Algeria HF AERO

15NOV16 8894khz 0639UTC: heard HB-FLH, a Pilatus Porter, wkg Algiers with departure and arrival times & altitude. This is one of several small Swiss-registered aircraft that regularly appear on this frequency from companies like Star and Zimex Aviation that, as far as I know, bring passengers and supplies to the Algerian oilfields.

Other recent logs also include French Airforce Transport aircraft (COTAM) wkg 6712khz and a German Airforce aircraft on 6730khz.

So despite HF being used increasingly less, there are bits and pieces still left if you know where to listen. I get depressed when I see the internet listing hundreds of frequencies that really interest me, only to discover the lists are old and out-of-date, and the services stopped being active years ago. So that is mostly why I write the blog: to let other fellow aviation enthusiasts know what can still be heard. Often I will spend hours and hours monitoring a single frequency - I don't do much HF scanning as I find you miss the initial details of the transmission, and those are the juicy bits with the callsigns and names of the stations.

I know there are some interesting catches to be had using the data modes of HFDL and one of my favourites, ALE. But I don't do very much data decoding these days as I find it hurts my eyes and gives me a headache. And for me, nothing beats the sound of a pilot's voice appearing out of the ether.

73 Adam

HF AERO LOGS

13Nov16 11285khz South East Asia
Using Tecsun 660 and small homebrew tuned loop:

1539 utc Flight Molinda Air 223 Kuala Lumpur to Tiruchirappalli
wkg Chennai radio with position reports for NOKRA and ASBIK

1605 utc Flight Malaysian 179 Kuala Lumpur to Colombo wk Colombo req deviation 20nm left

1609 utc Flight Molinda Air 185 Kuala Lumpur to Colombo wkg Colombo fl30 SULEN 1609 selcal chk req deviation 30nm left of track.due wx
All of the above flights were readable on just the telescopic whip however due to local electrical interference I use my homemade loop to null that out effectively and furthermore on 11 mHz the loop actually provides a slightly stronger signal whereas I have noticed on the five six and 8 Mhz AERO band the telescopic whip is slightly better but of course I do not have the option of nulling out the noise.

MEDIUM WAVE Maritime Monitoring

Not much Radio blogging this year as I have moved qth but now that the boxes are unpacked and I have been reunited with my Radio Gear and given that I am only a few feet from the sea I have started to listen to medium wave maritime stations and thought I would post a Blog of some of these logs.

06nov 1818utc 2656khz Ancona Radio wx
06nov 1838utc 1665khz Tjome Radio
06nov 2105utc 2657khz Alges Radio, Portugal wx & nav warnings
04nov 1935utc 2719khz Porto Torres Radio good sig, wx
04nov 1935utc 2680khz Cagliari radio weak, wx
01nov 1935utc 2579khz Bari visibilita buona, wx, II
01nov 2140utc 3673khz Netherlands coastguard wx EE
25oct  1935utc 2182khz RNLI lifeboat 2EQY wkg Ostend & Netherlands cg for radio check

All of the above logs were made using pl660 and homemade tuned loop.

Homemade MW Super Stick

Now the long winter nights are here, I wanted to have another bash at MW DXing. I have already built one or two MW loops, but in the early mornings I like to sit up in bed with my Tecsun PL660 and a cup of tea, and DXing whilst trying to balance one of these is not very easy.

I have had my eye on a commercial product from the USA, but with postage to the UK, the Royal Mail handling fee and our 20% VAT it came to over GBP80.00 which is way more than I wanted to spend, so I decided to have a go at building one myself.

An amateur radio pal of mine had given my a Sony Tuner a few years ago, and when I no longer had need of it, I removed the excellent 7.5" AM ferrite rod and stuck it in my junk box. What I was unsure about was how many turn of wire to wrap around it. The closest answer I could find on the net was to start with around 50 turns, but as it happens it took around 80 turns to get to the MW band (the max number of turns I could wind without going back over myself), and a further 30-40 (which I wound back over the existing windings) to tune all the way down to 531khz.

I housed it in a nice cardboard tube and tuned it with a small AM capacitor, removed from a broken AM radio. So far the cost: zero pounds! In fact the most expensive part was the printing charge at the library of 10p for the design label I made on Word. So the grand total was 10pence!

It works like a dream. and being so small and portable is perfect for taking away on holiday, carrying out to the end of the garden, or sitting up in bed in the small hours.

The Tecsun PL660 is quite sensitive on MW and selectivity is not too bad if you keep the gain at the "normal" setting at night. Perhaps it is not quite as sensitive as my old Sony 7600GR, but I never liked that radio much for reasons I mentioned in a previous post (mostly its poor battery meter and poor audio when compared to the far superior and punchy audio of the 660). And when coupled to a small loop like the Tecsun AN200, a small homemade loop, and now also my homemade MW Super Stick, it is a ferocious contender! I couldn't be more pleased with it. Last night, when CRI from Urumqi on 1521 khz came through the co-channel interference with their familiar Chinese ID of the folk tune "Jasmine" and Chinese "zhonguo guangbo diantai" (China International Radio Station) followed in Russian by the ID "radio kitaja", it was hard to describe the excitement of knowing it was being pulled out of the ether by something I myself had made. It is indescribably more enjoyable than using a commercial product. And with the money I have saved I have treated myself to a Sony SW-35, which is going to replace my Tecsun PL310. I will write a  review on the SW-35 in the not too distant future.

Below is a photo of the insides of the Super Stick, and later I shall add a link to a youtube video demonstrating its effectiveness and also I will post another photo.












 

And as promised, the Super Stick photo on the right. And if you click here you will be taken to my YouTube video demonstration.

As I said previously, I have a small 30cm diameter homemade air-spaced loop (where the wire is wound around a loop rather than a ferrite rod). I built it to cover both the MW broadcast band and the MF Marine Band, and so it tunes from 540khz up to around 2.8mhz. During the daytime, distant MW broadcast signals are a little better on the larger air-spaced loop when compared to the MW Super Stick. At night the difference is less noticeable. But having tinkered around with the two loops for a long time I think it would be fair to say I don't think there is anything that the larger loop can pick up that I haven't also heard on the Super Stick. And the Super Stick has all the benefits of neatness, convenience, and portability.

I have also experimented with using the Super Stick behind the PL660 to bring in the required station, and then using a second loop behind that again, and positioning it in such a way as to null out either interference from stations on the same channel (not much luck with this during the nighttime, but moreso during the day) and, more successfully, local niose. This technique is called phasing, and it is like magic when you introduce the second loop and watch the local noise completely disappear.

To end this article, I have included a photo of my homemade air-spaced loop:

 

Russian Navy Kaliningrad 8459.0 (more)

Last night at 1843 I tuned again to 8459.0khz USB and cw signals were present. This time I didn't record it, but fed the signal directly into MULTIPSK using the QRP decoding function and switched from the big signals with white noise of the outdoor vertical to the quiet signals with no noise of the indoor loop. The results were much, much better using the indoor loop: despite the signal really dropping very low at times, the QRP function on MULTIPSK had no problem decoding. You would never believe such a low signal level could result in such good decoding - it had to be seen to be believed.

In fact, MULTIPSK has always proven to be exceptionally good at handling low quality and low level signals, consistently beating the competition hands-down. And having such an enormous array of modes makes it a very good value and high-quality package.

Anyway, back to the Russian Navy. After the familiar "tire" and "tok" words and numbers I was familiar with from the other night, we got "peterburg" and an "AR" at the end of the message. The next message began:

"REO REO de RMP RMP QTC ........"

Here is the screenshot of this interesting ID part of the message:

Have a look at Tony's PLANESANDSTUFF BLOG blog and his Russian callsign list and you will see this is a weather warning for the Baltic Sea (REO) from Baltic Fleet HQ, Kaliningrad (RMP). I am not too sure about the QTC. Perhaps it is "message follows", "we have a message for you" from what I see on Google.

 I entered the word "RABOTY" into a Latin - Cyrllic alphabet online site and then copied the Russian characters to Google language translator and it means "WORK". It is time-consuming but fascinating to a language enthusiast like myself to decipher the text in this way.

My next challenge is to move away from this mostly broadcast oriented transmission to decoding CW to and from actual ships.

Russian Navy Kaliningrad 8459.0

Earlier in the week I was trying a few Russian Navy CW freqs in my DX394 when I heard some activity on 8459.0khz. I recorded it and then played it back into various CW decoders to check what it was. MultiPSK was best  (tried FLDIGI and a few others) and decoded some strange sets of numbers, some letters (TIRE and TOK in our alphabet...oh and KARTA which is Russian for map). But best of all the words KALININGRAD.  There were non of the ususal 5 figure groups associated with military and utility stations. Here is the multipsk screenshot:

18030.0 Russian Air Force ACTIVITY

19JUN15 18030.0USB 1255UTC Pskov AB (KORSAR) wkg 76719 an Ilyushin IL76 based Taganrog
19JUN15 18030.0USB 1301UTC Pskov AB (KORSAR) clg Orenburg AB (POLIS) and sev others
19JUN15 18030.0USB 1400UTC Pskov wkg 22457 (presumed RA22457, an Alrosa Mirny AL Mil8 helicopter, as I couldn't find any other "22457" serial. This AL operates scheduled AND charter flights, so it is feasible it was chartered to the Russian AF in the same way Atlas Air flights are used to transport USAF troops and equip.) This was a very interesting catch as I also managed to hear the words "raschetnoye pribitiya" which means "ETA" and the time afterwards of 1710.

I am going to try and upload the audio as an AVI ile and show the actual Mil8 helicopter as the background. Never done this before, but wanted you to hear the excellent signal.    

    UPDATE!!!!

Tony, from the blog planesandstuff, has been helping me with my Russian and I wrongly heard the numbers. They should be 52456 (pyat dva chetirye pyat shest). Can't find this serial number on Google, but it isn't the Alrosa Mirny Mil8 helicopter I thought it was. Silly me. This is the problem with working with another language and of assuming you know some of it! ha ha. Never mind, the error has taught me to listen to EVERYTHING many times before thinking I understand it.