Acars Antenna

Hi all

I have a raspberry pi 2, and a dongle, and would like to receive acars with him.

But I don’t know which antenna can use for this.

Someone could send me an antenna design that I can build at home?

Sorry bad english :laughing: :laughing:

You could make a basic ground plane antenna for ACARS quite easily. The principle is exactly the same as the spider antenna for ADS-B, however the elements are a different length.

ACARS operates on frequencies around 131MHz and 136MHz depending on where you are - the former mostly in europe and the latter in the US.

At 131MHz, the wavelength is 2.29m, so 1/4 wavelength elements will be 0.573m long.

At this frequency you may have problems with front end overloading at high gain settings - eg where I live the London bus services use very powerful transmitters on 140MHz that break through a lot, and it’s not that far above broadcast FM.

Hi Alan,
As caius said the 1/4 wave based on a spider design is a good one for acars.

You could try a J-Pole or slim jim for acars if you have 5-6ft space in your attic.
The slim jim works great on airband too
Very easy to make,most builders will already have the materials you can make one from some copper wire wrapped lengthways around a piece of scrap plastic pipe or a 6ft/1.8m length of 2x1 (50mm x 25mm) wood/ timber as a support frame for the wire elements,for acars or vhf civil airband , ACARS ,you will perhaps need to trim the wood/pipe support to around 1.65m here is a link with some diagrams…just be careful with the measuring & cutting. Attach coaxial to antenna at point shown in diagram. Hang antenna in vertical position,Connect to your rtl dongle and you will be good to go.

m0ukd.com/calculators/slim-jim-a … alculator/

Some useful software pages below for raspberry pi

sourceforge.net/projects/acarsdec/
satsignal.eu/raspberry-pi/acars-decoder.html
rtl-sdr.com/rtl-sdr-radio-sc … ith-acars/

Used VHF antennas from airplanes work quite well:

http://www.ebay.com/itm/ARC-A-25A-VHF-Antenna-PN-25060-9669-/111303059457?hash=item19ea2de801:g:ivAAAOxyUI1TGjg2&vxp=mtr