YEG aviation + west operations center

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SCPD

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I have been working on understanding aviation radio scanning , and I have gotten various planes and such near CYEG. I am wondering what the west operations center does though? It seems one place in Edmonton is directing air traffic for a large area?
 

Jay911

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Edmonton is one of seven Area Control Centers (ACCs) in Canada. These are the Canadian equivalent of the US ARTCCs. Edmonton has one of the larger areas - I can never find a full map to view - including a large portion of the Arctic.

The seven (or eight depending on how you classify Gander) ACCs in Canada are:

Vancouver
Edmonton
Winnipeg
Toronto
Montreal
Moncton
Gander Domestic
Gander Oceanic

Gander Oceanic essentially goes halfway to Europe (where an Irish station IIRC picks up), so it's probably the largest by far.

The ACCs have transmitters all over the country to communicate with aircraft in various places. Each ACC is broken up into sectors as well. For example, up your way there's the Edmonton sector, the Whitecourt sector, and so on. They're shown in this agency in the DB. (Personally, with the new location-based scanners, I would re-rig this whole agency, so that the radio sites were grouped by their location instead of the sector they covered, because for example the Banff sector has transmitters in Banff and Calgary, and you're extremely unlikely to hear both of those with a ground-based scanner.)
 

robertmac

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In addition to RR, this site Alberta Aviation Frequencies has a lot of frequencies for Alberta [I will not say they are accurate or the same as RR]. But it does kind of differentiate between flight levels. I would agree that posting by location would be better. I have put the frequencies for the areas I visit into scanners but do not have a printed form. My area of interest of course is Calgary and east to the Saskatchewan boarder. Recently, while out in East Central Alberta, about the only activity that I heard on a scanner was air traffic. On another post on RR about air traffic, someone mentioned that a dedicated avionics radio is better for monitoring air traffic than scanners. With the anticipated move of most interesting departments to scan in Alberta moving to encryption, I am thinking of obtaining a dedicated air traffic receiver very soon.
 

SCPD

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Do you have any model numbers for aviation radios ? I assume people just buy the ones that are made for aviation like railfans are getting nexegde radios .
 

Jay911

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My FD bought a few airband handhelds because we are part of the first-due crew to Springbank CYBW. We picked up a couple of Icom IC-A14S radios and one IC-A14. The difference between the two is the A14 (no S) has a full keypad with which you can direct dial a frequency; the others just have 'channel up/down' buttons, and you can either step through the entire COM part of the air band, or store freqs in memories and use the down/up buttons to navigate them.

Of course, there's no such thing as TX inhibit with these radios (there isn't even computer programming that I'm aware of - on the S model you can't even delete memory entries!) so if you're not an aviation licensed operator don't TX.
 

robertmac

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My FD bought a few airband handhelds because we are part of the first-due crew to Springbank CYBW. We picked up a couple of Icom IC-A14S radios and one IC-A14. The difference between the two is the A14 (no S) has a full keypad with which you can direct dial a frequency; the others just have 'channel up/down' buttons, and you can either step through the entire COM part of the air band, or store freqs in memories and use the down/up buttons to navigate them.

Of course, there's no such thing as TX inhibit with these radios (there isn't even computer programming that I'm aware of - on the S model you can't even delete memory entries!) so if you're not an aviation licensed operator don't TX.

I whole heartedly agree with not TX. Plus I think Friday afternoon they had an incident at CYBW as the scanner had some activity out that way. The ICOMs I have looked at as well as Yaesu/Standard. I am also considering AOR [expensive] but have not looked into them as much as the ICOMs [IC-R series] and Yaesu/Standard. I am not a flyer at all, but have a lot of family and friends that I seem to be going to the airport to drop or pick up. When picking up, I like to go up earlier and listen to their flights from the time the get into Alberta airspace and all the way to the terminal. The reason for considering Yaesu/Standard over ICOM is I have a lot of accessories already for Yaesu [batteries, chargers, etc.]. Yaesu radios are the FTA-230 to 750 series. I have yet to looked into software for ICOM, but Yaesu does have for most of the FTA series. I did look under the Aircraft Monitoring Forum for posts there on good receivers but there was not a lot of info.. And there really is not a Forum for Avionic receivers. I have not done a search on RR for other information. However, did find under the Aircraft Monitoring Forum this thread http://forums.radioreference.com/aircraft-monitoring-forum/299952-yaesu-fta-750l-vs-icom-a24.html. There are currently a few ICOM radios on sale plus some Yaesus with a rebate.
 

dharding

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Edmonton is one of seven Area Control Centers (ACCs) in Canada. These are the Canadian equivalent of the US ARTCCs. Edmonton has one of the larger areas - I can never find a full map to view - including a large portion of the Arctic.

These aren't all on one map - but the Enroute Charts available from Nav Canada show the area.
Edmonton is on HI 1, HI 2, and HI 3.

NAV CANADA: Products and Services - EnRoute Charts
 
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