Taking my neighbour up and radio problems post ppl
07 Oct 2007Growing up, I’d lived in the same house since around age two, and for the entirety of that time, we’d had the same people living next door. As such as a family, we knew them quite well, and they’d been following my progress through getting my PPL. He’d always been interested in going up for a flight with me once I was qualified, so today was the day!
I took him up for quick flight down to Torcross and back one of my kinda standard routes, which I knew without really needing to calculate headings/tracks for, and was always a pretty consistent length of time.
The clouds stopped us actually getting all the way down to Torcross, but they were quite impressive as we were either above them (still in sight of the ground) or weaving around, them at about 2500’.
On the way back, there was a slightly worrying moment, where I thought the radio had gone out on me, as it dawned on me that I hadn’t heard any transmissions over the radio for some time. It’s not unheard of in the Plymouth airspace to not need to talk to ATC much once you’ve left the airport area, as it’s generally quite quiet, but to go more than 20 minutes without hearing anything at all, from anybody, is unusual. And when I tried calling them to let them know we were heading back, I got not reply.
I just kept flying the plane, and tried a few things to troubleshoot, like checking the volume wasn’t down, the squelch (which removes background static) wasn’t up too high, and that frequencies were all tuned correctly. All was fine, but whenever I tried calling Plymouth, no response.
I tried the Exeter frequencies too, as they’re often busier, but again nothing, although given my altitude and position, it was entirely possible that Dartmoor was getting in the way of those transmissions (and I had experienced that before).
My mind was racing through all the possible options and reasons why it may not be working. I was a little lower than I usually fly in that area, due to the cloud, and I remember my instructor once mentioning that there was a radio mast down that way which can interfere, particularly with the NDB signals from Plymouth, and sure enough the needle on that one was indeed spinning in circles.
I tuned in the ILS frequency and got both sensible indications on the instruments, and its audible identifier coming through on the headset, so was at least able to rule out any issues with the headset, at least receiving, so my best guess at that was that I couldn’t transmit, or the mic was broken on the headset.
As we were already en-route back I decided the best option was to carry on back towards Plymouth, with a slight hope that we were just simply out of range for some reason, but if not, the intention to fly into the overhead, change the squawk code to 7600 (hoping Exeter or Newquay radar might see that) and wait for a green signal to land (or someone giving verbal clearance on the frequency), while I called blind on the radio.
If it’d come to that I obviously would have let my passenger know what was going on, but for now I made it look like all the things I’d been doing were just standard practice. Once we were closer to Plymouth and approaching a known point where you’d often call and ask for joining instructions, I tried calling the tower for a radio check, and luckily got a crisp clear response! The rest of the flight then went as normal, with a nice smooth landing, and I suspect my neighbour was none the wiser!
I still to this day, do not know exactly what happened with the radios there, I can only assume the signal was being blocked somehow due to our height, or there was a loose connection with the headset mic that solved its self. I did mention it to the flying school once on the ground, and they checked it all out, and seemed to be no problems!