My Early Airband Radio......

I'm feeling in a nostalgic mood today and managed to find a picture of my first 'proper' airband radio, a Sharp airband radio. I did have one of those very cheap multiband radios before it, but I consider this to be my first 'real' airband radio.

 

Others that I've owned in the past include the Signal R537S which had just two crystal controlled fixed channels available as well as being able to tune the VHF airband via the tuning dial, aah those were the days! This was followed by a WIN108 - my first digital display airband radio, anyone remember these?

I was very excited by the red LED light in the top left corner of the Sharp radio as the intensity of the LED gave some indication of signal strength! I remember the tuning dial was quite 'stretched out' with numerous frequency markings so you had a good idea of where to place the tuning dial to listen to certain frequencies, but of course, like many of these radios, you could be monitoring several frequencies either side of the one you wanted to listen too!

Yet Another Live Air Traffic Radar Website!

Just a quick message to mention another great live air traffic radar website which I missed out in my earlier post: www.heathrow-london.co.uk (it doesn't just cover Heathrow!).

Pilots, Flying and Laser Pens!

Just last night, I picked up an aircraft inbound to Leeds Bradford working Scottish Air Traffic Control and the pilot was reporting being 'dazzled' by a laser. This seems to be an ongoing problem for pilots and I'm not sure what the answer is as they are so freely available.

I know from my own experience of night flying as a private pilot, it's essential things are kept as dark as possible in the cockpit so that the pilots can easily read the faint glow of the instruments inside the cockpit but also, they're eyes are suitably adjusted to still see out of the cockpit for any traffic etc. When a bright laser is pointed in a pilots direction it can cause temporary 'blindness' that could prove very dangerous.

Signal R535 VHF/UHF Aircraft Band Receiver

One of our readers recently asked where to get hold of one of these great airband radio scanners (besides Ebay!). I'm afraid I can't answer that question as Ebay would probably be about the only option now as they do come up for sale once in a while.

I have personally owned one of these on two different occasions now. The reception and sensitivity of this radio scanner for airband listening is well known, however, it is 20+ years old now and I honestly believe scanners such as the Yupiteru 7100 and my own current receiver, a Uniden Bearcat 3500XLT are very close if not equal to the performance of this radio.

The only limiting factor that caused me to sell mine was the fact that it had just 60 memory channels in a single memory bank. For me, this just isn't enough anymore. Do any of our readers still own this great radio? do you find 60 memory channels is enough? Please let us know.

Online Real-Time Virtual Aircraft Radar Sites

If you cannot stretch to the cost of the latest Airnav Radarbox or Kinetic SBS-1 real time radar receivers then why not try the next best alternative...

Two websites in particular provide an online real time radar display of aircraft that are transmitting ADS-B position information. The first one being RadarVirtuel.com and the second FlightRadar24.com.

Both of these sites are collating position information submitted from many different receiver owners all over the world.

My personal favourite though, has to be flightradar24.com because there are more options to customize the display. For instance, they have recently added the option to display up to three lines of information next to each aircraft displayed on the map. On the first line you can display callsign or aircraft registration, on line two, type and registration or altitude and speed or just one of any of those four options. On the third line, you have all the same options again, so over the three displayed lines you can instantly see a lot of information! 

One other point, FlightRadar24.com also provide apps for the Iphone and Google Android operating system phones - so I've now got a real time radar app on my mobile phone wherever I go! In fact, whilst I can't comment on the Iphone app, my Android phone app even has an option called 'AR view' (I think it stands for aspect ratio view) so you can switch to this option and point your phone at the sky and it will display all the relevant info on any plane that's within your 'view' although, in practice, this doesn't always work correctly.

Why not give one of them a try - you'll soon be hooked!