Favorite liveatc feeds?

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Flying h4x0r

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Flying h4x0r
Today I accidentally figured out that I can stream liveatc to my car audio through bluetooth on my cell phone. Finally something to make long commutes more palatable!

What are some of your favorite feeds?

I heard there are some KBOS controllers who are hilarious. Are they on Approach? OpWhat times do they work?
 
Flying h4x0r said:
Today I accidentally figured out that I can stream liveatc to my car audio through bluetooth on my cell phone. Finally something to make long commutes more palatable!
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My wife LOVED it when I discovered this! :no::no::rofl::rofl:
 
THE Bos controller that is so renowned is "Boston John," John Melecio. He's in the tower there. He's been promoted to Frontline Manager, so he's not on the mic nearly as much any more. All the BOS controllers are great, though. I like the N90 sectors around Newark and LGA because they're always busy, and they know how to push tin (and I know the airspace/fixes very well). But probably my favorite facility to watch/listen to is LGA Local. When you get to understand what they do when they're busy, and what it means to truly "shoot the gap," it can provide hours of entertainment.

We have a handful of controllers on here, though, who could probably tell you where to listen.
 
NYC Heli feeds! (Disclaimer: I'm the provider).
 
Stockholm Arlanda (ESSA) feeds! (Disclaimer: I'm the provider)
 
The iPhone App also knows how to stream via the Dock Connector and Airplay, and how to operate as a background App and stay running when you go to a different App.

The KAPA TWR feed comes from an upstairs bedroom in my house.

I wanted a tower-only feed and the other guy in town adds 132.75 (DEN TRACON) to his KAPA feed scanner which gets too busy with other traffic during weekends to catch all the stuff at the airport. Dave was happy to have another feed.

An old Pentium III, and a scanner. Dave has the software setup down cold. On Linux, I just popped a hole in the firewall for the streaming ports and SSH, Dave ran a script and the box has been running 24/7 for quite a while now. Power outages that outlast the UPS are about the only outages. (Router reboots too, I suppose.)

For me, I enjoy listening to the North Atlantic HF stuff, static, SELCAL tones, and all.

Harkens back to an age of much less capable aircraft crossing the oceans, I guess, complete with sleepy navigators doing reporting-point checkins and seeing if propagation is good to talk to the controllers tonight...

DEN has pretty poor coverage. It's distance from "civilization" means a good multi-receiver setup on any of a few nearby towers would work well, but need IP there.

I've been corresponding with Dave for a while on possible solutions, but no "that's the perfect answer" circumstances have come about yet.

Another friend can probably get a tower lease for cheap/free with the correct wording of the proposal, but maybe not. We haven't pulled that trigger yet -- not until Dave says "go" really. The site is useless without Internet bandwidth.
 
Listening to the KAPA tower feed at 10:58AM local. Boy, them guys are busy today! Makes KDTO look "small" in comparison. Even during our busier times with the foreign students trying to process the commands and respond with drawn out heavy accented voices.
 
KAPA was third-busiest for number of operations for a very long time, then the Chinese flight schools descended on KDVT and other KPHX area airports, and we now don't rank that high anymore... but it's still a pretty busy place.

Weekends have been odd lately... sometimes the pattern is nuts, and a few hours later there will be no one in sight anywhere. Very weird.
 
denverpilot said:
Weekends have been odd lately... sometimes the pattern is nuts, and a few hours later there will be no one in sight anywhere. Very weird.
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I've seen that too.

Every April, I attend a conference that is hosted at the Inverness, and I always ask for a room facing the golf course, which, *ta-dah!* faces the airport. Kinda neat to relax in my room listening to LiveATC and have a live play-by-play of the activity.

And you're right that there are times when it's a beehive. Wait a bit and it's a ghost town.


The Chinese students can be a bit of a bother at KDTO. More than once I've been sitting at the hold short line and had a window of opportunity to get take off clearance pass me by because a student in the pattern (or approaching the pattern) and the tower controller had to overcome English communication difficulties.

Makes me wonder if there is really that much opportunity for pilot jobs over there.
 
I kinow I can use the internet on my iphone and get liveatc but is there an iphone app, mentioned by Denverpilot, that is better?
 
I listened to the KILG tower while working in my office today. One of the presidential fleet is doing T&G's and I can see them turn left base for runway one niner.
 
Dunno if it would ever be possible or offered, but kinda wish we could see some sort of visual (radar representation?) to go with the audio.
 
AggieMike88, ever looked at the Passur feeds? Only large Class B airports (and some Class C), but it's pretty interesting. Also for historical data playback. I had a flight in the NYC area where I was under the Class B shelf and an Airbus A330 turned toward my flight path and crossed less than 1000' above. Later pulled the LiveATC recording and heard the Airbus call "traffic alert". Interesting to have both the Passur and LiveATC playback. It was a non-event, but nice to review it.

Passur:
http://www.passur.com/airportmonitor-locations.htm
 
Listen to the feeds from JFK tower and ground: Especially in the afternoon and at night when the overseas carrier ops are high level. I am constantly amazed, both in the plane with NY TRACON and with the local controllers from JFK and EWR, how they break through the heavily accented english they have to contend with on a regular basis. Leads to some 'interesting' events both in the airspace and for ground ops...
 
KAPA Tower is my favorite, as my office is in the traffic pattern. I can watch an airplane overhead and hear its radio chat with ATC at the same time. Kinda cool.
 
cbmontgo said:
KAPA Tower is my favorite, as my office is in the traffic pattern. I can watch an airplane overhead and hear its radio chat with ATC at the same time. Kinda cool.
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Glad to hear someone's using it! :)

There's two of us feeding... there's the feed with Approach mixed in, and then there's "my" feed which only has the Tower. I believe I also have the alternate Tower frequency when they operate split-tower which muddies up things a bit, but I'm not sure the other feeder has that frequency in his scanner.

Either way, have fun listening to KAPA. I had the bandwidth and the extra Pentium III (HA!) and a copy of Ubuntu, plus an old scanner... so the only cost to me was some time to build a WiFi link to the upstairs bedroom with a couple of old WiFi routers (didn't feel like pulling cable or running antenna cable to the basement) and a $10 wall-wort to power the scanner. I could have tapped off of the PC power supply for the scanner, but I was feeling lazy. ;)

I may buy it some kind of mini motherboard DC powered "car PC" type of thing sometime and a flash drive, just to lower the power utilization, get rid of the fan noise (which on a P-III is virtually nil anyway) and put a Flash Drive in it to get rid of the spinning platter, and have an on-board WiFi chipset so I can dump the routers, but I'd rather spend the money on AvGas. :) It'll eventually get rebuilt though, so I can put it in a little box in the closet in that bedroom where it can run without anyone really even noticing it's there.

If we had power in our hangar I'd just put it out there at the airport...
 
denverpilot said:
Glad to hear someone's using it! :)

There's two of us feeding... there's the feed with Approach mixed in, and then there's "my" feed which only has the Tower. I believe I also have the alternate Tower frequency when they operate split-tower which muddies up things a bit, but I'm not sure the other feeder has that frequency in his scanner.

Either way, have fun listening to KAPA. I had the bandwidth and the extra Pentium III (HA!) and a copy of Ubuntu, plus an old scanner... so the only cost to me was some time to build a WiFi link to the upstairs bedroom with a couple of old WiFi routers (didn't feel like pulling cable or running antenna cable to the basement) and a $10 wall-wort to power the scanner. I could have tapped off of the PC power supply for the scanner, but I was feeling lazy. ;)

I may buy it some kind of mini motherboard DC powered "car PC" type of thing sometime and a flash drive, just to lower the power utilization, get rid of the fan noise (which on a P-III is virtually nil anyway) and put a Flash Drive in it to get rid of the spinning platter, and have an on-board WiFi chipset so I can dump the routers, but I'd rather spend the money on AvGas. :) It'll eventually get rebuilt though, so I can put it in a little box in the closet in that bedroom where it can run without anyone really even noticing it's there.

If we had power in our hangar I'd just put it out there at the airport...
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That is very cool, Nate. I had no idea that you were the man behind the curtain with KAPA. That ATC feed is really cool.
 
KBED tower 20 min ago:
AC: "Sorry I forgot to call mid-left downwind."
TOWER: "No problem we forgot to call your base."

I've never known the tower guys to be particularly funny before this. :)
 
cbmontgo said:
That is very cool, Nate. I had no idea that you were the man behind the curtain with KAPA. That ATC feed is really cool.
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Seriously, Dave Pascoe (Mr. LiveATC) gets all the credit.

Although after I saw what he'd done "behind the scenes" on the Linux and Windows boxes and how he feeds it all, I just did a face palm and thought...

"Well, crap... THAT was easy! Why didn't *I* think of that?!"

I have no idea how "successful" it is as a business for him (he has a real day-job still), but talk about one of those things you set up, maybe it pays for itself, and everyone knows who you are...

Dave's having a ball.

On the flip side, it's fun to volunteer 'cause you get to meet Dave! (GRIN!)

(Okay, that's a bit much... Dave's not exactly hiding from people who aren't feeding the site, he's easy to find and meet at OSH and other places... and a really nice guy.)
 
steamee said:
KBED tower 20 min ago:
AC: "Sorry I forgot to call mid-left downwind."
TOWER: "No problem we forgot to call your base."

I've never known the tower guys to be particularly funny before this. :)
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You just haven't been to KAFW when the NASCAR races are in town. ATIS Information BUBBA
 
For KAPA, where is the reporting point I heard a pilot refer to as either "pinery" or "refinery"? I looked on the sectional and didn't spot it.
 
ok, there is an iPhone app, anybody know of a blackberry or droid app for the same purpose? I would love some entertainment from that while "working." Thanks.
 
AggieMike88 said:
For KAPA, where is the reporting point I heard a pilot refer to as either "pinery" or "refinery"? I looked on the sectional and didn't spot it.
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It's east of CASSE / Castle Rock. A neighborhood / country club, that used to be a more prominent landmark before all the land around it was mostly developed.

Used to be the only housing development out there. Also its on that little ridgeline over there so it's easy to spot for VFR pilots.

Bottom right corner of attached iPhone/Foreflight screenshot.
4b94241c-0dad-e049.jpg


(If you look close you can see the blue GPS dot at my house in the top left corner.) ;)

Jets and IFR traffic and IFR training are regularly flying inbound from CASSE on the ILS 35R, so the common VFR technique controllers use is to have VFR non-approach traffic stay further East and report over Parker Road, The Pinery, or Parker itself, or the KOA radio tower. (The tower shown there on the chart in Parker.)

Then they can sequence you on a base for 35R/L or if winds allow, 28.
 
You can use flight aware but there is about a 10 minute delay reporting. I think there is a similar delay on the above Atlanta feed.
What's the difference between the app for your smartphone and just using the browser? I've used the browser to monitor liveatc.net KBOS. It seems to work quite well.
 
denverpilot said:
(If you look close you can see the blue GPS dot at my house in the top left corner.) ;)
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As mentioned in somewhere else on this board, I attend a conference at the Inverness each April.

Perhaps in 2012 we can link up for a drink or sumthin.
 
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