Sunday 11 December 2011

STANAG and ALE Monitoring

I have recently started getting into receiving the data modes on HF after reading the deocde column in December 2011's "Radio User" magazine. I downloaded a copy of the free "MultiPSK" program and in no time at all I had my first STANAG (4285) message on the screen.
The station callsign was FUE, this being the French navy in Brest. Here is a screenshot of MultiPSK as it decoded the strange sounding transmission:

Later this weekend, I downloaded a copy of the PC-ALE program by Charles Brain. This a neat pieace of software and I used it for just the simpler, single-channel monitoring. I put 15043khz into the Icom 703, opened up the program, selected mic input, and in no time at all messages from the USAF bases around the world were coming in. From my simple station, receiving using only a 20 meter longwire from the window of my shack down to the garden fence, I have already received ALE messages from as far away as Offutt AFB, Nebraska, US! All of the aforementioned messages were standard "sounding" messages, where the station sends an ALE data burst to announce its presence on the network. But I have subsequently received a message from a USAF C5 Galaxy, serial number 70-0463. This is the message sent from station 100463 at 0752 hours below:

[07:52:43][FRQ 05708000][SND][               ][TWS][100            ][AL0] BER  0 SN 00
[07:52:43][FRQ 05708000][SND][               ][TWS][100            ][AL0] BER 21 SN 05
[07:52:43][FRQ 05708000][SND][               ][TWS][100463         ][AL0] BER 22 SN 04

For an interesting list of worldwide ALE stations and station identifiers, this is a fascinating read:

http://www.ominous-valve.com/ale-list.txt

So far, the USAF is the only net I have successfully monitored, but watch this space as I spend the next few days trying out a few more. The oil and gas industry networks in Algeria interest me a lot, so I will probably try these first.

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