[Spooks] Information on V2a/M8a/SK01/Radio Habana Cuba ringing sound

Sun Aug 29 09:40:47 EDT 2010

I thought it was noise from equipment at first too. Upon examining other clips you sent me the info I was seeing in spectral analysis doesn't cut thru all of the clips. In fact it's only in the Cuban ones and in other clips it's only where the news caster is speaking. 

Sent from my iPhone

On Aug 29, 2010, at 5:15, Nick Smith <appledesktopbus at yahoo.com> wrote:

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> 
> Nice to talk to you again. I didn't notice the naming mistake until much later. :)
> 
> Interesting. I never thought about the possibility of it being an announcement that their is encoded information in the broadcast.
> 
> If I understand correctly, I produced the simulation in a very similar way to what you described. In the Baudline tone generator ( http://www.baudline.com/manual/tone_generator.html#tone_generator ), I set the maximum tone to 777.10Hz and the minimum tone to 621.83Hz (both sine wave), set the modulation to FM, set the modulation function to square, and then set the modulation frequency to 7.143Hz.
> 
> This made it switch between the two frequencies at a rate of 7.143Hz.
> 
> 
> 
> The 5600Hz signal... I see something closer to 5425Hz. If that's what you meant, then that would be noise produced by my soundcard or motherboard.
> 
> Best regards,
> Nick Smith
> 
> --- On Sat, 8/28/10, Ryan Kirby <ryan.sdefect at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
>> From: Ryan Kirby <ryan.sdefect at gmail.com>
>> Subject: Re: [Spooks] Information on V2a/M8a/SK01/Radio Habana Cuba ringing sound
>> To: "Shortwave Spy Numbers Stations" <spooks at mailman.qth.net>
>> Date: Saturday, August 28, 2010, 11:11 PM
>> Visit http://mailman.qth.net/mailman/listinfo/spooks to
>> unsubscribe from this list
>> 
>> With those stations with a lot of spoken word (i.e. news
>> casts) its
>> possible they are using the spoken equivalent to a book
>> cypher, but I
>> cant figure out the purpose of the ringing if this is the
>> case. Other
>> than the ringing could indicate that there is an intended
>> message in
>> that portion of the news cast. Since verbal/book cyphers
>> are
>> impossible to crack without the key (nothing's impossible,
>> but there
>> is too many possibilities in any spoken/written word) it
>> would make
>> sense if they chose to do that.
>> 
>> The other thing is that the ring appears to be a result of
>> a single
>> square wave form oscillator, with the LFO set square as
>> well. This is
>> a good choice ensuring a message gets across (if the
>> ringing is the
>> medium). The technique for that would be to set up a
>> receiver with a
>> modular signal amplifier with the gain set high. Then use a
>> technique
>> called comb filtering to filter out all of the frequencies
>> OTHER than
>> the frequencies of the ringing. You could easily do this
>> with a
>> analog/digital rackmount EQ.
>> 
>> The human voice works on several frequencies, and just like
>> other
>> natural noise, as a very large set of harmonics. The
>> downside to the
>> voice, etc, over the radio is RFI or other forms of signal
>> degradation
>> may effect the frequencies of those harmonics, which will
>> cause the
>> voice (or whatever) to be not understandable. This is why
>> in those
>> recordings, it may be hard to hear the voice properly, but
>> the ringing
>> cuts through very well. There is no overtones or harmonics
>> with
>> signals produced by oscillators (unless you use multiple
>> oscillators
>> just to create harmonics/overtones.... now I'm going off
>> topic).
>> 
>> Here's an example using Nick's Recordings, using the comb
>> filtering
>> technique on the frequencies he listed.
>> http://www.megaupload.com/?d=AJWZY33X
>> 
>> Spectral analysis shows nothing odd about the ring or
>> voice... But at
>> ~5600hz there is a constant burst... kinda like a constant
>> binary
>> 0101010101 pattern all the way through. It modulates at a
>> very high
>> frequency and due to the constant pattern I can say that
>> there is no
>> analog transmission of data on this frequency. This pattern
>> does occur
>> at a few other frequencies as well. The odd thing about it,
>> is it
>> doesn't seem to be due to interference. It could be a
>> result of their
>> broadcasting equipment, or a result of the recording
>> equipment,
>> however. The only odd thing about it, is that it's
>> occurring on ONLY
>> those frequencies.
>> 
>> 
>> Just my findings.
>> 
>> Ryan
>> 
>> On Sat, Aug 28, 2010 at 1:16 AM, Nick Smith <appledesktopbus at yahoo.com>
>> wrote:
>>> Visit http://mailman.qth.net/mailman/listinfo/spooks to
>> unsubscribe from this list
>>> 
>>> Almost a year old now (October 2009), but in the
>> interest of adding content, here is something I wrote. I
>> originally sent it to the ENIGMA2000 group, so that's why
>> you'll see references to "e2kfiles."
>>> 
>>> 
>>>        Information on V2a/M8a/SK01/Radio Habana
>> Cuba ringing sound
>>> I use a Ten-Tec RX320D and an indoor antenna that is a
>> few feet longer than 100 feet (30.48 meters) and used
>> Baudline ( http://www.baudline .com/) for analysis of the
>> frequencies and tone length.
>>> 
>>> Ringing:
>>> Ring high tone : 777.10 Hz
>>> Ring low tone : 621.83 Hz
>>> Ring tone length : 0.0700 Seconds
>>> Ring tone High-Low cycle length : 0.1400 Seconds
>>> Ring High-Low rate : 7.1428571 Hz
>>> 
>>> Unknown low tone : 466.55 Hz
>>> 
>>> [Note: Frequencies and times were measured with a
>> cheap internal sound card. They are probably not totally
>> accurate.]
>>> 
>>> With this information, I've made a simulation of the
>> ringing. It is available here: http://eepromeagle.dyndns.org/e2kfiles/ringsimulation.wav
>>> 
>>> The ringing will sometimes be longer or shorter than
>> usual. However, I have not checked the length of each ring
>> to see if a certain ring length corresponds to a certain
>> number (like the XP stations, but with time instead of
>> frequency).
>>> By ear, the tones themselves seem to stay pretty much
>> constant in length somewhere near the measured 0.0700 second
>> length, and it's the number of times the high-low (or
>> low-high) cycles repeat that changes. Listening to my
>> recordings, in one of the rings, the length of the first
>> tone in the ring sounds like it is shorter. I'm not sure if
>> this was an error when I was recording or if it really was
>> shorter.
>>> 
>>> There is often a really low tone (the "Unknown low
>> tone" as specified above) that is sometimes present with the
>> ringing and will sometimes stop and start. This could be
>> just RFI, but I thought it'd be worth mentioning.
>>> 
>>> I saw something about this on the list, but on
>> 2009-10-21 at 04:48UTC on 6000kHz, I heard the same ringing
>> sound on Radio Habana Cuba. I made two recordings of that:
>> http://eepromeagle.dyndns.org/e2kfiles/RHCwRing-6000kHzAM-20091021-0448UTC.wav
>> and http://eepromeagle.dyndns.org/e2kfiles/RHCwRing-6000kHzAM-20091021-0455UTC.wav
>> .
>>> 
>>> I also made a good recording of SK01 with very loud
>> ringing (some QRM though) on 2009-10-13 at 09:33UTC on
>> 5930kHz AM, which you can find here: http://eepromeagle.dyndns.org/e2kfiles/SK01-5930kHzAM-20091013-0933UTC.wav
>> (warning : it is almost 150MB. I recorded it with a sample
>> rate of 48000 kHz even though I was using a filter that
>> appears to filter off anything above 4.5kHz)
>>> I might have recorded it in SSB and forgot to change
>> the filename (my radio is around 53Hz off frequency in SSB
>> without correction). I think I had the radio tuned somewhere
>> around 53Hz below 5930kHz to correct for inaccuracy though.
>>> 
>>> Here is another one with loud ringing as well as the
>> low tone (you can hear it make a "dah-dit-dah" noise near
>> the middle) 2009-10-13 at 09:32UTC on 5947kHz LSB: http://eepromeagle.dyndns.org/e2kfiles/SK01-5947kHzLSBaAM-20091013-0932UTC.wav
>>> I did switch modes near the middle of the recording,
>> so there are some loud beeps. It was recorded in LSB, not
>> sure if I corrected it or not.
>>> 
>>> I may have written down the frequencies and times
>> incorrectly for the recordings since I probably mistyped
>> some of the filenames. I normally keep logs with accurate
>> data that are separate from the recordings, but when trying
>> to switch frequencies and start more recordings fast, it was
>> kind of easy to make mistakes.
>>> 
>>> 
>>> 
>>> 
>>> 
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> 
> 
> 
> 
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