ACARSD

After struggling with the acarsd suite for some time, I decided to give up. I managed to get the installer to run under Ubuntu 10.10, which seems to be more than post people.

I then had a struggle with the internal libraries; this is when I gave up:

george:/opt/acarsd$ ./acarsd 

acarsd - ACARS suite v 1.65 - (C).2003-2006 by KjM acarsd@acarsd.org
               web: www.acarsd.org  mail: acarsd@acarsd.org
Your version of libacarsd.so is not supported
System stopped
Versioninformation from libacarsd: Version 1.46 Revision 2

george:/opt/acarsd$

The program doesn't recognise the only version of the library (from acarsd.org, the official website) then I have no idea how to get it working! Seems overly complex for my liking. It's supposed to be good software, it's just trying hard to appear bad!

PlanePlotter

After giving up on acarsd I decided to have a play around with PlanePlotter. Now PlanePlotter is a Microsoft Windows application, and so I was warey of how it would function under Ubuntu (Linux). Excellently, is the answer. I have not found anything that does not work. I am still on the 21-day free trial, but it seems to work very well.

I am using a Yaesu VX-7R Amateur Radio handheld on 131.725 MHz, AM, with the output fed into my PC's soundcard. The antenna is a $λ / 4$ vertical antenna on the roof of the front of the house. With this setup, I managed to obtain some of the following images.