PC.ACARS Standard

Available as PC.ACARS-G (ground station operation) or PC.ACARS-A (aircraft operation)

Offers both interactive and passive (monitor only) performance.

As an interactive aircraft or ground station, the system will communicate in accordance with ARINC 618 standard features including compliance with Category A and B communications, Ack/Nak, UBI/DBI,  Message Sequence Numbering and multiblocking.

In both interactive and passive modes, PC.ACARS displays and logs all transmitted and received data for replay and analysis.  Typical display formats are shown below.

Each message begins with Mode Character, Aircraft Tail Number, ACK/NAK, Label, STX then message text. Final Character is usually ETX A tag line is added to the display with further technical information. For a full sized screen shot please click here.

View each message divided into columns for fast recognition. Observe Uplinks & Downlinks in different colours - see RGS ACK for each Downlink. For a full sized screen shot please click here.

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PC.ACARS  EG (Environment Generator)

The EG Software option is used to generate a multiple ground station or aircraft RF message environment enabling message sequences for use in more complex testing of ACARS avionics or ground systems.  "Well-behaved" and "Badly-behaved" message generation is supported.  The purpose of the PC.ACARS EG software option is to create an environment which simulates a real RF situation in which an ACARS equipped aircraft or ground station may find itself.  EG provides: -

• Multiple transmission environment
• Uplinks and downlinks for a variety of aircraft
• RGS uplinks containing ACKs, NAKs and Squitter transmissions
• Multiple Ground Station or Aircraft simulation
• Category A and Category B RGS simulation

While this background environment is being generated, an aircraft system under test can conduct normal ACARS conversations with PC.ACARS which will monitor and record the aircraft’s performance.  EG provides the functionality to transmit canned messages, create and edit messages, as well as vary the inter-transmission interval and automatically increment selected fields.  Even ‘illegal’ message formats can be generated with either bad formats or bad BCS character sequences to test the resilience of a target aircraft to noisy or poor communications environments.

Other user friendly features of EG include the ability to -

• save/load individual message configurations or entire test environments so that test results can be reproduced
• send messages requiring an acknowledgement (Managed) or as "send and forget"   (Bypassed) messages for full control over the test environment
• vary the start time, inter-transmit interval and maximum number of  transmissions for each message in the environment
• dynamically enable/disable transmission of selected messages while environment is running
• view messages in text/hex and deconstructed formats

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PC-ACARS 622/623 Options

The PC-ACARS 622/623 Options include:

• Departure Clearance (DCL)
• ATIS

These software options allow the PC-ACARS operator to simulate an aircraft or ground station for the purpose of requesting, sending and acknowledging Departure Clearance and ATIS reports and for the viewing of received reports with imbedded invalid parameter annunciation (including 622 CRC).

These options allow:

• generation of label B3 Request for Departure Clearance downlink
• generation of label A3 Departure Clearance uplink
• manual acknowledgment function of the Departure Clearance messages per the ARINC 623 label B4 downlink
• embedded CRC generation and checking per ARINC 622
• generation of ARINC 623 label A9 ATIS report uplinks and label B9 request downlinks