Why Airplane Radios Still Use AM: Simulating Airband Radios
Simulating Airband Am Radios
A flight simmer explains why aviation radios still use AM: it lacks FM's capture effect, so overlapping transmissions remain audible. He details the signal processing behind realistic radio simulation—path loss, decibels, SNR, automatic gain control, squelch, and envelope detection—and how these create authentic clicks and static in a combat flight sim's voice chat.
One of the reasons that’s persisted through decades of technological advances is that AM radio doesn’t have a “capture effect”.
- aardvarkdriver
Came for the planes and stayed for the incredible intro to DSP writeup. Well done!
- outworlder
As someone studying for the PPL and who had to play around with squelch quite a bit(and has stepped on others transmitting and vice versa), this was excellent. I can understand what's going on behind the scenes now.
- fennec-posix
Wow this is actually really cool. The interactivity makes it quite easy to understand the theory behind it all. (And yes, the default BMS garble when two stations talk over each other is painful!)