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Pirate & Unusual Radio Signals

Ermintrude said:
Well, you clearly understand a lot about propagation and troposcatter, I'd guess. My guesswork is that if anyone really (genuinely) wondered about what HAARP really is/was, forget all the weather weapon/global warming/alien death beam rubbish.

It could've been just for doing precisely what I'm just guessing....bending HF/VHF radio signals in a modified ionisphere, and making them appear to originate from wherever they needed to seem to be at.
Click to expand...

Here's one for you Erm. HAARP transmission ....

https://soundcloud.com/doc227/haarp
 
Andy_X said:
That's a very well tuned haarp!
Click to expand...
Isn't it just!!

haarp.jpg
 
I had heard somewhere that the 'secret' US DoD HAARP facility was now closed down.

Not sure about this...it may be one of those post-War (ie 'after' the Cold War....) reductions in activity, similar to the decrease in the activity heard from Numbers Stations. In other words, a dip before a climb....

Now that we all live in in a universal, peaceful utopia, with no threats of nuclear or any other form of war, and every nation state is in a mode of happy fraternal cooperation, well....if only!

Talking of HAARP-type urban legends and radio conspiricising, I wonder if the alleged British / Welsh HAARP facility is still in operation?

http://www.ukcolumn.org/oldforums/index.php?p=/discussion/8122/what-s-h-a-a-r-p-doing-in-wales

This attracted unhelpful-but-interesting media mob speculation with headlines along the routes of:
"David Cameron authorized HAARP facility in WALES that engineered UK floods!"

Sheer UK newspaper madness, very-similar to the National Enquirer style of editorial.

I mean, all these good people are doing is attempting to project large amounts of radiofrequency energy beams skywards in order to be able to obtain upper atmosphere weather RADAR information....not the massive powers being generated/transmitted in the US, as I understand it.

Misconstruing this, and making RADAR seem like a 1930s Flash Gordon death ray, is eminently-suited for scaring the masses. But as dispassionate Fortean investigators, we must sit on (and above, and under) the fence.

And always remember....with great power, comes great electricity bills/costs.....:)

ps @Doc all your excellent Soundcloud stuff (especially that World Adventist intercept) reminds me of searching through the WRTVH last century. Those of us old mature enough to have dabbled, properly, with pirate/utility radio in the 60s/70s, truly were online, on 'the net', at least quarter of a century (perhaps half a century, or more) ahead of the current mainly land-based internet....just imagine back in the halcyon days of Hallicrafter, Collins, Hammerlund, or even Heathkit, Sony and Yaesu, that there would be a future era when the entire human race would be interconnected using RF multimode communications devices permanently. Those of us that were originally 'radio-active' (note that all-important hyphen) last century were unacknowledged pioneers in so many ways. But the vast majority of the billions of "home computer amateurs" in the 21st century are oblivious to what we did (and, ever-decreasingly, do..... @Monstrosa @GhostInTheMachine , trust us, it was, and still is, a grippingly-interesting thing to have been involved in....it did have it's place, fringe radio plays a part in almost every sci-fi and Fortean story of the modern era)
 
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Not Pirate, but unusual enough to be worth a mention:
Mount Wellington Mine Celebrates St Piran’s Day with amateur radio broadcast celebration of Cornish mining landmark
Paul Armstrong

A CORNISH mining landmark will be celebrating St Piran’s Day on Saturday, March 5 with a special broadcast by the Cornish Radio Amateur Club, or CRAC for short.
The club has obtained a special events station licence making a one-time-only broadcast at Mount Wellington Mine to activate it as an amateur radio station.

CRAC will use a special "K2" locator in the call sign, which has been licensed to Cornish stations by OFFCOM for only one year. The station will use a HF (high frequency) set-up, which will broadcast to UK and foreign amateur radio (ham) users and a VHF set-up, to cover local users as far as north Devon.
The call sign for the club is GX4CRC and can be Googled for more information.

“It seems a rather fitting tribute to transmit from a Cornish Mine on the day that celebrates the landing of St Piran on the shores of Cornwall, and his claimed subsequent discovery of tin the same day” said Mount Wellington Mine’s owner, Richard Freeborn. “As far as we can ascertain, this will be the first time a special event radio station will ever have operated from a Cornish mine. The idea was suggested last year by the late president of CRAC, Norman Pascoe, who passed away in February this year, who would no doubt be thrilled to have known that his idea has come to fruition”.

The station has been licensed to operate from 9am to 4pm and will consist of up to eight radio operators.

http://www.falmouthpacket.co.uk/news/fpfalmouth/14302009.Mount_Wellington_Mine_Celebrates_St_Piran___s_Day_with_amateur_radio_broadcast_celebration_of_Cornish_mining_landmark/
http://www.falmouthpacket.co.uk/author/profile/1600.Paul_Armstrong/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mount_Wellington_Tin_Mine
 
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rynner2 said:
Not Pirate, but unusual enough to be worth a mention:
Mount Wellington Mine Celebrates St Piran’s Day with amateur radio broadcast celebration of Cornish mining landmark
Paul Armstrong

A CORNISH mining landmark will be celebrating St Piran’s Day on Saturday, March 5 with a special broadcast by the Cornish Radio Amateur Club, or CRAC for short.
The club has obtained a special events station licence making a one-time-only broadcast at Mount Wellington Mine to activate it as an amateur radio station.

CRAC will use a special "K2" locator in the call sign, which has been licensed to Cornish stations by OFFCOM for only one year. The station will use a HF (high frequency) set-up, which will broadcast to UK and foreign amateur radio (ham) users and a VHF set-up, to cover local users as far as north Devon.
The call sign for the club is GX4CRC and can be Googled for more information.

“It seems a rather fitting tribute to transmit from a Cornish Mine on the day that celebrates the landing of St Piran on the shores of Cornwall, and his claimed subsequent discovery of tin the same day” said Mount Wellington Mine’s owner, Richard Freeborn. “As far as we can ascertain, this will be the first time a special event radio station will ever have operated from a Cornish mine. The idea was suggested last year by the late president of CRAC, Norman Pascoe, who passed away in February this year, who would no doubt be thrilled to have known that his idea has come to fruition”.

The station has been licensed to operate from 9am to 4pm and will consist of up to eight radio operators.

http://www.falmouthpacket.co.uk/news/fpfalmouth/14302009.Mount_Wellington_Mine_Celebrates_St_Piran___s_Day_with_amateur_radio_broadcast_celebration_of_Cornish_mining_landmark/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mount_Wellington_Tin_Mine
Click to expand...
I'll listen out for this if I'm home! Thanks Rynner2!
 
Ermintrude said:
I had heard somewhere that the 'secret' US DoD HAARP facility was now closed down.

Not sure about this...it may be one of those post-War (ie 'after' the Cold War....) reductions in activity, similar to the decrease in the activity heard from Numbers Stations. In other words, a dip before a climb....

Now that we all live in in a universal, peaceful utopia, with no threats of nuclear or any other form of war, and every nation state is in a mode of happy fraternal cooperation, well....if only!

Talking of HAARP-type urban legends and radio conspiricising, I wonder if the alleged British / Welsh HAARP facility is still in operation?

http://www.ukcolumn.org/oldforums/index.php?p=/discussion/8122/what-s-h-a-a-r-p-doing-in-wales

This attracted unhelpful-but-interesting media mob speculation with headlines along the routes of:
"David Cameron authorized HAARP facility in WALES that engineered UK floods!"

Sheer UK newspaper madness, very-similar to the National Enquirer style of editorial.

I mean, all these good people are doing is attempting to project large amounts of radiofrequency energy beams skywards in order to be able to obtain upper atmosphere weather RADAR information....not the massive powers being generated/transmitted in the US, as I understand it.

Misconstruing this, and making RADAR seem like a 1930s Flash Gordon death ray, is eminently-suited for scaring the masses. But as dispassionate Fortean investigators, we must sit on (and above, and under) the fence.

And always remember....with great power, comes great electricity bills/costs.....:)

ps @Doc all your excellent Soundcloud stuff (especially that World Adventist intercept) reminds me of searching through the WRTVH last century. Those of us old mature enough to have dabbled, properly, with pirate/utility radio in the 60s/70s, truly were online, on 'the net', at least quarter of a century (perhaps half a century, or more) ahead of the current mainly land-based internet....just imagine back in the halcyon days of Hallicrafter, Collins, Hammerlund, or even Heathkit, Sony and Yaesu, that there would be a future era when the entire human race would be interconnected using RF multimode communications devices permanently. Those of us that were originally 'radio-active' (note that all-important hyphen) last century were unacknowledged pioneers in so many ways. But the vast majority of the billions of "home computer amateurs" in the 21st century are oblivious to what we did (and, ever-decreasingly, do..... @Monstrosa @GhostInTheMachine , trust us, it was, and still is, a grippingly-interesting thing to have been involved in....it did have it's place, fringe radio plays a part in almost every sci-fi and Fortean story of the modern era)
Click to expand...

Very well said Ermintrude! :clap: I know I'd rather spend a day and a night in a low-QRM location (preferably back in time in the fringe-radio era of the 60's to 90's), turning the dial minutely-slowly, waiting for the whisper of weak signal noise in the cans and then working to boost it, and identify it, than suffer a months'-worth of current TV/radio. You're right, those who were never there never will be now, and can't imagine it as it was.

Amateurs, CB'ers, military stations and even pirate stations communicating in groups always have and still do call themselves a "net", long before the interwebbynet thing happened. :fckpc:

If you liked the World Adventist intercept, here's TransWorld Radio from the same location, Guam.

https://soundcloud.com/doc227/twr

I've got some Overcomer Ministries, Brother Stair, tracks somewhere too. Disturbing ... o_O
 
I mourn the slow passing of the NDB's. For those who haven't heard of them or haven't tuned in to them, they are (in too many cases now - were) small Omni-directional transmitters, located mostly at practically every commercial airfield in the world. They transmit 1, 2, 3 and sometimes 4 letter/number combinations in morse code, repeatedly, with a space or a tone in between. They are only meant to be heard within a few hundred miles of the airport, as a directional guide to aircraft. As the use of GPS and nav computers increased, the need for NDB's decreased, and they are being decommissioned.

They had another use, for radio anoraks. Skip plotting, or propagation clues. If you could hear an NDB on skip from a particular area, chances were you could receive other signals from that area. If I could hear DHJ59 (in morse), I knew I could probably hear signals from around Sengwarden Naval Base, Germany. OST gave me Ostend in Belgium. WLO, Mobile, Alabama USA. FI, Finisterre, Spain. FJP2, Noumea, New Caledonia. There were thousands of them, like a quiet little roadmap of tropospheric scatter. Sigh ... back in the day.

What brought these memories to mind was the discovery in one of my bookshelves of a 1994 copy of Ferrell's Confidential Frequency List, 9th Edition, published by Listening In magazine. This was one of our Bibles for Radio Anoraks, listing frequencies, callsigns, modes, locations and identities of umpteen thousand stations, an inch and a quarter (386 pages) thick. It listed Aero, CW, Coast Stations, Fixed (NDB's), Embassy Stations, Military Stations, Fax, Volmet (Meteorological) Stations and Time Stations. Happy daze.

Unhappy daze - on 7/11 (EDIT: did I say that? I meant 9/11 obviously. To self; don't have a drink and then type), even USAF transport aircraft (callsign REACH to signify Global Reach) were kept at arm's reach from the continental USA ..

https://soundcloud.com/doc227/reach7046wtc
 
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Doc said:
I mourn the slow passing of the NDB's. For those who haven't heard of them or haven't tuned in to them, they are (in too many cases now - were) small Omni-directional transmitters, located mostly at practically every commercial airfield in the world. They transmit 1, 2, 3 and sometimes 4 letter/number combinations in morse code, repeatedly, with a space or a tone in between. They are only meant to be heard within a few hundred miles of the airport, as a directional guide to aircraft. As the use of GPS and nav computers increased, the need for NDB's decreased, and they are being decommissioned.
Click to expand...

When I first got into sailing professionally, in the 1970s, there were few radio aids for small craft. But small handheld RDFs (radio direction finders) were available, and they could give a compass bearing to the nearest marine radio beacons (on lighthouses and harbours, etc), and with bearings to two or more of these you could get a position fix. The callsigns and frequencies of these beacons were listed in the nautical almanacs, and they also included airport beacons near the coast that could serve the same purpose. I think there were two or three in the Channel Islands which were useful to us sailors, and I think these are what you refer to as NDBs.

Bigger vessels, like fishing boats, might then have carried Decca, but that was not too easy to use, and required special charts to plot your position. But the march of technology then produced computerised versions of Decca, which would convert a Decca position into standard Lat/Long, and this piece of kit was small enough and cheap enough to be used on quite small craft. But after a few years Decca was superseded by GPS and Satnav, and Decca went the way of most Radio Beacons.

One other radio nav system I've had experience of was Loran, a long range version of Decca, but I don't know its current status.
 
rynner2 said:
When I first got into sailing professionally, in the 1970s, there were few radio aids for small craft. But small handheld RDFs (radio direction finders) were available, and they could give a compass bearing to the nearest marine radio beacons (on lighthouses and harbours, etc), and with bearings to two or more of these you could get a position fix. The callsigns and frequencies of these beacons were listed in the nautical almanacs, and they also included airport beacons near the coast that could serve the same purpose. I think there were two or three in the Channel Islands which were useful to us sailors, and I think these are what you refer to as NDBs.

Bigger vessels, like fishing boats, might then have carried Decca, but that was not too easy to use, and required special charts to plot your position. But the march of technology then produced computerised versions of Decca, which would convert a Decca position into standard Lat/Long, and this piece of kit was small enough and cheap enough to be used on quite small craft. But after a few years Decca was superseded by GPS and Satnav, and Decca went the way of most Radio Beacons.

One other radio nav system I've had experience of was Loran, a long range version of Decca, but I don't know its current status.
Click to expand...

It saddens me too that the Non-Directional Beacon and its more complex cousin the VOR (which is highly directional, without going into details - and also broadcasts a Morse identifier) are doomed to be phased out (there's a joke in there somewhere...) but I can assure you that both systems are still going strong in the UK. Student pilots are still taught about these navaids and use them in plannng cross-country exercises - they can be of inestimable help if one's a bit lost and unable to find a visual reference point. These radionavigation techniques are also learned by pilots wishing to qualify to fly on instruments - and not only that, but the avionics on the very latest airliners make use of the good old NDB as just one of the collection of complementary navigation technologies that have come along over the years; VOR/DME, VORTAC, ILS, MLS, GPS, INS, GNSS and so on. The range of NDBs typically is somewhere between 10 and 50 nautical miles, with most of them being (IIRC) about 20 - 25nm.

There are a handful of NDBs in the South West:

Newquay NQY ( -· --·- -·-- ) 347 kHz
St Mary's STM (... - --) 321 kHz
Plymouth PY (.--. -.--) 369.5 kHz
St Mawgan SM (... --) 357 kHz
Penzance PH ( ·--· ···· ) 333 kHz

In fact Plymouth airport also has a VDF (VHF Direction Finding) station, which is (I think) not far removed from the systems developed by the RAF during WWII to help aircrews to find their way home in bad weather.

The standalone type of NDB-related instrument in an aircraft with 'steam gauge' instrumentation is referred to as an ADF (Automatic Direction Finder) rather than RDF (there are technical differences) and looks something like this - just a compass card and a needle...

ki227.jpg


...which is not nearly so much fun as this marine RDF which I just found via a popular and non-evil search engine. Not quite hand-held this one, eh, Rynner!? I imagine this is the kind of thing you might have found on a trawler in the 1970s?

Gemtronics_GT302_DF.JPG


The point is that neither the 'analogue' radio beacon nor Morse Code are dead quite yet. There's something special about hearing those dots and dashes coming over the airwaves...as well as being comforting in certain circumstances, as with lighthouses there's something lonely and romantic about their steady electromagnetic heartbeats.

PS: Just tuned into Brookmans Park VOR and found it very soothing, if repetitive. Why not have a go, asssuming you're within line-of-sight range of a VOR and have a marine / airband receiver lying around...

Brookmans Park VOR BPK (-... .--. -.-) 117.50 MHz

[edited for tiny typo]
 
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Interesting thread for an old radio-head like me! (Ex broadcast engineer.)

BBC R4 made a programme about numbers stations. It remains on Youtube: "Tracking The Lincolnshire Poacher".

Numbers stations are still around with schedules and podcasts about them available from http://priyom.org/ and http://www.apul64.dsl.pipex.com/enigma2000/

The most famous weird signal is probably the 'Buzzer' (UVB-76) on 4625 kHz and now also 6998 kHz. Easily heard all over Europe after dusk.

Long Delay Echoes of radio signals have also been an enigmatic interest of mine, but I'm not sure their existence is really confirmed yet; I suspect science is still at the hot-rock-don't-fall-out-of-the-sky stage on this one! Unfortunately LDEs get conflated by lazy journalists with the so-called alien Black Knight Satellite, and predictably the more gullible in the 'alternative' media have run with it and the story has grown legs - and arms and probably tentacles!

HAARP is another one where the facts get in the way of a good story. A look at the antennas will show a trained person what approximate frequencies it operates on, and it certainly isn't microwaves. Surely a moment's thought might suggest that to do all the dastardly deeds it's accused of would need colossal amounts of power. It would saturate all sorts of sensitive amateur and professional equipment used for various RF and magnetic measurements across most of the world.

Regarding the the many aspects of amateur radio (called 'ham' radio by our US cousins), well it's not really been just about communication in the telephone age, let alone the internet age. It's more to do with scientific endeavour; getting a signal from one place to another - be it a distance of a few miles or thousands of miles - without relying on any infrastructure.

For example, I have a half-watt beacon operating on 7,040.1 kHz connected to a bit of wire in the loft which via the internet (yes, the irony!) I can see is being received all over Europe, and at certain times of the day, under certain ionospheric conditions in Australia, New Zealand and North America. Half a watt is less than a tenth the energy of a lit cigarette! And the radio signal is detected in New Zealand! Some of us think that's nearly magic...

Other aspects - like making a simple radio transmitter and receiver out of odd components, and seeing how far you can communicate is a challenge; it's much like being an amateur meteorologist or bird spotter. Probably not massively useful in the 21st century, but occasionally amateurs invent, discover or confirm new things that are useful.

So remember, when the Zombie Apocalypse descends, when the lights go out and Tesco's closes, just check out those eccentric chaps in their radio shacks with solar panels and bicycle-driven generators. They're the ones who will be holding together what remains of civilization by maintaining some form of communications between communities...

Bakelite Brain
 
Andy_X said:
...which is not nearly so much fun as this marine RDF which I just found via a popular and non-evil search engine. Not quite hand-held this one, eh, Rynner!? I imagine this is the kind of thing you might have found on a trawler in the 1970s?

View attachment 2064
Click to expand...
The first hand-held one I used was called a Seafix. I'll look for a picture of one later, but meantime I found this discussion about them and how they were used:

http://www.ybw.com/forums/showthread.php?60906-Seafix-D-F
 
bakelite brain said:
[...] I have a half-watt beacon operating on 7,040.1 kHz connected to a bit of wire in the loft which via the internet (yes, the irony!) I can see is being received all over Europe, and at certain times of the day, under certain ionospheric conditions in Australia, New Zealand and North America. Half a watt is less than a tenth the energy of a lit cigarette! And the radio signal is detected in New Zealand!
Click to expand...

:cool::cool::cool:

bakelite brain said:
[...] Numbers stations are still around with schedules and podcasts about them available from http://priyom.org/ and http://www.apul64.dsl.pipex.com/enigma2000/
Click to expand...

Fascinating! Thanks for that...what an incredible amount of work that document represents. Wow.
 
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Andy_X said:
It saddens me too that the Non-Directional Beacon and its more complex cousin the VOR (which is highly directional, without going into details - and also broadcasts a Morse identifier) are doomed to be phased out (there's a joke in there somewhere...) but I can assure you that both systems are still going strong in the UK. Student pilots are still taught about these navaids and use them in plannng cross-country exercises - they can be of inestimable help if one's a bit lost and unable to find a visual reference point. These radionavigation techniques are also learned by pilots wishing to qualify to fly on instruments - and not only that, but the avionics on the very latest airliners make use of the good old NDB as just one of the collection of complementary navigation technologies that have come along over the years; VOR/DME, VORTAC, ILS, MLS, GPS, INS, GNSS and so on. The range of NDBs typically is somewhere between 10 and 50 nautical miles, with most of them being (IIRC) about 20 - 25nm.

There are a handful of NDBs in the South West:

Newquay NQY ( -· --·- -·-- ) 347 kHz
St Mary's STM (... - --) 321 kHz
Plymouth PY (.--. -.--) 369.5 kHz
St Mawgan SM (... --) 357 kHz
Penzance PH ( ·--· ···· ) 333 kHz

In fact Plymouth airport also has a VDF (VHF Direction Finding) station, which is (I think) not far removed from the systems developed by the RAF during WWII to help aircrews to find their way home in bad weather.

The standalone type of NDB-related instrument in an aircraft with 'steam gauge' instruments is referred to as an ADF (Automatic Direction Finder) rather than RDF (there are technical differences) and looks something like this - just a compass card and a needle...

View attachment 2063

...which is not nearly so much fun as this marine RDF which I just found via a popular and non-evil search engine. Not quite hand-held this one, eh, Rynner!? I imagine this is the kind of thing you might have found on a trawler in the 1970s?

View attachment 2064

The point is that neither the 'analogue' radio beacon nor Morse Code are dead quite yet. There's something special about hearing those dots and dashes coming over the airwaves...as well as being comforting in certain circumstances, as with lighthouses there's something lonely and romantic about their steady electromagnetic heartbeats.

PS: Just tuned into Brookmans Park VOR and found it very soothing, if repetitive. Why not have a go, asssuming you're within line-of-sight range of a VOR and have a marine / airband receiver lying around...

Brookmans Park VOR BPK (-... .--. -.-) 117.50 MHz
Click to expand...

Glad to hear that there are quite a few left still. I haven't been on LF/HF much lately as I've been concentrating more on VHF/UHF military and airline frequencies. I might see if I can string up a stealth antenna outside and have a listen around.
 
Happy hunting!

I sincerely hope NDBs are with us for some time to come. Their continued survival seems to be largely down to the fact that they work perfectly well, most aircraft have the receiving equipment on board, and they use little power and require very little maintenance - cheap effective and reliable: what's not to like?
 
Mythopoeika said:
I see now where Holger Czukay got some of his sounds from. That is remarkably synth-like.
Click to expand...
There are some really weird out-of-this-world data signal sounds. Even digitally-encrypted speech (got some somewhere). I remember as a 10yo kid in Manchester, tuning through HF on our first multi-band transistor radio with my mate, hearing a radio-fax signal (not knowing what it was) and wondering why we could hear high-speed aero-propellers on HF LOL.

About the same age, my Dad got me some 27MHz walkie-talkies, and we were amazed that we could sometimes hear Americans on them!
 
When I was a kid, I scanned all kinds of stuff on my radio, and there were a few things I found mysterious.
Such as radio transmissions that sounded like a modem, and others where there was very rapidly-modulated morse code - too fast for a human to transmit or interpret (i.e. produced by a machine).
 
Mythopoeika said:
When I was a kid, I scanned all kinds of stuff on my radio, and there were a few things I found mysterious.
Such as radio transmissions that sounded like a modem, and others where there was very rapidly-modulated morse code - too fast for a human to transmit or interpret (i.e. produced by a machine).
Click to expand...

My Dad was a Royal Navy Telegraphist in the 1950's, and he could still send and receive morse at 40WPM while reading a novel with his feet up in his mid-60's. He used the standard "up'n'down" morse key. During the Korean War (sorry - "police action"), while he served on the destroyer HMS Cossack, he was seconded for a short time to a USN destroyer, where he was introduced to the American "bug" key. This key, in transmit, permanently vibrated, left/right/left/right, at high speed. Left was dot, right was dash.

The operator sent his message by STOPPING the key going right if he wanted a dot, and STOPPING the key going left if he wanted a dash. A skilled operator could send very fast morse this way, and Dad somehow picked it up, but to me it's counter-intuitive and I couldn't do it. Best I ever managed with a standard key was 10-12 WPM, intensely concentrating.

There are also systems where morse is recorded at standard speeds, then speeded up for transmission. Receivers at the other end pick it up, slow it down and play it back.

Here's some voice encryption, in this case Australian professional fishermen.

https://soundcloud.com/doc227/ausfishcrypt
 
Thanks for the explanation. Those speeds seem impossible, but I reckon that explains it.
 
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Mythopoeika said:
Thanks for the explanation. Those speeds seem impossible, but I reckon that explains it.
Click to expand...

It makes a transmission less trackable, because of the short duration. "Burst" mode, used by Special Forces, can encapsulate voice or morse into a second or two; no chance of triangulation.
 
"A quick burst of Over-The-Horizon Radar or Ionospheric Sounder on HF.

https://soundcloud.com/doc227/othr "

About thee quarters of the way down this page
http://www.geoffkirby.co.uk/Albums/html/body_album_1.html
is a mention of Ringstead radar station on the Dorset coast.

In the early 70s there were a pair of Over the Horizon radar dish aerials there, just above the beach, and somewhere I have a couple of photos of them. But the aerials are long gone now, as is (apparently) a previous MB post about them that I made. And my photos don't seem to be on this computer either... (I must get around to reorganizing my photo collection, as I should have disc backups of everything.)
 
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Reactions: Doc
Doc said:
My Dad was a Royal Navy Telegraphist in the 1950's, and he could still send and receive morse at 40WPM while reading a novel with his feet up in his mid-60's. He used the standard "up'n'down" morse key. During the Korean War (sorry - "police action"), while he served on the destroyer HMS Cossack, he was seconded for a short time to a USN destroyer, where he was introduced to the American "bug" key. This key, in transmit, permanently vibrated, left/right/left/right, at high speed. Left was dot, right was dash.

The operator sent his message by STOPPING the key going right if he wanted a dot, and STOPPING the key going left if he wanted a dash. A skilled operator could send very fast morse this way, and Dad somehow picked it up, but to me it's counter-intuitive and I couldn't do it. Best I ever managed with a standard key was 10-12 WPM, intensely concentrating.

There are also systems where morse is recorded at standard speeds, then speeded up for transmission. Receivers at the other end pick it up, slow it down and play it back.

Here's some voice encryption, in this case Australian professional fishermen.

https://soundcloud.com/doc227/ausfishcrypt
Click to expand...


Same with my dad. He was a radio operator in the Paras in WW2. Upto the year he died, in his 80s, he could still remember his Morse Code.
 
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