Understanding poor quality radio comms
Posted by ai_wants_love@reddit | flying | View on Reddit | 15 comments
Hey!
To practice understanding ATC communication I am using atc live.
Sometimes the comms are loud and clear, but sometimes they are barely understandable. Yet somehow ATC and pilots are able to understand them.
I feel like if I were in their position, I would just have to spam the radio with "say again" all the time.
Any tips on understanding the radio communications better?
OracleofFl@reddit
It is hard to explain but one day, you can understand everything and it just clicks. To a large extent it is, IMHO, because at every stage of your flight, there are a limited number of things that ATC can say to you like 95% of the time. You take off, and tower is going to say something like "N2234 switch to departure at 123.45 remain at or below 2000" or something like that and that is what you are waiting for. Cruising along VFR flight following (today for me for example), I am expecting either callouts for traffic or transferring me to the next frequency or a directed altitude limitation or vector. Inbound you call out your position and say "full stop" and they give you once of like 3 different instructions (at my home airport for example) for getting lined up into the pattern or partial pattern like base entry.
Start by just doing pattern work at a towered airport and you will know all the moves and what to expect in the terminal environment.
bhalter80@reddit
Some day you'll realize too that you only heard the last 5 words of a transmission and are able to reconstruct what came before
ShaemusOdonnelly@reddit
2 things:
First, for some reason, the comms are clearer when they talk directly to you. The calls to other planes can be barely readable but yours are. I have not bothered to research why that is, but it is my experience.
Second, and most importantly: For most radio calls, you are already expecting part of those calls. For example, when the approach controller says : "GAF123 turn right heading 240, cleared ILS Z 27, Monitor Tower 121.775" you already requested ILS Z 27, so you that's one of only a few things that could follow the call "cleared for", you also know that they need to give you a ~30° intercept to the final (i.e. 240 if you're coming from the north) and you also know the Tower frequency because it is in your documents. Good pilots may have even preselected the frequency already. So basically, if you could only decipher "GAF123....240....cleared ILS....Monitor...." that is enough information for you, everything else is just a crosscheck. You then read back all the information and the controller can correct you if something was wrong. It's good airmanship to specifically confirm the call here, but you can pick out all the Info even from a partial call like that.
Swimming_Way_7372@reddit
Your first point can be explained by the fact the controller can use different transmitters depending on where you are.
threeleafcloverspy@reddit
Is that something that happens automatically? Or how does that work?
Swimming_Way_7372@reddit
Thats a question for a controller but I would say its not auto. If the audio gets bad you can ask them to try a different transmitter and they'll come back in a perfectly clear "how's this one sound?" .
threeleafcloverspy@reddit
What you hear isn’t what the pilot and ATC is hearing. Quality depends a lot on where transmissions are being made and where they’re being received. Live ATC has towers around to capture what’s being said, but they don’t have the benefit of being in the air like the plane or the equipment quality/location being used by the tower.
So lots of times they just hear the message fine.
Sometimes though they also know what to expect and that helps fill in blanks and helps them understand the message. Then the readback happens for anything important.
jtyson1991@reddit
And sometimes that tower is a monopole in one's attic. Source: LiveATC feed provider.
Squawk_0877@reddit
Pattern recognition more than audio quality, you wait for a structure (callsign, instruction, readback) and your brain fills the gaps, also live ATC is genuinely worse than real cockpit radio, compression and no ANR, in the cockpit with a Bose it's cleaner. Say again is not a weakness, pros use it constantly, radio was the hardest part of PPL for me too, clicked around hour 50 60
Odd_Entertainment471@reddit
And 99% of what is said TO the pilot is scripted. Once you pick up the script and expect the calls, it gets much easier.
coldnebo@reddit
if you think that’s bad, try the student headsets. 😅
coming from sims and liveatc at my desk with my studio quality headphones it was quite a shock to use the student headsets in a noisy environment.
and here I thought “simulate radio degradation” would be close— nope. I mean you get that too, but combine it with all the rest and it becomes a challenge.
It’s worth understanding how the LiveATC recordings work: they are collected from volunteers that have scanners setup in their homes and may be in the vicinity of an airport.
I use a uniden handheld for scanning as well, but if you’ve ever used one, you know it’s line-of-sight and ground clutter greatly reduces range.
I can hear jets and GA flying departures over my home without issue, but I can barely hear ground 5 miles away… I will hear atc, because they are broadcasting from a tower that is high above the treeline.
The end result is that ground traffic is usually not great on LiveATC unless the volunteer lives very close to the field and takes some care to setup good external antennae. (ham radio isn’t the worst vice to have). Anyway they do a great job overall, so I support them when I can.
jawshoeaw@reddit
ok no, liveATC isn't the same as what you hear in the cockpit..but I still think the question is legit. Sometimes you just have to ask tower to repeat. or you simply can't understand it because technology fails you. But you do develop an "ear" for it with time. When I was a student I felt like it was literally a foreign language.
YugeWaterBottle@reddit
Live ATC isnt what ATC or the pilot hears. It's a third party receiver uploading it to the internet. It is not representative of real life.
Matthewm3113@reddit
Quality of liveatc is poor as it is often intercepted by ground based receivers run by volunteers. The reception near the tower or at height is considerably better. I have never not understood what a controller is saying, sometimes you will have issues interpreting it as you are new to it though.
rFlyingTower@reddit
This is a copy of the original post body for posterity:
Hey!
To practice understanding ATC communication I am using atc live.
Sometimes the comms are loud and clear, but sometimes they are barely understandable. Yet somehow ATC and pilots are able to understand them.
I feel like if I were in their position, I would just have to spam the radio with "say again" all the time.
Any tips on understanding the radio communications better?
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