# 2. Aircraft Identification¶

An aircraft identification message has DF: 17 or 18, and TC: 1 to 4, the 56-bit DATA field is configured as follows:

+---------+---------+---------+---------+---------+---------+---------+---------+---------+---------+
|  TC (5) |  EC (3) |  C1 (6) |  C2 (6) |  C3 (6) |  C4 (6) |  C5 (6) |  C6 (6) |  C7 (6) |  C8 (6) |
+---------+---------+---------+---------+---------+---------+---------+---------+---------+---------+

TC: Type code
EC: Emitter category
C*: Charactor


For decode charactors, a lookup table is needed for mapping numbers to characters. It is defines as follows, where the # is not used, and _ represents a sepration.

#ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ#####_###############0123456789######


In summary, characters and there decimal reprsentations are:

A - Z :   1 - 26
0 - 9 :  48 - 57
_ :  32


The EC value in combination with TC value defines the category of the aircraft (such as: heavy, large, small, light, glider, etc.). When EC is set to zeros, such information is not avaiable.

## 2.1. Example¶

For example:

8D4840D6202CC371C32CE0576098


The structure of the message is:

     DF--- CA-  ICAO--  DATA------------------  PI----
HEX: 8   D      4840D6  2   0     2CC371C32CE0  576098
BIN: 10001|101  ******  00100|000 ************  ******
DEC: 17   |4            4     0
TC    *


Note that Type Code is inside of the DATA frame (first 5 bits). With DF=17 and TC=4, we can confirm this is a aircraft identification message. Aircraft callsign then can be decoded.

In previous example message, it is easy to decode the Data segment:

HEX: 20         2CC371C32CE0
BIN: 00100000 | 001011 001100 001101 110001 110000 110010 110011 100000
DEC:          |   11     12     13     49     48     50     51     32
LTR:          |   K      L      M      1      0      2      3      _


So the final aircraft callsign decoded is: KLM1023_

For detailed codes in python, refer to the pyModeS library function: pyModeS.adsb.callsign()