Radio Freqs

Radio Frequencies near Anchorage, AK

Anchorage Intl Airport (PANC)

Listening to this I heard some silence but a fair amount of regular traffic. Lots of numbers and letters (which I’m sure are numbers for flights and aircraft entering and leaving the airport) and things like “clear to takeoff” “clear to land”, “approach”.

I was interested to discover that the left and right channels of the audio are tuned to different channels, sometimes overlapping or anticipating each other, sometimes layered on top on a delay. Different towers at different places in the airport communicate on different frequencies. In this source, the left is 118.3MHz and the right is latching onto comms on other frequencies between 118.6 and 126.4. The result is sometimes confusing but it feels like if I made a habit of listening like this, I might eventually be able to parse more information or hone in on specific details.

These AM frequencies don’t appear to have a license associated with them, but I think that has to do with how the website lists them. They are COM channels on airband radio frequencies.

There were 2 of us listening on the website at the time.

Alaska Marine HF

These frequencies are reserved for communications between boats, including fishing vessels and the Coast Guard. They cover a few frequencies between 4125KHz and 8983KHz. The site says “Expect long periods of no traffic, then significant activity if there is a SAR mission or commercial fishing opening” and over my whole period of listening, I heard no traffic.

WQUI642

This license is for Cook Inlet Spill Prevention and Response Inc. It appears to cover two towers on the Cook Inlet, one further out and one closer to Anchorage itself. The southern node is of class FX1, meaning it is a control station expected to communicate only through the northern relay of class FB2. It seems like the relay is a lot stronger than the control station—it has a higher max ERP, has higher power capability, and is at a higher elevation. Presumably the node on the inlet has access to information and the node closer to Anchorage has easier access to power and maintenance, and this two-node system is the best way to get the info from the lower-powered station to the parties who need to hear it.

The FCC page has an address and an email address you could reach out to if you wanted to get in touch with people at CISPR and the notes section for the license reads: “RADIOS WILL BE USED FOR COMMUNICATIONS DURING OIL SPILL CLEANUPS.”