Long before the Internet there was shortwave  I had a SSB capable shortwave receiver and with a 50 foot antenna clipped to my whip antenna, I could pull in clearly Oceanic air traffic over the Atlantic, Pacific and Caribbean.  My longest captures were more than 5000 miles distant from Napa, where I first used Shortwave.  I found this link after an hour of searching, a very powerful web based Shortwave radio which has more functionality than the cheaper radios, including a graph that allows you to hone in on Shortwave broadcasts.  The learning curve is only about twenty minutes or so.  For fun one should try tuning the Oceanic air frequencies and using the lower or upper sideband to hear the Pilot to ground and back transmissions.

http://websdr.ewi.utwente.nl:8901/. 

Very nice!  Thanks for posting!

 

You can also listen to some HF Oceanic broadcasts on LiveATC.net. The trouble is nowadays much of it is done by satellite communication and the crackly old HF frequencies aren’t used as much. 

When I was young I lived near Shannon Airport and I managed to rig up a fairly successful HF receiver using a long wire running from my bedroom right across our garden. The odd thing was that although the Shanwick Oceanic transmitters at Ballygireen were only about 10miles as the crow flies from my home, I was often able to get a better reception from the controllers at Santa Maria (Azores) or Gander than from Shanwick! But it was all down to atmospheric conditions across the globe the nature of which I never quite got to grips with. Still there was something magical and exotic in those days to be able to listen to those crackly hissy transmissions sometimes from thousands of miles away in the middle of the night! Times and expectations were definitely more simple then.

Bill 

Brought back a lot of memories, I remember listening to the oceanic airliner air traffic and weather from Shannon and Gander. I also logged over 100 countries listen to shortwave broadcasts from foreign countries.  I remember listening to Israel when Iraq was launching Scud missiles at them. I also remember listing to Radio Berlin from East Germany hours before the wall came down and they stopped broadcasting. I also remember listening to ship to shore telephone calls on HF.  They were full duplex where the ship was use one frequency and the shore station use a different frequency. If you had two receivers you could hear both sides of the conversation.  I remember listening to one ship to shore broadcast for over an hour where a couple were having a spat, they broke up and made up 10 times during the call. I think these calls were dollars a minute, that must have been an expensive call.

Listening to shortwave radios in those days were just flight simulators now. You can travel all over the world and never leave your seat.

John Cottreau