Howdy folks, thanks for following ACARS Drama! Every once in a while we like to do a quick tour, so new folks know what this thing is all about. That tour will begin, thus:

ACARS is a radio service used by aircraft to pass messages to airline operations rooms on the ground, and vice versa.

ACARS has been around since the 1970's, it is broadcast completely "in the clear", which means anyone in the vicinity can receive those messages using low cost radio hardware and free open source software.

We call the folks who do this and pass the data to us 'sky drama farmers'.

Anyone can become a sky drama farmer if you have the right equipment, which all costs around $30. Our recommendations are on our website, https://acarsdrama.com.

Thanks to sky drama farmers around the world, we receive close to 300k messages an hour. Most of them are automated things or telemetry. 1/3