Fw: [GreenKeys] Strange RTTY Signal on 29.684

[Steve Cichorsky]

"Geoff Fors" Wrote:

> I'm about 150 miles up the coast from Vandenburg AFB, in Monterey. Unless
> the signal is extremely high power I don't think it would make it up here. 
> The consensus
> among the locals is that the signal is from the north of us, i.e. San 
> Francisco Bay area, which

>encompasses a lot of terrain including quite a few military 
>installations.<<<



Keep in mind that the U.S. Army Reserve and California National Guard are 
doing their annual two-weeks of summer camp just south of you at Ft. Hunter 
Liggett and Camp Roberts which are contiguous to each other. A few years 
ago, while on a service call to an AT&T microwave site located on Tassajarra 
Peak, I ran into a military communications van staffed by two National 
Guardsmen. They told me they had to stay there for two weeks and the path 
terminated at Port Hueneme (USN) near Oxnard.

When I commented on the vintage telephone (F1) handset used on the order 
wire and they informed me that the van was manufactured during the Korean 
War. They said the Cal National Guard was still using vintage WWII and 
Korean War equipment.

They mentioned that one of the other relay links in the path was located 
near the dam at Lake Nacimento, adjacent to Ft. Hunter Liggett and Camp 
Roberts.

A few months later, while driving over the lake's spillway, I spotted a 
commercial power company's pole with a permanent 100 amp connector that I 
have since found out was installed to allow the military to plug their vans 
into during their annual exercises.

The reason I brought this up is because your first inquiry coincided with 
the start of their training season. Perhaps a coincidence but who knows?





----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Geoff Fors" <wb6nvh at mbay.net>
To: <greenkeys at mailman.qth.net>
Sent: Saturday, June 07, 2008 7:56 PM
Subject: [GreenKeys] Strange RTTY Signal on 29.684


>I am a bit behind on replying to some of the messages about this topic.
>
> I'm about 150 miles up the coast from Vandenburg AFB, in Monterey. Unless
> the signal is
> extremely high power I don't think it would make it up here.  The 
> consensus
> among the locals is that the signal is from the north of us, i.e. San
> Francisco Bay area, which encompasses a lot of terrain including quite a 
> few
> military installations.  I am working on getting reports from up in that
> area to see if the signal can be heard there.
>
> I agree that upon further listening this signal is technically not Baudot
> RTTY but actually FSK data with a narrow shift.  I will hook up the DES
> M-7000 and see if I can
> determine the baud rate and shift.
>
> I checked lower frequencies (i.e. divide by 2, 3, etc.) to see if this was 
> a
> harmonic, but they are all clear.
>
> In my case, I determined the frequency by the lazy and simple method of 
> just
> tuning for zero beat.  For all intents and purposes 29.684 is accurate
> enough to say where it is.  The receiver is an R-1051B/URR slaved to a
> URQ-10 frequency standard.
>
> Regarding Peter's comment, you are right, there isn't much to copy on HF 
> as
> far as commercial RTTY these days, other than something like the French
> South Pacific naval station FUF's marker broadcast (which switches to
> encrypted when they actually send something.)  I tried to read some 
> Russian
> shipping RTTY using third-shift Cyrillic decoding but that ended in
> frustration as well.  There's always the new weekend KSM RTTY broadcasts
> brought to us by the brave folks at Radiomarine.org.
>
> Geoff
> WB6NVH
>
>
>
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