A letter from the army

On a sunny day (Sat, 27 Feb 2021 10:04:13 -0800) it happened Jeff Liebermann wrote in :

On the old radar I had a ticking noise in my small credit card size media player / FM radio on FM. Not much else. Was never sure if it was Leeuwarden airbase radar or that other one.

They complain I am using an ad blocker but I did read the essential part before it was covered by that complaint...

Yesterday was the second test day for that radar here, nothing on the spectrum analyzer so far, no RF alarm from my ebay RF detector, no other interference, Maybe they are just building or connecting things, tests last until March 26. Assume it will be on 24/7 after that ;-)

With ICBMs you never know here they come from, maybe Biden will attack Russia next...

The mindset behind brutalist eyesores also exploits historic designation as an aegis to protect their precious.

lynx effectively blocks the ads at the link and enables you to read the whole article in its entirety. Although some websites end lynx http(s) sessions as soon as they spot lynx's User-Agent header, you can use lynx options to specify a custom User-Agent header and easily circumvent such filters.

Weapons manufacturers bank on Biden's belligerence.

Danke,

--
Don, KB7RPU, https://www.qsl.net/kb7rpu 
There was a young lady named Bright Whose speed was far faster than light; 
She set out one day In a relative way And returned on the previous night.

More:

From the links above, it looks like it uses 1 to 2GHz. From the photos, it's a phased array panel antenna. L band (or the new and improved D band) is too high in frequency for over the horizon radar which is in A and B bands (HF and VHF): Hunting for cruise missiles arriving at near ground level requires a smaller beamwidth and a much higher frequency than 1 to 2GHz. The Thales data sheets says it can do 0 to +70 degrees elevation and has a surface level range of 60 km with a minimum range of 5 km. Not quite useless at ground level, but certainly not optimum if it's blind to anything closer than 5 km. Combined with a tower mounts as shown in the videos, I don't think they're going to do much testing trying to find anything flying at near sea or ground level, which suggests that you might not detect much RF at ground level.

I wonder what it will do to ADSB at 1.080 GHz. You might try listening in that area for something with a 12 RPM scan rate.

--
Jeff Liebermann                 jeffl@cruzio.com 
PO Box 272      http://www.LearnByDestroying.com 
Ben Lomond CA 95005-0272 
Skype: JeffLiebermann      AE6KS    831-336-2558

1.08 GHz is not only ADS-B, but, more importantly the response channel of secondary surveillance radar (SSR). The device in the aircraft is the transponder.

Thales is more than aware to avoid the SSR return channel, as very many of the SSRs in use in Europe are made by Thales and its predecessors.

The primary area surveillance radars are often around 1500 MHz.

--

-TV

On a sunny day (Sun, 28 Feb 2021 09:12:09 -0800) it happened Jeff Liebermann wrote in :

The last 2 documents seem to be identical.

It is about 9.5 km away from Leeuwarden mil airport.

I have dump1090 running on an RTL-SDR stick, it is recording plane traffic here 24/7 on a local map, goes into a video file:

Have not noticed anything strange last 2 days. I did use my rtl-sdr based spectrum analyzer from 1 GHz to about 1.74 GHz (highest it will go) to scan the band, so far nothing. I have build a convberter for 2.4 GHz band for it, maybe needs a converter for the rest 1.74 GHz to 2 GHz, But wait a minute, we have the input to the satellite receiver, from the universal LNB: universal_LNB Row 1 Col 1 7:21 Ctrl-K H for help

Voltage Tone Polarization Frequency band Local oscillator freq. Intermediate frequency range

13V 0kHz Vertical 10.70-11.70GHz,low 9.75GHz 950 - 1,950MHz 18V 0kHz Horizontal 10.70-11.70GHz,low 9.75GHz 950 - 1,950MHz 13V 22kHz Vertical 11.70-12.75GHz,high 10.60GHz 1,100 - 2,150MHz 18V 22kHz Horizontal 11.70-12.75GHz,high 10.60GHz 1,100 - 2,150MHz

so the satellite DVB-S card in my PC will accept 950 MHz to 2.150 GHz ! Wideband at that! And I wrote a lot of software for that, lemme see....

scroll down to "A modifed version of my dish positioner program xdipo I made, with a control panel for the STV0299 chip."

So cool thank you just gave me a great idea, have to get that old PC downstairs now :-) Piece of wire in the IF input should do. Some more coding required :-) See the STV0299 chip register control panel I wrote in the picture of my laptop in that link.

Well, Monday they will be at it again.

On Sunday, February 28, 2021 at 12:12:18 PM UTC-5, snipped-for-privacy@gmail.com wro te:

What a piece of crap! Thankfully those days are dead and gone. Don't forge t that VHF search radar was only 2D, smells suspiciously like a re-branded ATC radar GE already had on the books. Therefore they had to have that MPS-

14 height finder, under the little dome, a 5 MW S-band job that "nodded" th rough elevation at the operator designated azimuth. Of course it was probab ly only put into use when they didn't get a valid IFF or some other transpo nder response from the target. And that should have been like never. Dunno what their doctrine was exactly.

I beg to differ. The typical ATC radar doesn't have 2000 km range, can't track 2000 objects, doesn't use monopulse, doesn't have built in IFF and ECCM features, and doesn't look as "cool". For altitude, the data sheets mention "Instantaneous Doppler processing for the full range, azimuth and elevation coverage" which provides a good altitude guess from vertical Doppler and range measurements. Useful if you're tracking an ICBM, but not so useful for ATC. However, I do find it odd that it has a built in Mode S (ADS/B) receiver to provide a 2nd opinion on altitude when monopulse also provides elevation information.

If your objection is the use of VHF, that's probably because previous generations of such radars also ran on similar frequencies. New generations would not require a major frequency change a new frequencies are not easily available. So, they used what was already there.

--
Jeff Liebermann                 jeffl@cruzio.com 
PO Box 272      http://www.LearnByDestroying.com 
Ben Lomond CA 95005-0272 
Skype: JeffLiebermann      AE6KS    831-336-2558

Where are you getting those crazy specs, they said about 200 miles for maxi mum range. And 2000 objects in track seems really large for a radar of that era. The ATC has, or had, that L-Band SSR scheme to do the IFF. It's just a transceiver at a compatible frequency. I doubt anything was integral to t hat FPS job. In their application they have to use the civil aviation trans ponder/IFF mainly because it's what they're seeing all the time.

Dunno how they could possibly extract elevation from any kind of Doppler me asurement.

Are we reading the same specs? That radar did not measure elevation, monopu lse or not. Unless designating the radar as 2D means something else to them . But then they do have that height finder kluge which reports its results on an RHI- didn't see anything about them putting it on the PPI.

Not really, all that PAVEPAWS was at VHF too.

That's why I quote the links I had provided. For the range, see: The applied high-end techniques result in a radar with an unrivalled long range performance of up to 2000 km. Some of the numbers came from the naval version at:

2000 objects is for this era. You said it was junk, and I provided some performance and feature specs which suggests otherwise.

That changed in 1988 when the US shot down an Iranian airliner. It would not have happened if there had been a functional civilian IFF system. The ADS/B system functions as such. It would be improper to call it an IFF system since there are no "foes" in civilian aircraft. The big problem is that ADS/B is easily spoofed and relies on data from the aircraft that can easily be manipulated. It won't stop an aircraft that pretends to be friendly, but should prevent or reduce further accidents.

That also has me mystified. I have a few guesses, but nothing definitive.

From under "Features" see: - Dual axis multi-beam with instantaneous mono-pulse accuracy in azimuth and elevation. - Instantaneous Doppler processing for the full range, azimuth and elevation coverage.

There's the Doppler mentioned again for measuring elevation. Kinda looks like the radar has two ways to determine elevation (altitude can be calculated from the elevation and range figures).

Also, PPI (plan position indicator) displays are quite common and still in use in the majority of radar displays. However, 3D displays are becoming popular. I have no idea what the Thales Smart-L radar uses, but my guess(tm) would be something like the computah generated displays shown here:

Umm... Pave PAWS is UHF. 420 to 450 MHz which is all amateur radio frequencies. The frequencies are still in use by the military in two areas with restrictions on ham radio transmit power. Locally, anything near Beale AFB near Sacramento:

The displays for Pave PAWS look like they haven't changed much since the 1980's. Looks like all vintage 2D monochrome: "Missile Warning and Space Surveillance"

--
Jeff Liebermann                 jeffl@cruzio.com 
PO Box 272      http://www.LearnByDestroying.com 
Ben Lomond CA 95005-0272 
Skype: JeffLiebermann      AE6KS    831-336-2558

Typical marketing bulls*it.

That 2000 km applies only to objects high in space, either orbiting satellites or.approaching ICBMs in last phase of the flight.

Airliners flying at 10 km are detectable at up to 480 km distance and low altitude planes and cruise missiles up to 60 km.

As expected the targets are in the line-of-sight range as expected for microwave radiation.

True OTH radars work in the HF range and uses reflections via the ionosphere and apparently backscatter.

Apparently the Soviet "Woodpecker" often operating around 7 MHz tried to detect the disturbance to the ionosphere due to the ICBM exhaust cases during the ICBM ascent through the ionosphere just above launch site.

As long as two reflected signals come from sufficiently different angles and at sufficient different times (from different distances) these reflections can be separated from each other. The total number of objects tracked only depends of the computing power available, which has greatly increased during the last few decades.

:

I thought they looked familiar. I thought we were talking about the FPS-24, not the SMART-L(band).

I still don't believe the FPS-24 could do this, and they did something with CRT persistence to display track data.

n

Radar inherits a lot of military terminology. All aircraft are not targets either but that's what they call them. Civilian IFF supplies at lot of administrative data about the flight aircra ft registration as well as altitude, airspeed, and heading. And that data i s posted on the master PPI (or whatever they call it) in the ATC. One of th ose flight channel showed an incident that occurred in Peru or someplace si milar. The pilots thought their airspeed and altimeter readings were screwy , so they radioed the controlling ATC for confirmation. The ATC confirmed t heir readings as being correct BECAUSE THE ATC WAS GETTING ITS READINGS FRO M THE AIRCRAFT TRANSPONDER! The readings were in fact garbage and way off and the aircraft crashed. Stalled AND flew into a mountain.

measurement.

Uh-huh. By definition Doppler is radial in that it is relative speed of the magnitude of radius vector, not angular. But I'll keep an open mind and le t you tell me how they do an elevation angle extraction.

That station near your house doesn't use the SMART-L, or anything like it. Get back on topic of the FPS-24.

On a sunny day (Tue, 02 Mar 2021 10:08:31 -0800) it happened Jeff Liebermann wrote in :

I caught them in the act just now screenshot movie from my xpsa spectrum analyzer (download movie about 7MB)

It is a mess! ;-)

Interesting. I worked there a long time ago.

1MW sounds like you mighty be able to feel the pulses in your mouth if you have a gold crown somewhere.

Ours on 70cm overcomes the squelch even when set fairly high. In California the repeaters were forced into low power operation because of Radar but surprisingly I can still get to one almost 100km from here on

3W power and a vertical with much less than 10dBd gain. It's linked so you can talk to hams in other states and sometimes overseas. [...]

--
Regards, Joerg 

http://www.analogconsultants.com/

[snip]

It's intentional. Such operational displays changesvery slowly to not confuse the operators over time. The Air Traffic Control world works the same, for the same reason.

Joe Gwinn

On a sunny day (Wed, 3 Mar 2021 13:16:30 -0800) it happened Joerg wrote in :

In Wier?

Yes same here, there is PI2NOS countrywide at 430.125 MHz with 1.6 MHz tx shift and PI2NON north and middle east part of Netherlands at 430.275 MHz with 1.6MHz tx shift 'coversity'

Although I get more and more the impression that now is the 'trucker' channel, as once 27 MHz was. On a good day I can get PI2NOS with my Baofeng.. PI2NON all the time.

Anyways yesterday, since I did not hear anything on my Chinese RF detector (it goes of even on WiFi next doors) I took that little credit card sized FM radio:

and low and behold there it was swoop swoop swoop sound on FM!

So went back to my rtl_sdr spectrum analyzer (sort of ported to raspi4 8GB),

had marked some suspected frequencies, and yes! So seems real radar testing has started now. confirmation was that they stop at 15:00 and indeed signal gone after that.

What I will now do is record, with rtl-sdr stick, the IQ stream for say several rotations of the radar.

So here we have it, about 8MB size after zipping

This is how it was made: At 12 revolution per minute, so 5 seconds per revolution, recorded 2 revolutions so 10 seconds like this: rtl_sdr -d 0 -f 1396108445 -p 0 -g 33.9 -s 2048000 radar_3.IQ Then gzipped the result gzip radar_3.IQ

-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 8246177 Mar 4 10:42 radar_3.IQ.gz so about 8.2 MB IQ format stream. uploaded

Unzip with gunzip

Alien agents can then work out the spectrum, do a FFT, shift frequency and do a reverse FFT, transmit, add delays and basically imitate the signal, do anything, create incoming targets, so many cool ideas. Pity I cannot see what the poor guys at that radar will see on their screen :-) Feedback is important for that sort of hacks, Even with the computer power a thing like RPI4 8GB has, you can do incredible things today. An adversary could, by placing a small box somewhere, make their whole setup useless ...

Such boxes existed in the 1970s. They were small enough to fit on the back of a truck.

John

Hmm, Jan's post was completely blank on my side and had your sender address. Must have been a hiccup at the news.individual.de server that I use.

On a sunny day (Thu, 4 Mar 2021 15:54:03 -0800) it happened Joerg snipped-for-privacy@analogconsultants.com wrote in snipped-for-privacy@mid.individual.net>:

If my posting was blanked out, maybe Pa Ranoia took counter measures to prevent the radar stream I recorded with my rtl-sdr stick to be made public?

Using nntp.aioe.org ony newsserver that I know that works the way it should Let me check something

Posting is also OK on eternalseptember.org

Here is it again:

In Wier?

Yes same here, there is PI2NOS countrywide at 430.125 MHz with 1.6 MHz tx shift and PI2NON north and middle east part of Netherlands at 430.275 MHz with 1.6MHz tx shift 'coversity'

Although I get more and more the impression that now is the 'trucker' channel, as once 27 MHz was. On a good day I can get PI2NOS with my Baofeng.. PI2NON all the time.

Anyways yesterday, since I did not hear anything on my Chinese RF detector (it goes of even on WiFi next doors) I took that little credit card sized FM radio:

low and behold there it was swoop swoop swoop sound on FM!

So went back to my rtl_sdr spectrum analyzer (sort of ported to raspi4 8GB),

had marked some suspected frequencies, and yes! So seems real radar testing has started now. confirmation was that they stop at 15:00 and indeed signal gone after that.

What I will now do is record, with rtl-sdr stick, the IQ stream for say several rotations of the radar.

So here we have it, about 8MB size after zipping

This is how it was made: At 12 revolution per minute, so 5 seconds per revolution, recorded 2 revolutions so 10 seconds like this: rtl_sdr -d 0 -f 1396108445 -p 0 -g 33.9 -s 2048000 radar_3.IQ Then gzipped the result gzip radar_3.IQ

-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 8246177 Mar 4 10:42 radar_3.IQ.gz so about 8.2 MB IQ format stream. uploaded

Unzip with gunzip

Alien agents can then work out the spectrum, do a FFT, shift frequency and do a reverse FFT, transmit, add delays and basically imitate the signal, do anything, create incoming targets, so many cool ideas. Pity I cannot see what the poor guys at that radar will see on their screen :-) Feedback is important for that sort of hacks, Even with the computer power a thing like RPI4 8GB has, you can do incredible things today. An adversary could, by placing a small box somewhere, make their whole setup useless ...

On a sunny day (Thu, 4 Mar 2021 05:33:36 -0800 (PST)) it happened John Walliker snipped-for-privacy@gmail.com wrote in snipped-for-privacy@googlegroups.com:

Yes, but now I was thinking how to generate a signal that shows for example Mickey Mouse on their screen. If you could get feedback from their screen it is just a differential maybe use AI.

AS to that mouse, Biden flying Pegasus ? Well OK.. bit too much maybe.