HFU HF Underground
General Category => General Radio Discussion => Topic started by: osiris on November 27, 2024, 1203 UTC
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Sorry for the clumsy title. I've been getting back into monitoring the Trans-Atlantic air traffic. Does anyone know or know where I can find what times of the day they switch bands? I imagine it would have to change as the length of day changes.
Thanks for any help.
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Here is a start. It's not the 'end all' source however, depending on the NAT track being used.
https://radio.arinc.net/atlantic/
Best bet is to program all of the NAT family frequencies in and see which frequency range is active. Some times of the day are more active than others.
Edit: also, not sure how long you’ve been away from aero monitoring, but there’s a lot less traffic these days due to many aircraft using CPDLC. While some aircraft are still doing position reports over radio, the others you’ll only hear during initial checkin with Shanwick or Gander.
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Thanks. I bookmarked all the NAT freqs. That helps. It can be confusing at times, still but less so every day.
I was just a casual listener in the past but I'm getting more interested in it. Seems I missed the boat on most of the fun on shortwave. Wish I had been into it in the 80s and 90s.
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CPDLC is part of HFDL data. If you want to see it in action without having to setup local software, KiwiSDRs (mine linked in below) have a builtin decoder (unless manually disabled) for message traffic and positional mapping.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_Frequency_Data_Link
Web-888 SDRs (mine linked below) have an option to build a HFDL decoder, but I have yet to bother as I am not sure it even works right now. I might give it a try on my next build cycle.