[Scan-DC] Map of ACARS position reports

[Andrew Clegg]

I've been playing with the acarsd program for the last week, monitoring aircraft ACARS messages on 130.025 MHz. From the several thousand decodes over the week, 550 of them have been position reports. Here's a map displaying the decoded positions (link below). My station location is the red balloon near the middle.
So far the farthest report I've received is from about 420 km away. The radio horizon for a plane at 40,000 ft (with my station at 220 ft) is about 490 km (the vast majority of this distance is due to the plane's height, not mine). So I'm getting a bit less than the predicted horizon distance, but still, getting 420 km on VHF without some type of anomalous propagation is pretty cool.
I'm using an ICOM R-8500 receiver connected to an antiquated Windows XP laptop I found in my closet. The antenna is a discone up about 220 ft. A lot of people are doing this now using RTL dongles and Raspberry Pi, and also using ADS-B at 900 MHz.
73 de W4JE
Link to map: http://www.w4je.com/acars_decodes.jpgLink to acarsd program: http://www.acarsd.org/Info about ACARS: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aircraft_Communications_Addressing_and_Reporting_System