Jay Beckman wrote:
"Roger" wrote in message
...

Yup. We're in the process of building a picnic area..er...Have to
call it a "viewing area" or parks and recreation gets involved.

Make sure they stick an industrial-grade speaker out there and relay
the CTAF. A really big hit in places where I've seen/heard it done.

I've, uh, "viewed" several lunches and dinners at the shelter area at
the local GA airport. I could tell basically what was going on by
watching, but it made more sense when I remembered to bring my scanner
with me. (It's a fairly busy, towered field though.)

I have pondered a few designs for a viewing area radio. You can always
hide the radio and the speaker way up in the rafters of the shelter,
which might protect them from vandalism. You can get fiberglass
electrical enclosures and if the signals are strong enough, you might
get away with an antenna entirely inside the enclosure. That way you've
only got two holes in the enclosu juice coming in and speaker wires
going out. Depending on the location, you might want to have a timer
that shuts off the radio in the wee hours, if somebody might object.

For a busier field, I've thought of something like an old crystal-
controlled scanner in a Pelican case with a clear lid, plus external
speaker. Many of these scanners had an LED for each channel, and it
would be easy to make up a little placard for the LEDs showing which
channel is which, like "Tower", "Ground", etc. You could do the same
thing with a later-model scanner with a numeric LED or LCD, but then
(for most scanners) you'd need to provide a list of frequencies on
a placard and expect people to match up 123.45 on the scanner display
with 123.45 on the list. Either way, you have to put the radio down
lower so people can see it, and it might be more prone to damage.

Some people like to watch trains instead of airplanes and there are
apparently a couple of busy rail lines in Rochelle, Illinois. The city
built a shelter that has a scanner so people can listen to the trains;
you might talk to them to see what works and doesn't work.

Matt Roberds