Another week of amateur radio has expired. Expired Ham, get it? 🙂
Welcome to another issue of Expired Ham, a weekly newsletter where I discuss the ways I participated in the amateur radio hobby this week.
Welcome to the 30th issue of Expired Ham.
As you know, I’m working through the CWOps CW Academy (CWA) course to improve my CW operating skills and Morse code proficiency. It’s going really well and it is abundantly evident that I am improving in both speed of recognition as well as sending speed and accuracy. There is still room for improvement, though. I am still at it every day with head copy practice, which is the toughest part of CW in my opinion. I am running through sending drills every couple of days.
My current CWA advisor shares with us, at the beginning of each advisory session, sometimes obscure radio-related trivia and this past week, he shared with us the topic of beacons. However, we didn’t talk about the typical beacons you may already be aware of, like the NCDXF beacons or APRS beacons. We talked about Letter beacons, Non-directional beacons, and Numbers Stations. If you’re unfamiliar with any of these, Wikipedia gives a good introduction. Just click the those links to go down that rabbit hole.
Letter beacons are largely used for unknown purposes, though at least a few of them are considered to be used for propagation analysis. Most of the letter beacons known are attributed to Russian stations, some dating back to the U.S.S.R. days.
Non-directional beacons are less obscure, but nonetheless still interesting from a ham’s perspective. NDBs are often used in the aviation industry as airway markers and locator beacons. NDBs are apparently a popular thing to hunt for shortwave listeners, who can sometimes receive QSL cards from NDB operators. I’ve often wondered what the appeal of shortwave listening was, and now I’m perhaps learning the answer to that question.
Numbers stations is where things get most interesting. Numbers stations are almost definitely used to pass information to covert operatives doing their covert things all over the world. There are documented examples of this particular use in recent history where foreign government spies were being passed information from their handlers via encoded messages sent by numbers stations. The handler would broadcast a cryptic message on a predetermined radio frequency at a predetermined time on a predetermined day and the operative would listen for the transmission using a general purpose shortwave radio. Using a one-time pad, the operative would then decode the message, then destroy their one-time pad. If you’re interested in cryptography at all, go down that rabbit hole and learn about one-time pads–fascinating stuff. The use of a one-time pad to encrypt and decrypt messages is considered an unbreakable form of cryptography. And numbers stations transmissions have been a fascination of listeners on the air for a long time. So much so that there are websites devoted to the topic. Check out the Wikipedia article on The Conet Project. You can also check out priyom.org and navigate to their page on numbers stations to view a catalog of numbers stations recordings and to view a transmission schedule for known numbers stations. You can use your radio to listen for their secret codes yourself. You can spend hours perusing through the online information related to numbers stations and how they’ve been used throughout history if you’re at all interested in such things. I spent the entire evening after class this week doing just that.
Also check out the Numbers & Oddities newsletter website, which has another catalog of numbers station recordings. They also include an archive of their newsletters if you’re interested in reading more about the fascinating world of numbers stations.
Apart from all of that, the week was a typical one. CW operating is still my primary point of focus within the amateur radio hobby. I have been toying with the idea of branching out to straight key operating and have purchased a couple small keys from CWMorse.us to see if I would actually enjoy using a manual key. The first one I bought was a good introduction, but the key is mighty small and required two hands to use due to its light weight. The second one is a bit larger and may be more easily used singlehandedly. I initially ordered a TS cable for the thing and found out that it is not compatible with any of the equipment I was going to use the key with. Plugging in the 1/8″ TS plug into the key jack on any of my gear caused an unstoppable tone to generate. I believe this was because the jacks require a TRS plug and using the TS plug shorts the ring and sleeve when inserted. Anyway, I ordered a TRS version of the cable and the key works as expected now.
HP CUAGN ES VY 73 DE K2MAS dit dit
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