With regard to " filling in the bits" when struggling to understand a radio transmission from a grounds station this could easily lead to miss understanding and obvious air safety issues. When finding it hard to understand a transmission the only way is to advise of poor signal strength and if you find theproblem continues fill in an Air safety Report.

T4

Before you go too far I suggest that you ask your local friendly radtec to check the impedence of your earphones.

Get him to explain the difference between some military headsets / radios and civvie combinations. USA works on a different impedence from OZ for example. Most OZ army machines seem to work on USA military standards.

I have seen so many OZ ex military jocks get into a civvie model, and plug in, and then the civvie is totally drowned out. makes me bloody mad it does.

Not only that, a wrong impedence or an nearly worn out microphone also often snuffs out the radio. This may be where your radio is now with your serious comprehension problems.

make sure you ask your boss ( flight instructor) to check it out because he is the one who continuously pays for the repair and he may not be aware of the imcompatibility problems.

Where did you buy your headset??

In the meantime, ban ex military types with their special (free) olive green bone domes from going anywhere near your prescious radios.

As far as old radios are concerned, if you want to get blown out of the ether, be careful when you get close to a well performing valve set.

Ahhhh yes the valvey thing's, I remember they lit up and glowed blue if driven hard + lots of heat!! So WW11 kit should better then.:E .
Does any one fly with the squelch control open? this should be set to just close the noise gate on the Rx. extremely tiring to have the background Rf. noise all the time, I would have thought if one ground station is clear & you are being read by same, the fault is most likely to to be station not your radio or head set, the impedance will not change from station to station.
As for old kit I can believe that, reading about lack of helicopters, body armour, ECM Kit (see Page 14 sept 19th Independent A really sad report & if the reporting is correct a grave indictment of the MOD\ government ) + the government treatment of the Gurkha's.
Now really depressed :( perhaps the gripe\grape will make things better

It is not too many years ago that the RNAS Culdrose ATC operated on the comms kit "salvaged" from HMS Vanguard, Britain's last battleship, scrapped in 1956 or so...

as you are early in your career you may find this a wee bit dificult to understand. However as you fly more and more thru military zones you will quickly get used to their lingo and before long, with practice, you will understand all they are saying.
Its all about experience. Good luck.

It's nothing to do with experience, there is definitely a problem caused by the poor quality of many UK military VHF transmissions. I doubt whether it is the use of antiquated equipment since the problem did not exist when they used the old 'minicom' system. The start of the problems occurred when the 'minicom' system was replaced by more modern equipment.

Sometimes it can be bad and a definite flight safety problem. I remember a few years ago having to divert around a military zone because the transmissions were totally unintelligable, even with a female controller.

For a couple of years now I have made a point of telling the controller of the poor quality of their transmission and asking them to notify their supervisor. Maybe if we all did it every time we experience a problem, it might prompt them into sorting things out.

Submitting a safety report is a good idea and the CHIRP system is a very simple way of doing that. It can be done very simply online or by post.

So experiance will fill in the unintelligible bits, Great!!:ugh: what about if you don't have this yet ? there also seems to be a competition by some controllers as to how fast they can talk (I know they are under pressure) but if they have to repeat it takes longer, & if you misunderstand their instruction either because of poor quality of Tx, speed of delivery & your inexperience and nervousness of asking controllers to repeat more than once, You could Die and take others with you
There appear to be as many if not more poor unreadable radios flying as on the ground.

I agree. In my experience military RT can be more difficult to understand / lower quality broadcast than civilian RT.

Tell them you are a student pilot, they are not trying to make things difficult for you! But definitely tell them they are being received at "readability 3" or whatever.

Disagree that experience allows you to "fill in the gaps". Experience allows you to anticipate the flow of converation, and over time you will find yourself tuning into the key information that you need.

But if you don't hear the key information clearly, ask them to say again. When you do hear it clearly, repeat it back to them - you may still have misheard and they will correct you if necessary.

RC

How about Tyro
 

Anybody on here spend a lot of time in MATZ? Is the callsign prefix TYRO still used? CAP413 "invites" students to prefix with Tyro when talking to mil radios and it's supposed to be in wide use in mil training schools. I have used it a few times when I used to squirrel around Middle Wallop in and out of Thruxton and it always worked.

Whatever phraseology is used, it can never be a bad thing to let the controller know that you're relatively inexperienced. "G-ABCD Student Pilot Solo" on first call for example.

Happy skies...