A letter from the army

Phil Hobbs

I think the problem is my news server (news.individual.de). It started acting up again today.

No, in Hengelo. I enjoyed cycling there, no hills! Since the Dutch bread is horrid I had to get that in Germany as usual. Even before there was the F35 fiets snelweg it was easy and fast to get to the border by bike.

Here the repeaters are mostly empty except for those inter-connected as a WIN-System (West Coast Intertie Network). My home turf is shortwave anyhow.

Haven't looked at the IQ stream but once they start that up Radar for regular use it will likely remain in operation until you are silent-key.

From my old ham radio days in Europe (70's and 80's) I remember that nasty Russion over-the-horizon Radar, a.k.a. the woodpecker. It was loud. One day it was gone and IIRC the real reason was that the concrete in its building in Krasnojarsk was beginning to fail. Good old Soviet quality, I guess some of the guys had siphoned off too much of the cement for their dachas or whatever.

Some day I'll get an SDR stick to use as a panoramic receiver. Got a Signalhound spectrum analyzer that could also do this but it won't run with Linux or in a VM.

Yeah, but those guys find such boxes in a jiffy.

We'll all come visit you in prison afterwards :-)

I knew a sales guy who had spent some time in a Dutch prison because he hadn't paid a traffic ticket. At the end he almost didn't want to leave. We asked him why. "Good food, color TV, and best of all _no_ phones!"

On a sunny day (Sat, 6 Mar 2021 13:12:57 -0800) it happened Joerg snipped-for-privacy@analogconsultants.com wrote in snipped-for-privacy@mid.individual.net>:

nntp.aioe.org is free, no registration needed to post, 100% uptime why bother with some other server? eternalseptember.org you can register and post for free too.

Ah, never been there, on pi2non I often hear the truckers crossing the border there to Germany. Lived almost everywhere in the Netherlands, but never near Hengelo. Now close to Leeuwarden in the north.

Well, I am not really very active, have a 150W transceiver but have not put up an antenna yet in this new place, huge garden, enough space maybe in the summer... Did build some stuff for QO100 satellite, busy with other things now.

Yes, tinfoil hats needed for everybody..

That is biased thinking, it was a nice piece of engineering.

These sticks are so cool, I have several, 3 TCXO 1ppm ones from ebay, an E4000 and a much older one.

It is always a matter of cost compare, you can kill a F35 with 100 toy drones flying in its path when taking off or a singe shotgun. A hundred boxes with GPS jammers can protect an area. A hundred boxes dropped by an agent before an attack will make your radar blind enough for long enough.

Still waiting on the extraction of elevation angle from a beam with no elevation directivity using the "vertical" Doppler detection. This would be the 2d FPS-24 and earlier.

That was from someone who was actually there, in the buildings. The electronics and SW may have been nice work, the building construction wasn't.

That's the one I am eyeing. Darn, it's $28 now and was $22 a year ago. "There is no inflation", the government tells us. Yeah, right.

Best of all, some is for Linux.

On a sunny day (Mon, 8 Mar 2021 09:48:58 -0800) it happened Joerg snipped-for-privacy@analogconsultants.com wrote in snipped-for-privacy@mid.individual.net>:

With all the money printed to keep jobless people alive, inflation is pre-progrmmed. I you look a the essentials of life, say food, corn price

I thought you were MS windows only?

On a sunny day (Mon, 8 Mar 2021 09:48:58 -0800) it happened Joerg snipped-for-privacy@analogconsultants.com wrote in snipped-for-privacy@mid.individual.net>:

PS here a better screen recording of the radar spectrum:

This should be played in Linux with mplayer -fs -fps 3 radar_7.mpeg to get real time (see seconds counter bottom screen). As you can see I sort of finished the port of my xpsa spectrum analyzer to a raspberry 4 8GB. This is with that 1 ppm 27$ rl-sdr stick and a 15 cm long indoors DVB antenna.

In the end only people know what the real inflation is. Governments don't and often have the head in the sand, for obvious reasons.

Only until Windows 7 went out of support and people were forced to Windows 10. Not me. That's when I pulled the plug. All computers here are now on MX-Linux. The little NAS in the basement, a hacked Pogoplug, runs ArchLinux because it only has 128MB RAM and a small processor.

That spectrum video of the Radar looks nasty. 1.372GHz won't affect ham radio much since it's above the 23cm band. I don't have any radios for it and in our regions it won't likely make much sense. Even 2m SSB/CW is quite silent here. In NL I could at least talk to hams on ships in the North Sea using 2m SSB.

This would be in reference to the Thales Smart-L radar and NOT the FPS-24. I mentioned the FPS-24 radar in answer to Jan Panelteje original question on the effects of nearby radar transmissions. See my answer at:

I also mentioned previously that I also don't know how elevation was done with the Thales Smart-L radar. Here's one of my comments:

Unquote:

On a sunny day (Tue, 9 Mar 2021 09:51:25 -0800) it happened Joerg snipped-for-privacy@analogconsultants.com wrote in snipped-for-privacy@mid.individual.net>:

I have moved most to raspberry Pis running Linux. Those are on 24/7 on a UPS and use little power.

Yes, I did see some other strange things yesterday, almost like I did see a second signal a few MHz up. Made me wonder if I was just looking at one sideband... I can clearly see 2 sidebands in the current signal looks like AM, with his software you can just click on a sideband and then an other one or the carrier if there is one and it will display the frequency difference and then you know the modulation frequency,

They are testing things so I will check again later. My main concern would be it interfering with GPS L1 (1575.42 MHz) and L2 (1227.60 MHz). not so much by mixing or in-band but maybe overloading the GPS receiver input stage. GPS indoor reception is not very good here, but I am logging it and will compare with their test times,

pi2nos has a link sometimes to the UK on 70 cm, I have heard UK stations on it. However the local repeater here for pi2nos was switched off long ago, so I rarely can hear them.

Is the hobby dying? cellphones won?

PS with his software you can just click on a sideband and then an other one or the carrier if there is one and it will display the frequency difference and then you know the modulation frequency,

Like this

Nothing you can know that is not known... Or something like that :-)

PS with his software you can just click on a sideband and then an other one or the carrier if there is one and it will display the frequency difference and then you know the modulation frequency,

And then, at the same time at a different frequency

and now I also see them on

24 MHz wide sweep??? with ever repeaing variable signal?

It may be a digitally coded signal with 4 MHz base frequency around 1.366 GHz.

Have you found the pulse width and repetition frequency? It is usually jittered tp prevent a potential target hiding behind Doppler shift.

On a sunny day (Wed, 10 Mar 2021 11:56:46 +0200) it happened Tauno Voipio snipped-for-privacy@notused.fi.invalid> wrote in <s2a54v$po4$ snipped-for-privacy@dont-email.me:

It was 12 revolutions per minute like Joerg mentioned, 5 seconds between similar patterns.

But now I will bring 2 rtl-sdr sticks online at say 1.362 and 1.366 GHz and see if that pattern moves between those frequencies or is simultaneous.

Next test for them is planned from 13:00 to 15:00 hour CET, gives me time to wire it up:-)

Those guys are testing, the test are to minimize interference locally no idea what will happen today, you may well be right, the patterns look complicated.

This is the antenna rotation rate. There is a pulse repetition rate, usually some hundreds of Hz, depending on the designed radial maximum range.

The pulse width may ba a fraction of an microsecond in traditional radars and typically some tens of mocroseconds in coded radars.

On a sunny day (Wed, 10 Mar 2021 14:21:14 +0200) it happened Tauno Voipio snipped-for-privacy@notused.fi.invalid> wrote in <s2adjr$j8o$ snipped-for-privacy@dont-email.me:

I just got the 2 xpsa running on one rpi4 8GB and then they switched to a strange spike pattern..

I like stuff to work without UPS and use little power. The hacked Pogoplug consumes only 1W and only goes up slightly during heavy data transfers. After a power outage it comes back faster than the LAN routers and stuff.

Like Tauno said it will almost definitely be a digital method, to dodge spoofing and other countermeasures.

What do you need GPS for indoors? To see the exact coordinates of the rocking chair? :-)

Ok, maybe for the time but there are other sources. I try not to rely much on GPS even while mountain biking in the sticks.

I restarted the hobby after an almost 30 year hiatus, now with a US license (AJ6QL). My observations: The average age on the shortwave bands has gone up a lot. People talking about colonoscopies and stuff. VHF/UHF shows a slightly lower average age but I can't compare much because in the 80's when I was active as DK9JK I lived in Europe and back then repeaters weren't interlinked.

What I find worse is that everybody and their brother seems to have moved to the digital mode FT8. What you can exchange there is almost limited to 599 tu. Not my cup of tea since I like long chats. There are days when you can hear lots of strong FT8 signals on 15, 20 or 40m and hardly anyone in the SSB/CW portions ... "I went to the bathroom for a number two and my radio worked three new countries for me!" ... I had to learn about digital modes for the exams and want to use some but so far found nothing in PSK31 or Olivia, it's all FT8.

One of the detriments to ham radio these days is noise from those dreaded solar installations on rooftops. Noise is a _lot_ worse than in the 80's and it isn't even stable in frequency, it wanders into your passband without warning. I an currently monitoring 14.153MHz for a group to come on and now it started "phseeeeooouuu...broooop", I guess I can forget that for today. Again.

On a sunny day (Wed, 10 Mar 2021 09:09:25 -0800) it happened Joerg snipped-for-privacy@analogconsultants.com wrote in snipped-for-privacy@mid.individual.net>:

Time.

Yes in the Netherlands it is hard to get lost, lots of signs and cities are relatively small.

Build my first transmitter with battery tubes for the medium wave in primary school... And then with transistors! OC71 came out in the 1954 or so. High school transmitter.

I build my first short wave transmitter in the sixties, still no license, it was 250 W PEP DSB using tubes, PE1-100 (1kV 250mA) outout tube, diode ring modulator... Some ham at school threatened me to get me off the air if I actually used that design.. Anyways made a QSO with somebody in the UK, using a fake callsign, but had to stop as some stop-resistor started smoking. So I listened and somebody said 'ask him to come out again', and I got called That was a VERY strong signal and that made no sense, was suspicious. So got on the bike to get some solder in the local shop, and when I biked around the corner there was the car with some guys in it and the antenna thing. Just in time! Got the solder and disassembled the thing, removed antenna and detuned the output,

I did the DVB-S thing out of curiosity for video a few years ago, (still no official call sign) but to my surprise it was published in some ham magazine.

Yea, and wall warts, I have many...

Soon after I got that license they changed the law so now you have to pay 30 Euro a year or so, each year more... So maybe I will just give it up, as pirate born ,,, LOL come to think of it they probably send the bill for this year to my old address... So here we are ;-)