Unicom 122.800 Coverage

General Discussion Pilot Talk
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Hello everyone,

As a student pilot who recently started to fly in Vatsim, I do have one question: What is the coverage for UNICOM?

I completed two successfull VFR flight in VATSIM in Greek Airspace with a live ATC, everytime I left his airspace, he asked me to “monitor” 122.800. As a person who flies VFR in real world, I do position report in each leg which includes:

my position
my altitude
my next leg
my intention

To make it as realistic as possible, I do like to share this report on VATSIM UNICOM as well, but then I realize there are many people who is monitoring 122.800 when there is no ATC coverage. So my point is I do not want to bother an IFR captain who flies 100NM away at FL380 while I am cruising at FL055.

I checked the website “VATSIM AFV Map” but there are hundreds of circules on top of each other so I could not determine the actual cover zone.

2

Voice Unicom is artificially limited to a radius of 15 NM per aircraft, so only aircraft within 30 NM of your position will hear your calls. Text Unicom is not artificially limited, so depending on how high up you are, messages will have a range of potentially hundreds of miles.

But don’t worry about bothering other flights. Announcing your intentions is exactly what Unicom is there for and frankly, there need to be more people who are as diligent about doing that as you, not less :wink:

1 Like
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Hello 1627359,

That’s great to hear that, thank you for your reply!