This is super interesting. L-Band BGAN has been cracked open a little. Nice video explainer (Good to hear a shout out from the Aussies - Questions will be asked about the helix I made for them!).

DecBGAN: Making Sense of Inmarsat's Broadband Global Area Network Service In Linux!

While I give a lot of attention to Ku-band DVB-S2 satellites on my channel, another subset of the SATCOM hobby that is close to my heart is L-band decoding! Inmarsat, GPS, Thuraya, and Iridium are examples of various L-band signals that can be decoded with modest equipment by the radio enthusiast, b

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Website Update. Its back up. I personally find it odd that out of the 20-30 people that use the site, only one bothered to tell me it was down. Unlike you lot, I don't live on the site, I got antennas and satellite dishes to fix to feed the site data. I often don't know if it crashes.....

Website Update: The site is down. Working on it.

Satcom ADSC/ACARS feeds are back up and running. tbg.airframes.io Who has been with me since v1 of the site? Remember those days? I'd either break the site or it would crash probably 6 times a week! Now I'm scared to touch it because so many of you actually use it to do important stuff!

Website update: Our 25e C-Band (ADSC and satcom aircraft) feed is currently down. I've let the station operator know and will get it back just as fast as we can. Its a 'best effort' website and we all have jobs etc. You can check the site feed status on this page: tbg.airframes.io/das...

Very late to the party I know, and yes I'm ashamed it's taken me this long... I just now migrated off Chrome to Firefox 100%. DuckDuckGo is now my backup browser. Chrome allowing all the ads made me think I'd gone back to the 2000's Internet. What a backwards step for them and some of us.

We've all heard the question: "What's in my pockets?" My version is slightly different..... "What's under my box?" Answer will be on my wardriving brain dump blog soon, but feel free to dump any and all guessed answers here. k6thebaldgeek.blogsp... #AllTheWifi #Wardriving

Wow. 54w and 25e are really dialed in right now. Lots of oceanic flights over EURO. Our guy in Australia (143e) is also keeping up the numbers. I'm still working on getting my 98w dish back up and running - sorry its taking so long. tbg.airframes.io/das...

If you are wondering why, when you ask 'AI' about ACARS, you get a dumpster fire in reply.... It's because the models have been trained on my web content, so much so its baked in the weights of the models. Sorry, not sorry. intheweights.com/

I got the itch to press the #Wifydra by @lozaning back into full-time #wardriving mode. You may (or may not) have caught the test I did with the panel antenna vs Yagi out the car window. (Photos here: k6thebaldgeek.blogsp...) Decided to go with the panel antenna full-time. 1/

wardriving

Added WiGLE App Settings: Oct 27th 2025 Topic menu Why wardrive Links and resources tbg vs Kismet GPS Android Phones Phone Placement WigleFi...

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A few hours either side of now is still the best time to see the most ADSC (Satcom) aircraft on either of my two maps. Be sure and check out the map link page as it has helpful hints on how you can filter them by squawk code. tbg.airframes.io/das... Be sure and check out ALL the other site pages.

Every hour that Cloudflare and I spend blocking YOUR bot is an hour I DONT spend on improving the site or its feeds. We are now blocking 167 unique IP addresses and 262,144 rotating bot IP addresses. I've only had one person complain that their VPN address got caught up in YOUR bot mess.

Rip out the M.2 Wifi card and replace it with an M.2 to Ethernet adaptor. Reconfigure Proxmox to use the new ETH interface to the Linux-Bridge. Now do it 11 times. How's your day going?

Website Update: Our 25E C-Band feed is currently degraded. L-Band is normal, just the C-Band data feed is intermittent. This impacts both the aircraft plots on the two tracking sites and the ACARS messages. I've reached out to the station, and we are working on the issue. No ETA as yet.

At this rate its going to take me longer to find the parts for my next project than to get it built and running. <sigh> One of these days, I'm going to label them better and sort them into little tubs. But for now, I need 1 x 560 Ohm and 2 x 4k7 for a Raspberry Pi experiment.

Bumping the gain on the car #wardrive rig from a claimed 6db to a claimed 12db. Its getting a bit long, but as long as I am careful going off road, it should clear most places I drive. BTW, this is my tbg madness build of the Signal Sluth. You can read about it here: k6thebaldgeek.blogsp...

That's a lot of sky trash. I mean, I get why we need to send up #radiosonde to collect the weather data, but wow. When you see a week or two's worth like this... It's a lot of batteries, GPS antennas, latex, and Gore-Tex string.

Question for you @wiglenet.bsky.social I have three phones the exact same, I can't tell which is which on the upload list. Anyway to change that name under the wigle filename drop down? (Got the chance to do a little more #wardriving and suck back into the top 100 again). Thanks for all your work.

It's a military ACARS rich map right now. My site has two maps, and remember, NONE of them have ADSB aircraft on them, so they are going to take you a hot moment to keep that in mind as you use and view them. Links and helpful hints here: tbg.airframes.io/das...

I traded my red car for a gray (grey) one.... So the #wiglefin must also change. I mean, you gotta catch #AllTheWifi and feed WiGLE.net all the #wardrive goodness. This is the first of 4 fins that I run when in hardcore mode. k6thebaldgeek.blogsp... Read the blog to learn more about the wiglefin.

Slightly off-topic thread (hey, it still has flying things in it). My wife wanted to learn more about bird calls and the birds that match them, and to teach them to our grandson. So I loaded up BirdNET-Go on a Pi and stuck a microphone out the window. github.com/tphakala/... 1/

Just got our Southern California station up and running on Iridium-sniffer. Circles are spot beams, dots are aircraft. 4 ground stations now feeding data to tbgmap.airframes.io/

Will 2026 finally be the year of #Iridium for #avgeeks? A few of us are working hard to make it happen! We have @ElbaSatGuy digging into SBD for position data, and @cemaxecuter working on a single-package decoder. Still some issues, but here are 3 stations from 2 days ago. This is a big deal!

No, your eyes are not playing tricks. There really are more satcom (ADSC) aircraft on the map. Tweaking things and seeing a nice bump in numbers. More work from more folks to come. Jump to all these maps from here: tbg.airframes.io/das...

I understand that this post will annoy some of you here. I don't mean to do that, it's just stating facts as I've seen them over the past few years. k6thebaldgeek.blogspot.com/2026/04/theb...

thebaldgeek and X (Twitter)

I've been forced to make some changes in how I use X. I was 'happy' (not really - but) to pay the $8 per month to get two key features: 1. ...

k6thebaldgeek.blogspot.com

No question, the new version of acarsHUB has had a massive facelift. Still the same idea for my site. Military-only aircraft with ACARS messages or position plots via ACARS. tbgacarshub.airframe... Click on the aircraft and read the messages. ACARS with alerts really jump out now!

Just when I thought I was getting along with Docker, it goes sideways on me. I still hate it. Back up and running. Big update by the looks of it. Few #avgeeks asked for dark mode. They have it now. Remember, do NOT remove existing alert terms, ADD only.

No good deed goes unpunished. There was an updated acarsHUB, so I did a docker pull and up command, and of course, it broke with an error that I can't understand. So, for now: tbgacarshub.airframe... is down. Sorry. Working on it. Not my code. No idea. (Only about 20 people used it anyway)

Saw this just now on my personal ADSB setup. Tinkering with my map while working on adding Iridium aircraft plots to my main ACARS map: tbgmap.airframes.io/ Iridium-sniffer and others. More soon.

Because of course North Korea launched a missile... ADSB is the where. ACARS is the why.