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  • Reconnaissance Ventures Ltd



    2500-2600FT @ 00:32 hours is out of order. Surely a noisy aircraft will wake up sleeping residents.

    I know they have a job to do (may be mapping roads / checking out City Airport / Thames Barrier)... but still..

  • #2
    I don't think aircraft noise would worry too many people on a forum such as this - most of us are plane nuts. There's another thread running here that suggests these Reims Cessna aircraft over London may be operated by the police service. If you look up the aircraft type on Wiki you'll find that one of its stated uses is surveillance.

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    • #3
      They are back!

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      • #4
        Another aircraft from the same company is flying in the South... at the same time..

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        • #5
          I've noticed some activity this week, over the New Forest and over the Aldershot / Dorking / Reigate area. REV4LF at 02h03 UTC 2015 01 25.pngREV4LF at 03h12 UTC 2015 01 20.png

          What are they doing? If it's an aerial survey why are they doing it overnight when it's dark?

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          • #6
            Job done, REV4LF was on the way back to BHX at 03h16 UTC
            REV4LF at 03h16 UTC 2015 01 25.png

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            • #7
              Originally posted by Danny1962 View Post
              I've noticed some activity this week, over the New Forest and over the Aldershot / Dorking / Reigate area. [ATTACH=CONFIG]5520[/ATTACH][ATTACH=CONFIG]5521[/ATTACH]

              What are they doing? If it's an aerial survey why are they doing it overnight when it's dark?
              Maybe, they are doing some instruments calibrations.
              F-WSSS1 - Cats refused to Pee & Pooh on RadarBox - Running a FR24 Receiver & DVB-T Dongle 24/7 to piss off The Chief Thief.

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              • #8
                It's 01h00 UTC and REV4LF has just begun a series of sweeps at 6,900' to the immediate west of LGW. This is certainly not a place to be hanging about while LGW is in operation, so overnight will be the only option here.

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                • #9
                  Back again.

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                  • #10
                    I'm leaning towards police/special ops and/or counter intelligence or recon (perhaps even training flights) or the like. And yes, Emergency Service organisations do occasionally lease aircraft and/or personnel, including pilots/crew. The pattern is similar to what I have experienced here in Australia with the NSW Police Force. However, I'm not familiar with either the airspace restrictions/limitations or the geography of that particular area. The circular patterns are very similar to that used here for guiding ground personnel and/or vehicles etc or sometimes to remove oneself from the area to put an offender off guard (thinking 'the cops are gone'). Or that can be to simply get ones bearings or chat to police radio/ATC or ground units if allowed (they need to do so via police radio here), or assess the situation away from the area of interest. The elongated sweeping patterns look more like a search grid pattern. (Or as somebody commented, 'knitting a jumper').

                    If you are fortunate you'll sometimes see them here around Sydney, and the actual track and altitude can vary depending on type of aircraft (fixed wing or rotary) and as I said, airspace restrictions. I'm much more familiar with them over here than I ever could be with London. We can also listen to them here although police have gone digitally encrypted but still interact with ATC on vhf airband). Here they now use a mixture of fixed wing (for speed measurement of vehicles and control operations for example) and rotary aircraft whereas back in my day it was purely rotary (helo's).

                    I'm not familiar with where the police and so on are based over there, whereas here the NSW Police Airwing is based at Bankstown Airport to the west of Sydney.

                    Or, it may in fact simply be mapping as I've also seen that here and it's not out of the realm of possibility. Either way, It's nothing we need to be concerned about. Navaid calibration is usually (but not limited to) more 'circles' in a smaller area than that shown above where they calibrate it from every direction.

                    Regards,
                    Gregg
                    Last edited by fungus; 2015-01-29, 06:51.
                    YSSY2/T-YSSY4 [SBS-1 Basestation w/- SSE-1090 SJ Mk2 Antenna (Thanks Delcomp) ] [Uniden UBCD996T w/- 16 element Wideband Discone VHF/UHF Antenna, and tuned 108MHz-137MHz Airband Antenna] [Trialing a home-brew 1090MHz collinear antenna]

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                    • #11

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                      • #12
                        That's interesting... it's a similar but not identical course to the patterns I observed for REV4LF over the past couple of weeks... the end-of-row turnarounds here seem a lot more loose and unpredictable, even turning into figures of 8 and loops on occasions. I wonder if the jobs the planes were doing are the same sort of thing. Also I notice it's all been happening over rural areas.

                        If it's police / special ops, this time of year they might be looking for any buildings that give off unusually high heat signatures, as this can suggest that cannabis is being grown on the premises. Growing cannabis commercially on a large scale requires a warm environment and you would ideally choose somewhere secluded without curious neighbours. Because of the energy requirements it is often also associated with theft of electricity from the network.

                        BTW how do you get your screenshots directly into the posts like the examples here? I've only figured out how to attach pictures I have saved already.

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                        • #13
                          REV4LF is starting early tonight... not yet midnight and already there's been a series of passes over the densely populated areas of Fulham, Camberwell, Wandsworth and Barnes (all areas of London) at around 3,700' . This altitude and these areas are totally in the approach zone to LHR and it would only be possible to carry out these manoeuvres when there are no flights in or out. It's one of the busiest patches of airspace in the UK.

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                          • #14
                            Originally posted by Danny1962 View Post
                            REV4LF is starting early tonight... not yet midnight and already there's been a series of passes over the densely populated areas of Fulham, Camberwell, Wandsworth and Barnes (all areas of London) at around 3,700' . This altitude and these areas are totally in the approach zone to LHR and it would only be possible to carry out these manoeuvres when there are no flights in or out. It's one of the busiest patches of airspace in the UK.
                            Danny,

                            Any chance of listening to ATC? (via a scanner). That's how I managed to figure out all the frequencies, location of aircraft and aircraft ID's around my area here in SYD before FR24 came along. In fact, I still use them in combination.

                            Regards,
                            Gregg
                            Last edited by fungus; 2015-02-02, 12:57.
                            YSSY2/T-YSSY4 [SBS-1 Basestation w/- SSE-1090 SJ Mk2 Antenna (Thanks Delcomp) ] [Uniden UBCD996T w/- 16 element Wideband Discone VHF/UHF Antenna, and tuned 108MHz-137MHz Airband Antenna] [Trialing a home-brew 1090MHz collinear antenna]

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                            • #15
                              REV4ND is criss-crossing North London tonight at about 3,100', it's currently 02h53 UTC and there's almost no other traffic about.

                              Gregg... thank you very much for your suggestion, which has prompted me to dig out a scanner that I'd had in a cupboard for many years. I plan to do exactly what you do, to use scanner and FR24 in combination. I'm not very experienced at doing this so it will take me a little while to really understand what is going on and to learn which frequencies are likely to be the most interesting. I've programmed many of the London Approach and ATC frequencies into my radio and have started to listen. All the online "how to use" guides I came across seem to concentrate on the actual operation of the radio, rather than telling the user how to find the most relevant frequencies and then interpret what they hear. Does anyone know of any good tutorials on this subject?

                              The other thing I was trying to do is to filter only on aircraft going to / from a particular airport on FR24. I'm positive I used to be able to do this once but I cannot remember how I did it and the FR24 interface doesn't make it obvious to me. Many of the incoming flights to LGW and LCY come over my house so I want to listen to the approach frequency for LCY at the same time as FR24 is set only to show planes that are on the way there. Can anyone give me any tips? Or even direct me to a scanner user forum? I think my questions would be more relevant there than they are on this thread.

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