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by jcrawfordor 2055 days ago
Aviation radios on aircraft are typically 25w and ground stations the same to somewhat higher... and operations are generally line of sight and using analog AM modulation, which gets along nicely with CW. From a practical perspective (rather than regulatory), it is difficult to imagine miliwatt CW transmissions causing any meaningful problem with aircraft operations. Most radio systems used on aircraft are not really all that sensitive anyway, the most touchy thing would be the glideslope/localizer but it's only used at fairly short ranges and with fairly high power levels. This could perhaps cause a slight deflection of the ILS but that's assuming it's very close to the runway and at high power. This paper discusses security of the ILS system against tampering, which is generally the most "touchy" thing that aircraft use and the main interference concern: https://www.usenix.org/system/files/sec19-sathaye.pdf

That's all sort of besides the point anyway as nav aids use the lower end of the aviation band, 125MHz is used for AM voice where the interference would be, at worst, audible but not strong enough to cause problems unless reception was already extremely marginal.

Or to put it differently, two pilots hitting their PTT at the same time is already causing far more disruption to operations in the 125MHz range than this thing ever would.