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?
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.
Plus I think Friday afternoon they had an incident at CYBW as the scanner had some activity out that way.
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.