4625 kHz Fun Continues

Precisely at 1800 UTC, a nasty 50-Hz hum appeared on the Buzzer signal. About half an hour prior to this, the strength of this signal dropped greatly.

Yes, 50 Hz is the power frequency in Russia.

It is definitely not a 60-Hz hum.

Someone else is sending VVVVVVVVV K in Morse, and of course the off-frequency air defense strings continue unabated.

Yet More 4625 kHz

At 1639 UTC, I am tuning on the GlobalTuners receiver in Austria. The upper sideband is definitely much louder than the lower sideband. The difference is about 5 S units, whatever those are on this radio. A carrier is present, and it is on frequency.

Is The Buzzer back? We'll have to wait and see.

More 4625 kHz

Currently (1625 UTC), authentic-sounding AM buzzes and Russian female voice messages are being sent. I'm dubious, but the use of AM mode is interesting. Someone who can tune their radio will have to find out if there is a suppressed lower sideband. I can't tell over the Internet.

80 Meter Waterfall Pictures

Users of a web radio receiver in Europe have been reporting an unknown net or nets with waterfall pictures and seldom if ever a callsign ID. This uses frequencies around 3585 to 3595 in the 80 meter amateur band. The players are unknown, though a couple of e-mail addresses displayed are on Ukranian and German servers. Some players are almost certainly from the former Soviet Union.

Waterfall pictures are images that appear right on the spectrum tuning display given by most digital radio decoding programs. They've been around a while. They are created by scanning a graphic file into pulsed or amplitude-modulated audio tones corresponding to lines of pixels in the file. Some ham programs do this, as does a fun little shareware program called Audiopaint.

First I heard of the 80-meter activity was from a posting to the UDXF mailing list by Robert, KB7AQD. This particular station was creating large numbers right on the waterfall spectrum display. These corresponded to dB below full power, and as the power was lowered the numbers became fainter.

Today, the 25th of January, I ran across one station on approximately 3588 kHz USB. It was sending a graphic "CQ test" call, like this:



The e-mail address is actually for gmail.com. The bottom got cut off due to tuning.

Here's another one, sent at 1940 UTC today. It's a cute lil' doggie:



And here's an elephant, sent at 1945:



The blob on the spectrogram after the picture is a burst of BPSK125. It is an identifier, but probably not one for the same station. It decodes to:


DK4XI-8:72 Pskmail v.0.7.24 - 19:45:19

DK4XI is a German ham active on packet and APRS modes. It strongly appears that this identifier is for an automatic transmitter associated with a European PSK e-mail network not related to the 80 meter waterfall pictures.

Another picture, that I didn't get a spectrum of, contains the web address www.funkbasis.de. This goes to a CB/ham forum in Germany.

????????????

Firedrake Jammer Revealed (CD Available)

Every so often, I run across a web page that just makes my jaw drop off. The latest Oh My God is this Satdirectory article on the source of the Firedrake (Firedragon) jamming signal used by China to cover Falun Gong's "Sound of Hope" broadcast from Taiwan.

One can make a case that this item pertains to world broadcasting, not utilities. However, the signal pops up on or near utility frequencies regularly, as it chases SOH around the bands. Lately, it's been heard daily in the fertile ute hunting ground just above 20 meters, on 14410 kHz around 2300 UTC.

It's actually rather good music, when conditions permit clear reception. It has some real nice drumming. It certainly beats all the other noise blasted into the HF bands by governments that can't handle freedom of opinion.

Well, here's what Satdirectory has to say on Firedrake:

Shortwave Radio Enthusiasts and Ham Radio operators have been watching China's Firedrake with interest. They believe that the primary Firedrake transmitter location is on Hainan Island off the coast of Southern China, however it is believed that there may be other transmitter sites also in use. It has also been noted that the Firedrake audio is a one hour loop with no announcements. This got us thinking at Satdirectory; how does the Firedrake programming get to the transmitter site? Is it delivered by a tape or CD on repeat, or is it like most other Chinese radio, delivered by a satellite link to the transmitter?

Well, a search with our 3 meter dish has found Firedrake! The audio is transmitted on Chinasat 6B within the China National Radio (CNR) satellite feed circuits. Many of the China National Radio feeds are in stereo, however one channel that is solely mono is CNR 8 - The Voice of the Minorities broadcast which features programs in the Kazakh, Korean, Mongolian, Tibetan and Uighur languages. The CNR 8 audio feed to the Chinese transmitter sites can be found on the left audio channel of a feed circuit labelled "Lzh8Rdjy". On the right audio channel of this feed is the audio for the Firedrake transmitters.

Following our discovery we tuned up a shortwave receiver to 17780 kHz which at the time also had the jammer running. The audio from the satellite feed and the shortwave radio were synchronised with no delay. This confirmed that the Firedrake shortwave transmitter site was also being fed by the same satellite feed, otherwise we would have expected a delay of a second or so due to the satellite uplink and downlink path delay when compared to the shortwave broadcast.

Satdirectory has actually made a CD with the full, 60-minute cycle. Since the copyright status is unknown, this one is available for non-commercial use only, from support(at)satdirectory.com. The only costs are to cover shipping and duplicating.

There's also a 4-minute sample of the high-fidelity audio right off the downlink, in Windows .wma format. Yes, there's some of the cool drumming.

Get it right here. But do go to the site and check out the whole story, with technical paramaters for those with a shot at Chinasat 6B, and some hilarious propaganda art.