[Spooks] Spooks Digest, Vol 78, Issue 26

[Beaumont, Paul]

Just to add some additional info:

In particular XPA consists of a minimum of 11 tones, some of which have dual allocations, for instance fig 2 [840Hz] and fig 6 [1000Hz] are combined into a seven figure character[individual characters longer than the usual 100ms] to indicate the end or beginning of synchronisation for actual number group transmissions, sent in blocks of 64.

The front cover of [sorry to advertise] ENIGMA Control List 24 from www.enigma2000.org.uk illustrates the tones with numerical explanation. Inside are details of all the polytones heard to date. [You can hear polytone samples from this site and possibly from Ary's N&O]

The numbers in the spiral notebook doesn't suggest hand copy at all; what it suggests to me is a key to access the auto decoded message.

XPA on the known schedules has been received in America; then again its been heard in Australia and I copied it in Guyana twice in 2006.

For some time I've also had a suspicion that not all clandestine comms come from a source within the Country controlling the spying. The reason for this is from a description of a certain spy in Britain receiving his Morse via a commercial receiver inside his apartment I read a couple of months ago. The aerial he used, 3ft of wire, is a joke and I suspect that his message may well have been rebroadcast from the Embassy of the country who he was working for.
That Embassy was, until recently, loaded with antennae quite capable of sending a message on low power to his location some 4/5 miles north of the Embassy.

Embassy radio equipment, especially from the Iron Curtain,  is nothing like Ham or in some cases, Military gear. It can be accessed remotely, reprogrammed and retransmit messages without any human intervention. They are really nice bits of kit too.

What's to say the same thing wasn't occurring for this apparent bungling group? There was also one polytone schedule that suddenly ceased in late May 2010 and hasn't been found since. It had been refurbed in December 2009 with very strong signal strength, a change of mode from MCW to USB and bought into line by standardising on 10bd rather than the 20bd it was previously using. Probably signals for a different customer.

Incidentally, I have been copying Polytones for the last 16-17 years; not at all experimental. They are surprisingly resilient through all sorts of QRM and do click/tick on occasion as the message progresses.  [I've even noted that E06, a speech station, has clicks in the background too, probably some signal overspill from the synthesiser.  

The last XPA polytones I copied was this morning:

9118kHz 0400z 28/07 Strong, good audio

10718kHz 0420z 28/07 Strong, good audio

And 

11518kHz 0440z 28/07 [to be assessed tonight - auto intercept]

Message detail:

175[ID] 1[No of Msgs] 00202[Msg Serial No] 00051[Number of Msg groups] 79164 [decode key] 70433 [Last group - its relevant and the only valid group in the Group count since the other three are not included:  actually 54 groups sent] 

Yesterday I copied nine XPA transmissions [three schedules] so it's a well active signal system; there are other types of polytones too - any of which might have been employed with this Group.

73
Paul

-----Original Message-----


>Another possibility is that the messages were being transmitted using a
>fairly simple digital mode - something along the lines of x milliseconds
>of tone for a mark, and x milliseconds of carrier-only for a space.
>While I'm not aware of anyone actively doing this, it would go some way
>towards explaining the clicking noises.


Could be. But I think the simplest explanation is that they were using a
numbers station and format already known to shortwave listeners. In 2006,
the FBI had a look around the spies' Seattle apartment. The fact that
messages were being recorded in an apartment at all means that the station
used is probably not DX for North America. The spiral notebook with blocks
of random numbers means hand copy.

The FBI complaint mentions a 2009 intercept for the spies instructing them
to "prepare the radio equipment" for "test RGs". That sounds more
complicated than hand copy from a portable radio. Based on the FBI's
definition of an radiogram, as quoted by Paul, that would mean the digital
RGs began between 2006 and 2009 and were probably still experimental.
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