Live airband on all frequencies from KORS. Victoria, CA also ground stopped

Hi all. Thanks for the interest. I'm going to post an impromptu blog post here just explaining what this is. The rather unfortunate ground stop today made this unexpectedly useful with the pilots here on Orcas just to get a sense of the chatter in our airspace re the situation.

This is an ETTUS B210 attached to a dual 4090 box. It's a polyphase channelizer that takes the entire airband, channelizes it using cuda code on GPU, demodulates it, detects transmissions, throws away data tx and then feeds the tx through a voice model I created for transcription. A separate LLM reads the transcriptions to create a situational awareness picture of the airspace.

I'm interested in open sourcing this and making it available for folks who can run an ETTUS B210 or high quality SDR with enoguh bandwidth and a local GPU machine, so that we can cover more airpsace.

This was born out of an incident we had not too long ago where a pilot around KORS (based at Friday Harbor) lost the engine in his 172, and put it in the water in front of a ferry and was picked up by the ferry. We're a pretty close bunch on Orcas Island and we only heard about it days later via social media. That felt completely unacceptable, and I set out to create a radio that could monitor everything in real-time, all the time, and alert on emergencies. That has extended to transcribing and creating situational awareness for a chunk of airspace.

I'm an IFR pilot. I fly a T206H regularly in IMC around here and I'm a ground instructor. You can email me at mark@defiant.com or find me on x at mmaunder if you'd like to connect. I'm particularly interested in hearing from folks who can run a station on their own hardware and are under bravo or a charlie or even just somewhere interesting re airspace.

This reminds me of a Claude hobby project from a while back that listens on public KiwiSDR receivers (on-demand, politely, never taking the last slot) and decodes ships’ DSC radio signals: https://research.datadesk.eco/skywave/

These are mostly quite boring, but I did manage to make some progress in triangulating position between multiple receivers using the delay, which would be useful as a method for tracking AIS-dark vessels.

If you scroll back to 2:03pm (the time this link was posted) there was this interaction:

14:03:04 Uh just wanted to confirm uh there's a ground stop uh going into Vancouver on this frequency?

14:03:10 Encore 3325, that's correct. Nothing is departing to land at Vancouver at this time.

These are raw transcripts unedited by me that I extracted possibly related to the groundstop, generated at time of posting:

  2143Z, 126.400 Victoria Ground (weak signal): "Yeah, we just uh communication issues, so we got the traffic stopped on [unintelligible]"

  2151Z, 134.800 Vancouver Centre, pilot of a flight ending "364": "We're saying they just have an alternate plan. They've been getting lower and lower 48 right now. We're on
  the phone with you, they are saying cannot show any reason why we would be out of communication to Seattle. So just otherwise we do have some alternates that we're talking
  about, but we just want to see, you see anything on your end that we cannot proceed to Seattle?"

  2152Z, 134.800 Vancouver Centre, same pilot: "Okay, sounds good. Yeah, we appreciate that. We'll be staying by and we'll just kind of get the alternate plans for ready to
  go. Thank you."

  2159Z, 121.075 Victoria Terminal, controller: "Seacraft 304, just a heads up here, there is a ground stop for an aircraft about into Vancouver at this time. I'm sure you
  have a VFR slot, seeing where you're headed there now, so I'd like to be still going to take you, but it just has stopped that you might end up getting turned around."
  
  2159Z, 121.075 Victoria Terminal, controller: "Sorry, that's all inbound aircraft, ground stop."
 
  2200Z, 121.075 Victoria Terminal, controller: "Yeah, it's not affecting anything airborne at this time. We're just about departing anything for Vancouver and Calgary at this
  time."

  2201Z, 126.400 Victoria Ground, pilot (weak signal): "Hey Ground, it's Jazz 270, and I'm guessing there's a flow for Vancouver."

  2203Z, 121.075 Victoria Terminal, pilot: "Uh just wanted to confirm uh there's a ground stop uh going into Vancouver on this frequency?"

  2203Z, 121.075 Victoria Terminal, controller: "Encore 3325, that's correct. Nothing is departing to land at Vancouver at this time."

  2204Z, 134.800 Vancouver Centre, pilot: "Yeah, right now they said normal ops continue, but we'll see what happens once we get closer."
 
  2217Z, 126.125 Vancouver Departure, pilot: "Yeah, you guys not having any of the issues that they're having in the US right now?"
 
  2217Z, 126.125 Vancouver Departure: "Uh, apparently the ones uh seeing ground stop for the 14 major airports I've just got a few minutes. Okay, thanks."

  2227Z, 126.400 Victoria Ground, pilot: "Encore 58, information Papa, requesting flow through to Vancouver for 2255." Reply: "Roger, 2255 on the flight plan."

No, there are no ground stops at yyj. All flights operating normally and no notams.

Surprised at how garbled many of these transmissions come across.

I can barely understand 50% of what is being said and am impressed by these professionals who can.

Are the transmissions still analog for security / interoperability reasons?

OG scanner transcriber https://scanner.rachelbythebay.com/

Only ground stop is the FAA one: https://spaces.navcanada.ca/workspace/ois/

I’m supposed to be flying tomorrow afternoon for my wedding next week. I fly to Toronto and then Mexico, so no stops in the US but needless to say I’m worried.

This is a _sick_ tool. I can imagine using this for listening to all sorts of mixed streams.

I'm confused by this one, when I click the link I am seeing a lot of live traffic?

EDIT: The title is confusing to read, there's 2 statements.

If someone who understands what this is feels like explaining it, that would be very cool :)

What model are they using for the speech to text transcription?

This is very nice, I always wanted something like this.