Thanks! We were really lucky in that the Santa Clara city system was still using analog voice channels with lots of bandwidth (20K0F3E). If you check out the SVRCS system that replaced it (and I also logged for a few years), the audio quality is a lot worse. Super-compressed audio which then gets crammed through /another/ codec (MP3) isn't great.

I will admit that I actually listened to the original system a lot with headphones, so I had every reason to fine-tune it until it sounded as awesome as possible. If you go back far enough into 2011, you can find a bunch of calls with terrible audio before I figured out the finer points of squelch, tuning errors, and 48 vs. 44.1 kHz :-)

I haven't decided whether it's worth building another system now that I have time to actually listen again. Hmm...

When I lived near the airport I made an ACARS monitoring box with the B200 and GR. Had a bunch of fun analyzing engine performance data and the funny messages going back and forth. Travelling with my rtlsdr has saved my butt a few times. Always nice being the first to know that a flight has been cancelled.

I would vote for a new one!

(I love all your posts!)

When it was up and running they would just pop in live. It's easy to miss but the cool thing about this is that it's essentially doing multi-channel recording so you don't miss anything within the bandwidth of the receiver. They would just pop in serially and you would catch up during the dead air.

For a little side project she did a fantastic job (very good write-ups of the trials and tribulations in her blog as well).

All of her posts are well worth reading. I feel like doing so kicks my IQ up a couple of points.