So I've had this idea for a while, what if you could listen to AERO calls and ACARS messages on Android?
Crazy idea right? Seriously though, I love porting things to android and wiring them up with FFI bindings. I've had fun porting multimon-ng, DSD-Neo, RTLAMR, RTL-433 and others to android and so, why not JAERO?
I recently had a few days off and went no-sleep for the first 60 or so hours knocking my head against this problem. You see there's something very different about AERO decoding from say decoding AMR, 433 or even digital voice.
The signals are never in the same place, you have to visually tune AERO signals. Thus that meant getting a working FFT/Waterfall before I could even start decoding. I already had this working previously in a private project of mine that my Patrons have been testing out and so I figured I'd re-use that tooling.
See it's a flutter project like most all my Android projects but I used C for the FFT/Waterfall and DSP so ensure optimal functionality and because well, flutter can only do so much on it's own.
The first night was tireless, I was amped up and ready to tackle the issue, I managed to port a working C variant of JAERO's 10500 bps ACARS decoder and was successfully decoding an IQ file on linux, the next step was taking that to Android.
Except, I accidentally deleted the native decoder early in the wee hours of the morning and lost many hours of work in the process. Though I thankfully found another port already finished online that was working for everything but voice.
Bringing that JAERO derived library into Android was fairly simple with FFI bindings in flutter and I was able to get the same file sample to decode on Android.
That was it! I had AERO ACARS decoding on Android! Now I just had to get it working over the air.
The issue I've spent the last who knows how many hours on has been filtering and DSP work trying to get over the air decoding to work.
That's where this project currently stands and why you've not seen it available anywhere on the Forge. I typically don't like to talk about what I'm building until I know what I'm trying to do is feasible.
I've made good progress but now it's time to sleep on it for a while and get some rest. I've gotta work tomorrow and I'll need some time to recover before I can dive head first back into ACARS land.