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Dave AA7EE alerted us to this attack. Please follow-up by posting reception reports (and triangulations!) in the comments below. Dave writes:
Recently, an unlicensed beacon (for which read pirate) has turned up on 3579 KHz. It seems to be located somewhere in the Western US, in the tradition of unlicensed HF beacons dating back to the late 80's that were solar-powered, and located in remote areas of the Southwestern deserts. The very first ones were a cluster of beacons around 4096 KHz (a frequency for which crystals were cheaply and easily available).
Anyway, I am equal parts intrigued and miffed by this latest clandestine operation. Intrigued because of the mystery surrounding all such clandestine operations. Where is it? What does it look like? Who built it, and why? I'm also miffed because, well, dagnabbit - it's on our turf!
It can be heard nightly after dark in the West, on both the KFS and KPH SDR's, in Half Moon Bay and Point Reyes respectively. It sends a series of 22 dits, then the call letters KOK, then more dits.
This is an outrage, a travesty, and a direct assault on the sovereignty of all self-respecting CBLA recruits! I call on all denizens of colorburst land to dust off their Michigan Mighty Mites and other plucky little transmitters, and launch the loud, raucous battle cries of CQ, CQ, CQ into the ether. We shall fight them on the airwaves, we shall fight them in our radio shacks while drinking hot chocolate, winding toroids, and reading QST. We shall go on to the end. We shall never surrender!
I'm telling you Bill, when the very foundations of our existence are threatened, there is nothing that a colorburst crystal and half a watt from a 2N3053 transistor can't achieve. By golly, we can do this.
Your obedient colorburst servant,
Dave
AA7EE
So yur' saying there's an SDR in Pt. Reyes!?!?!?
ReplyDeleteI just put Project TouCans, the 20 meter rig constructed by my daughter, KO6BTY, and myself on the air, and there it was, very faintly, on the KPH SDR! Our 5 Watts makes it via ground wave to the RNB stations in Berkeley and Stanford. And, at most times of the day, we can hear it on the Half Moon Bay, and now the Point Reyes SDRs.
The RBNs are useful debug tools we use to verify our signal is making it out of the rig at all. The SDRs serve as secondary input bandpass filters for TouCans and as headphone repeaters. Allow me to explain :)
Project TouCans consists of a Rockmite feeding a 5 Watt Tuna Topper, all of which is housed in our dipole antenna. The Rockmite has a single crystal bandpass filter on it's rx input. That makes it a pretty wide reciever which is fine, but it's particularly sensitive to its tx frequencies, 14075.5 and 14058 kHz AND—for some reason I have yet to understand—10459 kHz. By watching the SDRs that now—thanks Dave—envelope us here at our home QTH in San Francisco, we can see the frequencies of incoming signals. That information keeps me from responding to 14059 kHz signals in vain.
And now, the headphone repeater: TouCans is completely wireless with respect to the ground. That means there's no power line, no feedline, no keyer lines and no headphone line. Keyer controls are handled via wifi to a Raspberry Pi Pico-W on the rig while audio is brought back to my headphones via Bluetooth. Power is provided by a USB-C battery pack that lives in the rig which is mounted above us in the antenna. (Yes, all of this is becuase I thought feedlines matches and baluns were too mystical and hard to understand years ago. Yes, this has probably all been more work than a balun. Yes, I am still totally enamored of my original design decision. :) ) Anyway, the bluetooth range is about 50 feet and the wifi range is shorter than that. The short of it is—pun not intended—that I can't quite use the rig while I'm in my office. But, I can send CQ to the rig every half minute or so via a memory keyer, then turn on the SDR in my office, and then sprint a bit closer to the rig when someone calls back. (It helps that houses in SF are a bit tiny.) So, SDRs are kinda an integral part of our QTH setup and it's awesome to learn about a new—to us—one! Thanks again!
Yep, I hear it tonight on KFS WebSDR, was listening before sundown and it seem to come on right at sundown in SoCal.
ReplyDeleteLoud and clear at 579 on KPH SDR 3579 CW. That's a problem. 3579 would be unusable for anything on that part of the West Coast. Can't two KiwiSDRs be used in a diversity mode to DF? Paul VK3HN
ReplyDeletehttps://www.rtl-sdr.com/kiwisdr-tdoa-direction-finding-now-freely-available-for-public-use/
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ReplyDeleteEvery now and again, I put out extended CQ's on 3579 in the evenings. Recently, due to this beacon, I have shifted my CQ calls up 500 Hz, to 3579.5. I like to look on the bright side of things, and the silver lining to this cloud, is that 3579.5 is closer to the actual color burst frequency.
ReplyDeleteAll is not lost!
Dave
AA7EE
At least 3579 is getting used !! 8^0
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