[MilCom] NASA has a Predator?

[Bill Jones]

 > I've been playing with Flight Explorer and everytime i
> sign on i always check NASA in the a/c id bar.  Well,
> it's showing NASA 870 and under a/c code it says MQ-9.
>  I googled it and it come up as the UAV Predator.  So
> NASA is flying a UAV (i guess for testing) and like
> their other planes it's showing up on Flight Explorer
> (and other flight trackers i assume).  It's current
> path @ 0235Z shows it over Idaho and it's scheduled
> flight time is from 2208Z to 1423Z.  Talk about a long
> loiter time.  Oh well, i thought i would throw that
> out.  Kind of interesting.

Many years ago (early 90's I think), I was surfing the arc with my C-band 
satellite dish, and came across a really strange signal.  It was the view from 
an aircraft, but had lat/lon indications on the screen, as well as 
azimuth/elevation type data for the direction the camera was aimed.  This feed 
stayed up for MANY hours, and followed a big truck with an "X" on top from 
south of San Francisco (I think), across a bridge over to Oakland (I think).  
At the time, I had never even heard of un-manned aircraft, but it was obvious 
that was what it was, and I later decided that it must have been an early 
version of a Preadator or some other similar aircraft.  Really neat to watch, 
but there was also audio, and you could hear the guy controlling the aircraft 
talking to ATC, and he was being asked to avoid the airspace around the SF 
airport, which made it more difficult for him to keep tracking the truck.   I 
was never quite sure where the satellite feed  was coming from, ie from the 
plane itself (not likely), or from some mobile control center controlling the 
plane, but it was neat.  So these things have been flying around the US for 
quite a while, and through controlled air space. 

  Shortly after I found this SF experiment, I ran across the same feed again, 
this time in the desert somewhere (near area 51 actually), again following 
some truck simulating a nuclear shipment or something.  I think these things 
were testing not only the plane, but also testing the satellite communications 
system.  Pretty neat.  

   I did manage to record a lot of the transmission on vhs tape, and captured 
a few images to my computer.  See:
http://www.megalink.net/~wejones/Spy3.jpg  

Maybe someone familiar with the various UAVs can recognize the format of the 
display to tell what UAV it was from. 




Bill Jones         N3JLQ
Sweden Maine
wejones at megalink.net
http://www.megalink.net/~wejones