[Spooks] End of year thoughts...

[Bob Roehrig]

On Mon, 31 Dec 2001, Captain Davros wrote:

> well, since we are at the end of the year, how about a gathering together of
> thoughts about our hobby?  Does anyone have any outstanding
> memories/comments to make about numbers stations and the listening to
> thereof?

Well, there is also the apparent demise of M42 - FAPSI RTTY transmissions.
I have always been a RTTY fan. I remember the really rapid decline of all
the great press stations (AP, UPI, ANSA, VOA, AFRTS, JANA, XINHUA,
REUTERS, etc) starting about 1995 or so. There used to be a lot of MFA and
embassy type stations on too that were fun to copy.  One of the really
neat things to copy was the FCC direction finding net. They had a HF
repeater system in operation where you could monitor one frequency and see
the traffic from all the FCC monitoring stations. Their traffic was
encrypted by inverting the data bits - changed every 24 hours. Had a
special converter built to cope with the bit inversions. They too went
to other methods of communicating. Now there is little RTTY left of
interest.




                    73        Bob Roehrig        K9EUI
                    Aurora University Telecom/IS dept.
                    630-844-4898   broehrig@aurora.edu