Squawk

[John Racars]

Hi All,

Yesterday I installed, from curiosity, the "Squawk-box" software succesfully. The box appears on the RadarBox screen and shows information.

Until sofar I did not see what this information bring us more (groundstation names like "Maastricht", "Karlsruhe") then the Radarbox allready do. But may be, I am a "new be" in the world of the Squawk, I do not understand the meaning of this "squawking". Has is something to do with ACARS? Is it intend to use with Google applications only?

I hope there are some experienced users on this who can tell us more about this subject.

[jgrloit]

An Aircraft will be instructed, by the comtroller to Squawk an Ident - to assist in identifying it on a radar screen.
Some Idents have specific - World-wide Functions - 7500, 7600, 7700,  others are controller specific, by area.
a UK SSr list is available from the CAA website.
I don't know how the EU codes are allocated, but in the UK, I can 'SEE' if the aircraft is under Military or Civil control, and the area it is operating in.
codes around 1750-1770 are allocated, in the Borders ( England/Scotland) to the Spadeadam Electronic Warfare range - as an example.
Hope this gives some ideas.

[daveg4otu]

Detailed up-to-date  list of allocations (Feb 09) here...
http://www.nats-uk.ead-it.com/aip/current/enr/EG_ENR_1_6_en.pdf

[Andy Frost]

John, "Squawking" and how it works is also explained in a little more detail in the Wikipedia at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transponder_(aviation), expanding on the info posted above by jgrloit.

[John Racars]

Thank you Andy! With this I will try to make it more understandable for me.

The software is working verry well so it looks! Is it possible to show aircraftreg in the place of callsign?

If so, please let me know how.

[Andy Frost]

If the flight number is not available for a particular flight then SquawkBox shows the modeS code. Currently for those flights only it is possible to ask SquawkBox to replace the displayed modeS by the aircraft registration if that aircraft registration is contained within the aircraft database.

Always showing the aircraft registration in place of the flight number or modeS is however something that I could add to the program sometime perhaps.

[John Racars]

Thank you Andy. That's clear to me.

[DaveReid]

An Aircraft will be instructed, by the comtroller to Squawk an Ident - to assist in identifying it on a radar screen.
Some Idents have specific - World-wide Functions - 7500, 7600, 7700,  others are controller specific, by area.

"Ident", in the context of squawks, means Special Position Identification (SPI) - a facility used by the flight crew at the request of ATC which causes the aircraft concerned to be highlighted on the controller's screen for approximately 18 seconds.

[Andy Frost]

For those like John above who might prefer to see scrolling aircraft registrations in SquawkBox instead of flight numbers I have made a modification to the program. From "Options" in the program's menu you can now choose display priorities. By default, before this change was made, the program displayed flight numbers first. If a flight number wasn't available for a particular flight then the aircraft registration was shown instead and finally if that wasn't available then the ModeS was shown. Now you can choose which of flight number, registration or modeS you want to prioritise.

Usual download site http://www.gfrost.co.uk/SquawkBox/. To get the update you only need to extract the '.exe' file if you already have SquawkBox. The ReadMe.txt is also updated.

Note: SquawkBox gets its aircraft registrations by accessing the RadarBox database because this information is not available to it on Port 30003. A 'snapshot' of the aircraft database is taken when SquawkBox starts. This means that some aircraft registrations (new aircraft) may appear listed in the RadarBox interface panel but not in SquawkBox until it is restarted.