Aircraft Receiver
 

Not exactly amateur radio...
A few years ago I ran across a Ramsey Aircraft Receiver kit that hadn't been assembled. It had been opened and a quick scan showed that most of the parts were there, with a few minor parts missing (labels, jacks, knobs and the odd cap or resistor). Anyway, it was cheap enough, so I took a chance, brought it home and assembled it. It works well enough, but you have to be very patient with its tuning. I live near a busy airport, so I generally just leave it tuned to their frequency and occasionally listen to their comings and goings.

One of it's lid flipped...
http://videokarma.org/attachment.php...1&d=1323640669

and of the back panel...
http://videokarma.org/attachment.php...1&d=1323640669

wall wart
 

Could be interesting , during a storm or high cross winds. If it does work out well for you, hook it up to a 9 volt wall wart, I find that 9 volt batteries don't last long.

That's pretty wild. Any idea of the frequency range?

Yup, 118 to 136MHz VHF. :)

thats pretty cool man. sometimes in my travels i find funky obscure stuff like that, and i always scoop it up when i can. i have a wierd radio made for k-mart for there radio network kinda like muzak that is only tuned to there frequency. and it works! its been awile since i used it, but i wonder if its hooked up to some sort of signal via sattilite? cause i dont live anyware even close to a k-mart.

It probably uses an off-band carrier (SCA) from one of the nearby FM stations, Rob.

I always thought the aircraft band began just above the FM broadcast band, at 108 MHz.

I didn't know until now that stores like K-Mart even used FM SCA subcarriers for their in-store broadcasting network (if they have or had one). I always thought SCA was used almost exclusively for background music, a.k.a. storecasting.

When I lived in an east-side Cleveland suburb, I used to hear aircraft transmissions on one of my FM radios. I would hear them while listening to an FM station about 50 miles away on 97.1 MHz. The station was broadcasting easy listening at the time, and it was weird, to say the least, to hear a pilot trying to contact the control tower -- blasting in right over top of the station's beautiful music program.

That station plays rock music now, however, and I have since moved (as of 12 years ago) to an area of northeastern Ohio, not considered a Cleveland suburb, in which I no longer have the aircraft-radio interference problem on my FM radios. This is probably because the village in which I now live is almost 50 miles from the Cleveland airport; when I was in the suburbs, I was only perhaps 5 or so miles distant from a smaller airport not affiliated with Cleveland's airfield. Airplanes would fly overhead from that airport regularly, and, whenever they would fly over my home and I happened to be listening to 97.1, I'd hear the radio transmissions clear as any bell -- wiping out the 97.1 FM station, of course.

Now that I am so far from the nearest passenger airport, as I said, I no longer get interference on my FM radios from aircraft radio. On most of my radios that doesn't surprise me but what does, is that I also have no aircraft interference whatsoever when I listen to FM stations on my Aiwa bookshelf stereo system. That system has one of the world's worst FM tuners, IMHO, and I live over 30 miles from every FM station in Cleveland -- I must use an external Terk "tower" FM antenna (without the amplifier) to hear most of the city's stations in stereo.

I am surprised, however, as poorly designed as the digital FM tuner in my stereo system seems to be, that I am not getting more aircraft interference on so-called "local" stations from Cleveland. I guess I should chalk that up to the fact that I am 50-odd miles from the airport, and planes rarely if ever fly over my apartment.

From Wikipedia :
"The airband uses the frequencies between 108 MHz and 137 MHz. The lower part of the band, from 108 to 117.975 MHz, is split into 200 narrow-band channels. These are reserved for navigational aids such as VOR beacons, fan marker beacons, Automatic Terminal Information Service (ATIS) and Automated Surface Observing System (ASOS) messages, and precision approach systems such as ILS localizers or LAAS.[2][3][4]"

So Yes, the band does go down to 108 mHz, but that end of the band is not used for voice transmissions, so not included on many "aircraft" radios sold to the public.

jr