Why was my radio picking up ATC conversations?
Evening all, a strange thing happened earlier. I was working in the garage this evening with the radio set to Rock FM (97.4 MHz). I live in the narrow corridor of unrestricted VFR airspace between Manchester and Liverpool airports but we still get the occasional airliner overhead above VFR ceiling.
Now, in my limited experience of several light aircraft/gliding airfields, I thought all uk civil aviation radio traffic was contained around 127.xxx MHz? So why on earth were the songs on my radio being periodically interrupted with things like "This is [callsign] on final approach 10 miles out", "Roger this is [callsign] bearing onto heading xxx" and "Copy that tower, thankyou and have good evening"? It seemed to happen every 5 minutes or so, and I only ever got one half of the conversation (presumably the transmissions from the aircraft overflying). And on a similar point, if I could pick up their conversations when I was supposed to be listening to a radio station, what was stopping the pilots receiving "Lancashire's most popular pop rock radio" instead of the ATC commands?