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JAERO
Software

Hardware A program to demodulate and

Plants
decode Classic Aero SatCom
ACARS signals
Math

Contact
JAERO is a program that demodulates and decodes
Classic Aero ACARS (Aircraft Communications
Addressing and Reporting System) messages sent from
satellites to Aeroplanes (SatCom ACARS) commonly
used when Aeroplanes are beyond VHF range.
Demodulation is performed using the soundcard. Such
signals are typically around 1.5Ghz and can be received
with a simple low gain antenna that can be home brewed
in a few hours in conjunction with a cheap RTL-SDR
dongle.

In the advent of MH370, Classic Aero has become a

well-known name. A quick search on the net using
Classic Aero MH370 will produce thousands of results.
The Classic Aero signals sent from satellites to the
Aeroplanes are what JAERO demodulates and decodes.

There are different types of Classic Aero, the main

difference being speed. JAERO demodulates the two
slowest speeds of 600 bps and 1200 bps. After the
signals have been demodulated the ACARS messages
are displayed.

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SatCom ACARS reception on 90cm dish

This program started when I was contacted by otti, a

satellite monitoring enthusiast from Europe inquiring
whether or not JMSK could be used to demodulate the
600 and 1200 Aero signals. Initially I was quite doubtful
because in the draft Aero protocol manual that can be
freely obtained from ICAO (International Civil Aviation
Organization) called Part III Inmarsat and MTSAT, calls
the modulation scheme A-BPSK (aeronautical binary
phase shift keying) and JMSK demodulates MSK
(minimum shift keying) not BPSK (binary phase shift
keying). Without even reading the manual I modified
JMSK to do 600 and 1200 and to my astonishment it
locked extremely well onto a sample signal I had been
given. I then read the manual a little more fully and
realized yes indeed what they called A-BPSK is really
just filtered MSK, this type of signal JMSK does very well
with.

After that, things were fairly straightforward. Using the

manual I implemented a QDevice class to decode the
bitstream, and with a few little tweaks here and there
JAERO was born.

Receiving the RF signal

The signals are transmitted on the L band around 1.5
GHz from geostationary satellites. That means the
signals are coming from about 40,000 km away, twice as
far away as GPS satellites (20,000 km) and 100 times as

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Menu far away as the international space station (400 km).

Despite the large distance the signals are surprisingly
Home easy to receive. For a list of satellites and locations see
the L band frequency list. The list was last updated 2.5
Software years ago as a writing (December 2015) so things may
have changed a little since then. To know which direction
Hardware
to point your antenna from wherever you are in the
Plants world, DishPointer I find handy

Math To receive the signal you need an antenna. Initially I tried

making a helical antenna but due to my poor
Contact construction did not work very well. My second attempt
was to simply take the ceramic filter out of an active GPS
patch antenna and feed it with some electricity; this is
what you see in the figure below.

Arguably the simplest L band antenna (GPS antenna with filter removed)

I found the filter somewhat difficult to remove and in the

end resorted to brute force by using side cutters to
shatter it. While the filter was not entirely removed it was
removed enough that it no longer functioned as a filter.

As the modified GPS antenna is an active antenna it

needs a power supply. I had a spare PCB with a couple
of SMA connectors on it lying around that I put a few
random components on to feed power to the GPS
receiver while blocking power to the RTL-SDR dongle.
The figure below shows a close-up view of the board.

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Power feed to antenna

The RTL-SDR dongle I used was just some $10 or $20

thing I found on the Internet. My particular one seems to
be particularly bad, as well as having the usual bad
long-term frequency stability, it also has bad short-term
frequency stability.

With this particular setup I pointed the antenna roughly in

the direction of the Inmarsat 3F3 satellite and tuned into
one of the signals using SDR# on the laptop. I then took
a screenshot which is shown in the figure below.

SatCom ACARS reception using GPS antenna with filter removed (no
dish)

With this set up the signals are fairly weak at around 6 to

10 dB above the noise floor. However, as can be seen it
is clearly possible to demodulate and decode the signal.
The following figure shows a screenshot of the frequency
spectrum from SDR#.

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Frequency spectrum display of received signal

GPS signals like the Aero signals are transmitted using

RHCP (Right Hand Circular Polarization), when such a
signal reflects off a surface I believe it is supposed to
become LHCP (Left Hand Circular Polarization) which
RHCP antennas are designed to reject. Therefore,
attaching such an antenna to it a satellite dish is not
really the right thing to do; I tried it anyway. It seems
however any loss incurred due to the RHCP/LHCP thing
is offset by the gain you get from the satellite dish. All I
had was a 90 cm dish and a 2.3 m dish. The figure below
shows the the modified GPS antenna connected to the
90 cm dish.

90cm dish with modified GPS patch antenna

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Menu According to Dish gain calculator, an ideal 90 cm dish

should produce 23 dB gain. The very first picture you see
Home on this page is a reception using the 90 cm dish. The
EbNo for the 90 cm dish is around 22 dB while with no
Software dish the EbNo is around 6 dB. Therefore thats an actual
gain of around 16 dB. Again from Dish gain calculator
Hardware
this means the efficiency of the dish is around 19%.
Plants According to Wikipedias parabolic antenna, The
aperture efficiency of typical parabolic antennas is 0.55
Math to 0.70. So all things being considered 19% is OK. Of
course this is all very approximate.
Contact
To mitigate the frequency stability problems that
RTL-SDR dongle have, I put it in a large box wrapped in
aluminum foil to protect it from the sun. I live in a very
windy location and gusts of wind seem to produce very
rapid changes in frequencies which the box seemed to
help with. I also left the dongle to run for about half an
hour with SDR# before running JAERO.

In New Zealand I have seen ACARS on two satellites,

Inmarsat 4F1 and Inmarsat 3F3 both produce roughly
the same signal strength here. The signals are easy to
see on a frequency spectrum display but can be difficult
to hear. as an example of what you might hear you can
listen to this audio recording of about 16 kHz bandwidth
that contains four 600 bps signals. I found to obtain such
signals without any buffer loss with RTL-SDR dongle's
required me not setting the RTL-SDR sample rate to fast,
I tend to use 0.25 MSPS which seems to work well.

Content
Unlike the usual VHF ACARS, with SatCom ACARS you
can not receive signals from the Aeroplane only the
people on the ground talking to the people in the
Aeroplane. This means you do not get the airplanes
reporting their position. Instead you tend to get weather
reports, flight plans, and that sort of stuff; but
occasionally you get something quite juicy and
unexpected. Just like VHF ACARS they usually use
cryptic shorthand notation. For example METAR YSSY
040400Z 08012KT 9999 FEW040 SCT048 23/09 Q1024
FM0500 05012KT CAVOK= is the weather report for
Sydney Airport in Australia in a format called METAR. It
tells you the time, when the report was issued, the wind

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Menu direction and speed, visibility, clouds, temperature, due

point and air pressure. Then it says from 5 AM UTC the
Home wind direction and speed and that the weather will be
nice. There are sites such as Flight Utilities that can
Software decode such information and display it in a more
understandable format.
Hardware

Plants The program

Math
JAERO can log ACARS messages to disk for later
Contact perusal or can be viewed live when running the program.
Metric information such as what planes have been
heard, when they were last heard, when they were first
heard, how many times they have been heard and so on
is also maintained. It is possible to record more than one
channel simultaneously but can be CPU intensive,
cumbersome, and the metric information is not stored
correctly.

The program has run successfully on Windows and

Linux. Martin Hauke (mnhauke) has kindly made a
package available on openSUSE's open build server
meaning the installation on openSUSE (a Linux OS)
should be as easy as "sudo zypper install jaero" (once
the his repo has been added to the package manager
"sudo zypper addrepo http://download.opensuse.org
/repositories/home:/mnhauke:
/sdr/openSUSE_Leap_42.1/" then "sudo zypper refresh"
for OpenSUSE's current download version as of writing).
Sound piping of at least prerecorded audio apparently
works out-of-the-box on openSUSE's pulseaudio on top
of ALSA setup too. On Windows it has been tried on 7, 8
and 8.1 successfully.

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Playing recorded Aero signals into JAERO on Linux

Currently there is no user manual but the program is

reasonably self-explanatory. If anyone wishes to write a
manual for others please feel free, I would suggest
placing it in the JAERO wiki so others can modify it as
time goes by. In the absence of a manual there are a few
things that may help to know. To receive the signal you
have to pass the audio of the receiver into JAERO. The
receiver may be a hardware implementation or the
common RTL-SDR dongle with SDR program (such as
SDR#) method. For a physical receiver just plugging the
audio output into the soundcard is enough. For the
RTL-SDR dongle method the usual way people do this is
to use a virtual audio cable such as VB-Audio Virtual
Cable. The receiver should be set to USB (Upper Side
Band), however, some receivers seem to be back to front
and LSB (Lower Side Band) is required. Therefore, if the
signal LED lights but the data LED does not, you either
have not tuned into an Aero signal or you need to
change the USB/LSB setting. If you select "Enable
widebandwidth" in the settings you can demodulate
signals up to 24 kHz but this uses more CPU,
alternatively not having it checked uses less CPU but the
upper frequency limit is limited. Currently the logs are
saved with <LF> which do not render correctly in
notepad.exe.

JAERO is a cross-platform open source program written

in C++ Qt. It is hosted on GitHub as jontio/JAERO so feel
free to extend it and improve it. The releases can be
found at jontio/JAERO/releases. Currently I only maintain
precompiled versions for Windows 32-bit, these should

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Menu work on Windows 7 and above for both 32-bit and 64-bit
computers
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Software Version 1.0.2 update (Third times a

Hardware
charm)
Plants 19-Dec-2015:
This version introduces a few new features and two bug
Math fixes. See the release page for what's new and fixed.
Contact I know some may have wanted an image of each plane
to appear automatically in the plane log window without
having to download one manually. But due to copyright
concerns I had, I've left it so if you want you can save
any image to AB1234.png or AB1234.jpg for a plane with
an AES of AB1234 and that image will load when that log
entry is selected. Clicking on the plane icon will open up
a web browser and bring up information about the plane
as well as copy the AES to the clipboard.

I've noticed that with the plane database that I've been
using military planes don't appear on it. For those planes
http://www.airframes.org/ can be used to find information
about them.

A quick word about the GES (Ground Earth Station)

numbers. GES is a number that can tell you both what
satellite you're listening to and where on the earth the
uplink to the satellite is coming from. However this
seems to be confusion as to the relationship between the
GES number and the satellite and ground earth station. I
have seen two different lists on the Internet which can be
summarized in the following three tables (The last two
tables come from the same information).

GES ID (Hex) Location Oceanic region

02 Southbury AOR-W

05 Aussaguel AOR-W

44 Eik AOR-E

43 Aussaguel AOR-E

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Menu 82 Santa Paula POR

Home 85 Perth POR

Software C1 Eik IOR

Hardware C5 Perth IOR

Plants GES table 1 (out of date?)

Math Table 1 is the standard one people seem to know about

and while it looks ok it can't be the full story. The reason
Contact
being is in New Zealand I have also seen 50 coming
from a different satellite further to the west. In addition I
have seen someone from Spain but getting the number
90. These signals I think are coming from Inmarsat 4
satellites which are newer. This brings us to the next
information I know of which can be summarized in the
following two tables.
GES ID (Hex) Location Oceanic region

82 Perth POR

44 Burum AOR-E

02 Burum AOR-W

C1 Perth IOR

GES table 2 of I-3 satellite vehicles (SVs)

(inconsistent with table 1 and missing some GES
numbers)

GES ID (Hex) Location Oceanic region

90 Fucino EMEA

D0 Paumalu AMER

50 Paumalu ASIAPAC

GES table 3 of I-4 SVs

(new satellites)

This seems to solve the problem of where the GES

numbers 90 and 50 coming from but raises another
problem. In New Zealand we can get 82 and 85 but 85 is
not mentioned in the I-3 SV list. So does that mean we

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Menu are in the middle of some transition between table 1 and

table 2? Is table 1 and table 3 valid but table 2 is not
Home valid just yet? Anyway, you get the idea of the problem. If
you see a D0 let me know then I can add that to the list
Software too.
Hardware With a low gain antenna such as a modified GPS patch
Plants
antenna you can receive multiple satellites at the same
time but the signal strengths are low. This is how I
Math accidentally discovered GES 90. With an antenna using
a dish the antenna becomes too directional to obtain
Contact signals from multiple satellites at the same time.

Github repository links

Repository
Releases
Wiki

Downloads
Windows 32bit binary v1.0.2
Source code v1.0.2
Master source

Jonti 2015
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Jonti. Last modiied Sat, 19 Dec 2015 01:35:32 GMT.

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