Three. Yes. Three.
But why?
Well, that’s for another topic, but please know they are all the same.
When the site went viral during the Kabul Extraction the weakness of the SPA (Single Page App) is that if someone searches, it over writes the previous search results. Annoying for the first searcher and when it happens, the first searcher searches again, which overwrites the second searcher results and they get annoyed so they search again and that … yeah… annoying right?
So that is why we have three.
To spread the search load (love?).
Pick one, if you get overwritten, pick another, don’t just search again, you will end in a search loop of annoyingness.
They really are all the same (Mostly, anyone notice which one is different and what it is?).
Now. as for the search itself, I try and make it clear, but I have found that no one (and I mean NO one) reads the hints.
So you can search for pretty much anything. Upper or lower case.
If you want marsa (air to air refueling), then put a space each side… If you don’t you will find inmarsat.
See how marsa is in there? If you put a space each side of " marsa " you will just get that term.
Thats for the raw search.
While the ICAO is in a lot of raw ACARS messages, its not in any ACARS, only VLD and SATCOM, so you need to have a clean way to search for them.
Lastly, people wanted to search for just a given feed, so we have that…
- hf-dl
- vdl-kriv (or station code as per the vdl page)
- L-25e (or L-Band signal from from page, 143e, 25e, 54w, 98w)
- C-143e (or C-Band signal from front page, 143e, 25e, 98w (we don’t have a C-Band feed from 54w yet))
- -irdm (you can look by station code from iridium page, but we only have a few, best to search just that mode).