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What is Feeding?

The term feeding describes the process of receiving aviation data with your own equipment and sending it to a remote aggregation service for processing and distribution.

When you use your SDR to capture aircraft data from the sky and send it to Airframes, you are feeding data to us. From the perspective of the Airframes service, your receiver station is a feeder because it is feeding data to it. Your feed contains data that was captured by your receiver from aircraft in its vicinity.

How it works​

Aircraft ──radio signal──► Your Antenna ──► SDR ──► Decoder Software ──► Airframes
  1. An aircraft transmits an ACARS message over radio (VHF, HF, or satellite).
  2. Your antenna receives the signal and passes it to your SDR (Software Defined Radio).
  3. A decoder client (like acarsdec, dumpvdl2, or dumphfdl) converts the raw radio signal into structured data.
  4. The decoded message is sent over the internet to the Airframes aggregator at feed.airframes.io.
  5. Airframes processes, stores, and makes the data available through app.airframes.io.

What gets sent​

The data you feed contains decoded ACARS messages — short text-based communications between aircraft and ground systems. This includes things like position reports, weather requests, maintenance alerts, and operational messages. See the Introduction for a full list of ACARS message types.

Your feed also includes metadata like the frequency the message was received on, the signal level, and your station identifier — which helps Airframes correlate and deduplicate messages from multiple feeders receiving the same transmission.

What happens to your data​

Once the aggregator receives your data, it:

  1. Validates the message structure
  2. Deduplicates — if multiple feeders hear the same aircraft message, only one copy is stored
  3. Enriches — adds aircraft, airline, and flight information from reference databases
  4. Decodes — attempts to parse the message text into structured, human-readable data
  5. Distributes — makes the data available through the web application, the API, and flight tracking displays

Your contribution joins data from feeders worldwide to build a more complete picture of aviation communications. See Why should I feed? for more on the impact of your data.