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All-Band Receiver Lets You Listen to All the Radio at Once

There are many ways to build a radio receiver, but most have a few things in common, such as oscillators, tuned circuits, detectors, mixers, and amplifiers. Put those together in the right order an…

But that wasn’t really a design concern for [Ido Roseman], who was in search of a simple and unobtrusive way to monitor air traffic control conversations while flying. With only a short piece of wire as an antenna, reception is limited to nearby powerful transmitters, but that makes it suitable for getting at least the pilot side of ATC conversations. It works surprisingly well — [Ido] included a few clips that are perfectly understandable, even if the receiver also captured things like cell phones chirping and what sounds like random sferics.

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