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.
> 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.
I just want to send a huge heartfelt thank you. My sister and her family live on Orcas, and my mom flies in on Kenmore every couple months, as she is too old to make the long drive. I often worry about the the whole thing, and track the flight on Flightradar24. I have watched too much Juan Brown.
From a tech pov, this is cool as heck. From a you are helping watch my mom on somewhat sketchy flights in case I am not available pov: I would like to really thank you for choosing to do this with your time and money.
That's so cool... I'm a pilot (have 3 planes) and would be interested in hosting one--or just running for my own edification, really.
I'll message you.
Awesome. Thanks.
Edit: OMG I just realized who you are. I used to read your blog obsessively before I became a pilot, and while I was working heavily on mysql. Thanks for that!!
First, What an amazing project! > a voice model I created for transcription. >> The model is outstanding. I literally spent 5 minutes listening and barely understood most of the comms, the model was extremely helpful. This looks frontier/next level. Is it possible to share how you built this model/tips&trixjs?
i'm amazed at the transcription quality here. i spent a couple minutes listening, just in awe at the often nearly unintelligble crackling over the speakers, and then a half second later it prints a transcription that seems totally plausible to what i just heard, but without the transcription i don't think i would have been able to understand it.
I've honestly never understood how pilots or the tower are able to understand anything that's happening over the radio. Not only is there always constant static and interference, but they all speak in short rapid fire bursts that even beyond the lingo and shorthand is hard to process. I'd never be able to get a pilot's license.
"Delta blarg-mumble-twenty-blurgle-fargle-*screeeeeeeech*eading-foxtrot-squidgle-skee thanks."
It's absolutely amazing that the AI model is able to transcribe all that noise.
90% of radio communications is standard and expected.
If I get the call sign and a few key words, I can normally figure it out. For the most part you kinda know what people are gonna say before they say it, or at least have it narrowed down to just a few possibilities. You also just get an ear for the narrowband AM sound after a few hours.
“(Garbled) n123a (garbled) joining (garbled) one three” heard at an untowered field is going to be “local traffic, Cessna N123a is joining the downwind leg for runway 13.”
Or if you’re on final approach and the tower calls you up, there are really only a few things they are going to tell you, most likely is “Cessna 123a cleared to land”.
Plus, I’m guessing you have o my listened to very busy feeds at commercial airports. Students at smaller airports will often announce that they are a student, and controllers and other pilots will try to slow it down and give them a little extra room and time.
No idea how AI does it, but I assume it’s not too hard since there are essentially unlimited hours of recording to train on.
Well timed! SSL cert date 2026-11-12?
I wonder if you can partner with ham radio enthusiasts running their own Web SDRs… maybe have a way to point a pipeline at a websdr. Some of em do have air band.
!! That's awesome, I'm across the water in Port Townsend & have been playing around with a pair of RTL-SDR's doing something similar with police & SAR bands. this is awesome work man.
ps: grew up in obstruction pass, I suspect we have some friends in common. Nice work dude.
Very nice! We just started building something similar for our SAR team so we could scroll back and look at any pertinent Sheriff/Fire/SAR transmissions we have missed or mis-heard.
The voice recognition model on Adrian's thing is amazing.
Thanks! I visit Spruce Goose a lot. Yum! My wife and I are friends with some folks in your neighborhood. You Port Townsenders are cool!
cool stuff!