ACARS FAQ

ACARS

ACARS lets you view ACARS transmissions on your iPad or iPhone. Just set it next to the radio's speaker, tune in an ACARS frequency, and watch the decodes.

To use this app, you need to feed the audio output from a your radio into the device. You can do this via one of several ways:

Set the device near the radio's speaker to pick up the audio. While easy to do, this is not ideal, as background noise can interfere with the audio, causing garbled decodes.
Plug headphones into the radio, and set one earphone near the mic. I find that with good quality headphones, this can work extremely well.
Use the microphone input jack of your device, by obtaining an appopriate cable and connecting the radio's line level output to the microphone input.
With the Camera Connection Kit, you can plug a USB sound input device into the iPad, and use a patch cable between it and the radio's audio output. This is by far the best solution.

You can use the volume indicator in the upper right corner to verify that audio is getting into your device, and that the volume level is appropriate.

If you are running iOS 7 or later, be sure to give the app permission to use the microphone. If you denied permission, you can always give it again by following these steps:

Open Settings app and go to "Privacy"
Select "Microphone" to get a list of all apps that have requested access to the microphone, and to control which apps have access to the microphone

If you're looking for a radio to use with the app, there are many different types to choose from. Take a look at our listing of radios to use with your app, to see several, along with some suggestions on how to choose a radio.

Want to clear the text? Give your iPad a shake!

Turn on Replace Parity Errors to replace individual garbled characters (those with a parity error) with a tilde ~ character. Note that sometimes if there are a lot of errors in a packet, they will not all be detected annd replaced.

Turn on Suppress Parity Errors to prevent display of packets with errors.

Here are some details on directly connecting an audio line source to your iPad/iPhone/iPod Touch

ACARS Frequencies

131.725 MHz ACARS Primary channel for Europe 
131.525 MHz ACARS Tertiary channel for Europe 
136.900 MHz ACARS Channel logged near London 
131.550 MHz ACARS Primary channel for North America 
130.025 MHz ACARS Secondary channel for North America 
129.125 MHz ACARS Tertiary channel for North America 
131.475 MHz Company channel for Air Canada and some European airlines in North America 
131.125 MHz ACARS channel local to ORD so far 
131.550 MHz ACARS Primary channel for Asia/Pacific 
131.450 MHz ACARS Primary channel for Japan 
130.450 MHz Overflow ACARS channel in use in the Washington, Boston, Chicago, and DFW areas

Email your comments and questions to support@blackcatsystems.com

Last modified May 19, 2010