Thursday, May 18, 2006

Airband











The mighty A380 Airbus is visiting the UK today (thursday 18th May) and will be flying in to Heathrow from Berlin, I understand it's due about midday? anybody have any more info on this?
And just a brief reminder as we head towards summer (though you wouldn't know it from the weather!) it can be interesting to listen to the 'common' allocated frequencies for gliding, microlights and balloons etc.

129.975 gliding
130.1 gliding
130.125 gliding
130.4 gliding
122.475 balloons
122.95 helicopters
129.9 balloons/gliders/paradrop sites
129.825 microlights

Cheers for now, Mark.

Airband Books

Wednesday, May 10, 2006

New Airband Scanner Arrives!


I have now received my Uniden Bearcat BR330t scanner which I have had to import from the US as it isn't available here. After forking out around £250 by the time I had paid for UPS delivery AND the dreaded import duty, I was hoping it was worth it.
This scanner has the 'Nascar' logo across the front as it has some special facilities for race fans in the US but after doing some research on the net, this scanner had the features I wanted specifically for airband listening (full VHF & UHF coverage included).
Wow! where do I start with this scanner, the functions included are brilliant and it's completely different to any scanner I have had before. Firstly it has up to 2500 'dynamic ' memories which basically means there is no set structure to the memory banks, the scanner simply has a memory area a bit like a computer to store any memory channels and banks that you create. Firstly you can create up to 200 'systems', for instance, I have a system called 'Mil Air'. Within that system I can then create up to 20 groups eg. I have groups within the 'Mil Air' system called 'Brize Norton' & 'Mildenhall' etc. Within those groups you can simply add as many channels as you want and also assign a name to them all (all systems, groups and individual channels can be given upto a 16 character name).
I have now added several hundred frequencies divided by about four systems all containing many groups and my current memory usage is just 6%!!

In addition, you can lock out any number of systems, groups or individual channels, and it scans at an amazing 90 channels a second (searching is 140 steps a second!).


Sensitivity and audio quality are on a par with my 'benchmark' Yupiteru MVT7100 (at last a worthy successor with all the facilities I could want!).
I will post again soon on my further findings and tell you all about the 'close call' feature included on this scanner. Cheers for now, Mark.

Wednesday, May 03, 2006

North East Airband Listener...

Carl has posted the following message:

Hi...I live in the North East uk (hartlepool)and always see High altiude aircrafts flying from East to West and West to east and these are normaly B747/777 plus many others and I would like to know the Frequencies of the Beacon Points from the East Coast hope someone out there can help us in this matter and I currently use a Icom RC10 Handheld.

Carl, I do know that Newcastle is a major intersection to the North and you are under the Montrose sector (Scottish ATCC) from FL255 to FL660. If anyone has some further detailed information for Carl please hit the 'comments' link at the bottom of this post, thanks. Mark.