A couple of years ago, Don Schimmel alerted me to an odd RTTY station found by Kevin Tubbs. This station was using names of space shuttles as callsigns, sending 5F groups, and plenty of lines of RY's. What first appeared to be an oddity later turned out to be some of the most interesting monitoring I have ever come across. The station Kevin had found turned out to be a training station used by the U. S. Military to train intercept operators. I copied this station extensively in 1996 and have a thick folder of printouts of the copied traffic.

The frequencies used by this station are 10225 and 16303.6, with two skeds daily, Monday through Friday, at 1600 and 2100 UTC. The modes used are 45, 50, 57, 75, & 100 baud RTTY; 50, 75, 110, 150 baud ASCII; SITOR-B; and CW. Despite which digital mode or speed is used, 170 Hz shift is always used. Transmissions usually last about two hours, and various different modes are used in each session. This station changes modes often and seemingly random choices of modes are made.

The traffic sent in each broadcast session consists of just about every type of message format you could imagine. The traffic simulates net operations sending various coded messages consisting of 3F, 4F, 5F, 3L, 4L, and 5L groups. Callsigns used by this station range from tactical callsigns such as the aforementioned shuttle names, to 3, 4, or 5-digit letter/number combinations. Both the message formats and callsigns vary widely, depending on what type of communications are being simulated.

Normally cipher messages are sent, but occasionally plaintext exercise traffic is sent, and this can be interesting. It can also give clues as to the identity of this station. On 17 September 1996 I copied this CW message: BASELINE EXERCISE INFORMATION: FOR EXERCISE PURPOSES TODAY IS TUESDAY, 3 SEP 96. ALL TIME REFERENCES IN TRAFFIC SHOULD BE CONSIDERED LOCAL TIME. CONVERT THESE TIMES TO ZULU BY ADDING SEVEN HOURS. This gives a hint as to the location of the receiving station, if not the transmitting station. Zulu -7 is the Mountain time zone, and it is apparent that this is where the receiving station is located.

Occasionally, the traffic will simulate international incidents, such as the transmission on 14 May 1998 in RTTY 45/170. This simulated voice traffic in which "Lavatyan Naval Vessel PCC51 Subhadra" fired on an unidentified vessel which turned out to be a "Karuban Fishing Vessel." There is, of course, no such country as Lavatya or Karuba. It is obvious that this is a lesson in how to spot reportable intercept. The boys in Washington would be most interested in this if it were to happen in real life.

Bob Margolis reported copying this station in which shipping reports from fictitious cargo vessels were sent to fictitious coastal stations, each having the name of a fruit. When's the last time you've received a QSL from Radio Melontown, Radio Orangapolis, or Radio Apple Island? Bob reported that a fictitious "piracy incident report" was made by one of the ships bound for Orangapolis, which was boarded by men with "Orange" accents. This also appears to be more training in how to spot reportable incidents.

After copying this station for so long, I noticed that the traffic started to repeat itself. I was able to determine that a station I had heard on 7 December 1995 on 16172 KHZ was the same station. I haven't heard this station on this frequency since, nor have I seen it logged by anyone. Currently it uses 10225 and 16303.6 parallel, and may possibly use other frequencies.

Next month, I'll give some insight into the possible location of the receiving station, if not the transmitter site itself.

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