Strange CW Station

[K9WG]

OK - A little funny for you guys....

A few years back I was working in the shack. True to my way I had several projects going at once so while I was tinkering I had 80 meters tuned in. Now mind you I am not the greatest at copying CW but can converse in it with some effort. Anyway, I was listening when this really bad sounding CW station comes on the air. His signal sounded like he had ac hum as well as a pulsating noise. Well I started to copy him and was wanting to get enough information to at least let him know he had a problem. After copying several letter groups I could tell that what he was sending was either not English or just random letters. It was after a few minutes that I noticed every time he sent a letter group the light on my hard drive would flash. Let me tell you it is really difficult working your Western Digital hard drive....


Never did get a QSL card from it.

 

[Nap]

LOL. My cellphone does something similar, especially when receiving e-mails. I wonder if it tries to re-transmit it using CW

 

[n9mxq]

I've found myself doing that with DM-780...trying to decode electronics...Doesn't work too well...hehe

 

[k9rzz]

After two long days of November Sweepstakes on CW weekend, even the refrigerator tries to call in.

That's next weekend, I believe.

 

[elk2370bruce]

After two long days of November Sweepstakes on CW weekend, even the refrigerator tries to call in.

That's next weekend, I believe.

But like the WASC (Worked All Silent Keys) group, they just don't send back a QSL.

 

[zz0468]

Very timely thread...

Just the other day I was up at one of our sites, and I noticed that if I stood in a certain place in the room, I could hear a real faint, high pitched cw. It was just two letters, sent over and over. It took almost an hour to track it down. It was an unused UPS, still sitting in a rack plugged in but with no load. It has an inverter failure alarm, and apparently sends an audible CW message when it's in trouble. Who knew!?

 

[K9WG]

I worked for a computer service comapny several years back. One of out client systems had a tape drive for automatic back-up. When the tape drive would go bad the LED on the front would flash S O S....

 

[K3DC]

Here's one for the "Strange CW" category. This was back in the '70s, at the height of the Cold War. I was tuning across the 40 Meter CW band one night when I heard a station sending 5-letter code groups at about 15 WPM; it wasn't just garbage, either- every letter or number WAS a real Morse character. The signal quality was good, no chirp or instability, just those code groups.

I listened for about 15 minutes, and he just kept chugging away- no callsign or identification, just 5-letter groups. Finally I decided it was a spy sending a message back to whoever had sent him out. I know they did use Morse code back then, but it just cheezed me off that he was using the Ham bands for it.

Several years later a friend who was a retired intelligence type confirmed it for me- he said several countries did just that in those days, especially the smaller ones who didn't have the James Bond gadgets our people did- they just bought a cheap Ham rig, and set up a sked with home base on the ham bands. Their chance of getting caught was almost nil with so many of us pecking away alongside them; you'd have to be lucky to find him unless you knew exactly when and where to listen.

I've always wondered who he was, and who he was sending that message to...

73, Bill K3DC