VOLMET Weather Radio Stations

VOLMET stations broadcast weather reports to aircrafts in flight. The name is a combination of two French words, vol, meaning "aircraft," and météo, meaning "weather."

Three VOLMET stations that serve aircraft on trans-Atlantic routes are located in New York City, Gander, Newfoundland, and Shannon, Ireland.

These VOLMET stations serve planes out of the range of weather radar. They broadcast in amplitude modulation upper-sideband mode. AM is sent via a carrier wave with a wave, or band, on each side that contains the content. Music needs both sidebands to be heard clearly. Voice needs only one. The sideband mode thus saves bandwidth. Marconi used it to send code across the Atlantic. In a digital age, this relic of the analog era survives.

The New York City VOLMET station is WSY70. I hear it on 3.485 megahertz in the 90 meter short wave band. Its transmitter site is on the Atlantic Ocean, near Barnegat Light, New Jersey, about 90 miles south of New York City. Its control point is in New York, and its ID is "this is New York radio."

On the website of radio amateur W8JYZ are two PDF files that tell the story of New York aviation weather radio and station WSY70.

WSY70 shares its frequency with VFG, the VOLMET station serving the international airport at Gander, Newfoundland. It's among the least-known broadcasting stations that legally ID as New York, one of the more useful, and one of the most intriguing.

It broadcasts the wind speed and direction, cloud cover,visibility, temp and dew point, and precipitation, for airports in the eastern third of the United States. That's everything pilots need, and all anyone needs to visualize the conditions in a particular location. It gives the time every five minutes. There's no need to keep looking at the clock, as long as one can convert Zulu (GMT) to local time. There's also no need to get up and change the station when a bad song comes on, or when a talk show host's topic becomes the contents of Sarah Palin's closet.

WSY70 broadcasts for the first twenty minutes of each hour and signs off. VFG Gander VOLMET takes over from :20 to :30 after and broadcasts the same info for airports in Canada. WSY70 returns for another twenty minutes, and VFG for the last ten.

Each station has a range of several hundred miles, using the old reliable AM upper-sideband mode. Trans-Atlantic pilots leaving the eastern US can start with New York, switch to Gander, and stay with it over the Atlantic until Shannon can be heard.

On my trips to Paris, when there was nothing to do but look out the window at Iceland, I would think about what I might hear if my home listening post was with me.

All three VOLMET stations would be listenable, and a place no doubt exists, in the middle of the Atlantic, where Gander and Shannon can both be heard loud and clear.

It's also fun to tune away from the Big Talkers and Fresh Music Mixes to 3.485 for some VOLMET. The later the hour, the better. I can find out what the next day's weather might be at my location, and imagine what might be going on in the cockpit of a plane headed for Paris, or the darkened WSY70 control room. It sparks the imagination, the way radio used to.