A Northwestern Air Corridor

I am having an aeronautical weekend here in the Ribble Valley. The area where I live forms an ideal ‘corridor’ for transatlantic arrival and many flights to Continental Europe and Scandinavia. I am also very near to BAE Warton. Now, I have always enjoyed monitoring the Airband. Mostly voice traffic and, on occasions, HFDL.

Thanks to our friends at SDRplay, who have kindly lent me an RSPduo for some (later) short wave experiments, I have now taken advantage of the ADS-B plug-in in the SDRuno software that goes with the SDR.

The screenshots on this page are my first results – I was very pleased. The data feed is via the Virtual Radar Server software, which was easily installed on my Radio PC.

I used a variety of antennas for this, from an outdoor scanner discone to some dedicated antennas from the Moonraker range. The RadarRama RADAR-RAMA 1090MHz Base Aerial works very well, as does the BS-1105 Base Station ADS-B Aerial, overall, the latter was, perhaps, my favourite one for this project.

With this being the RSPduo, you can open a second ‘instance’ of the software and listen to voice traffic at the same time, with a different antenna, if you like.  This is a comprehensive little system, and great to look at too.

(15-20 November 2021)