Friday, March 11, 2011

E10 is QRT!

First, an apology.

I work hard at keeping up with all this. I have sniffed out fishery frequencies at a time when that operation has good reason to be as secretive as any military. I have followed Libyan air ops via remotes. I have kept up with 11 other trouble spots.

At the same time, I have run daily cruises through 10 MHz of suddenly active HF spectrum looking for whatever changes have occurred in the past 6 spotless years.

It would appear, however, that I didn't try hard enough. My only excuse is that the human brain has its limits. In this case, it meant that I got behind on the ENIGMA 2000 list.

Today I just saw something that everyone else has known about for 10 days. E10, the Israeli Intelligence Phonetic Alphabet Station, the largest or second largest "numbers" operation in the world, has not transmitted since March first. The extensive network of ENIGMA members, which has followed every photon coming from E10 for years, reports only nil.

The shutting down of E10, even if it comes back eventually, is huge utility news. No one knows why this has happened, and probably no one ever will. The timing appears superficially to be interesting, but then this could also be simply looking for connections that don't exist. There is no information upon which to base a conclusion at this time.

More when I stop watching tsunami activity in CA.