Listen to the Clouds

Possibly like a lot of other folks here, I discovered this phenomenon of "radio chatter" over "ambient electronic music" via http://youarelistening.to/ - I find it so helpful for concentration.

I came up with my own improvised "mixing desk" using tabs in a separate browser window (makes it easier to separate from your main work. The most common tab URLs are:

http://priyom.org/ - For listening to numbers stations (uses websdr below!) http://websdr.ewi.utwente.nl:8901/ - For basically any shortwave transmissions http://www.broadcastify.com/ - Various scanner feeds from all over http://www.broadcastify.com/listen/feed/11888/web - A fascinating repeater that I love listening to

And finally, I overlay one or more of these over my own Spotify playlist of ambient sounds. It's public, so I'll plug it here. I put this on random and use a crossfade of 10 seconds.

https://open.spotify.com/user/n_sonic/playlist/5tEUDt2X2QB0S...

Once again, thanks for this! Will be recommending it to folks today.

The big thing is understanding the vocabulary, and the things they're likely to say. It's called the "pop-out effect" - once you know what you're looking for, it's much easier to find it. You can think of it in Bayesian terms - an increased prior on certain words and phrases makes them much quicker to detect.

(I will also say that many people find American aviators/ATC much harder work. They use less standardised phraseology - perhaps because they don't have so many different native languages all crowded up into a small airspace. See if, eg, Amsterdam or Dublin is easier for you to understand.)

For example: Altitudes and flight levels:

3,500 is spoken as "three thousand five hundred".

13,500 is spoken as "one three thousand five hundred".

But other numbers (like times, directions, etc) have every digit spoken, for example 10 minutes is "one zero minutes" or wind direction 220 is "wind direction two two zero". Speed reading would be something like "one niner zero knots" for 190 kt.

The sentence structure is also relatively strictly defined, for instance at an unattended airport you would always transmit in this order:

(1) where you are

(2) who you are

(3) what you intend

(4) repeat where you are

So you'd say something like: "Swartkops traffic(1), small Jabiru Kilo India Tango(2), left downwind for runway one eight, touch and go(3), at Swartkops(4)"

This kind of strict structure and limited lexicon does make it understandable after a bit of practice, since you are expecting certain words to show up.

But... not understanding isn't necessarily a bad thing, I can't listen to this and work because I can understand it

E.g., https://coffitivity.com/

He has long drives, mostly around NY area.

I feel the SF radio was better two or three years ago. The background music was less in the front, the mix was more seamless.