I just seen this message posted to the UXDF Yahoo group. Note sure what to make of it.....
"The US Navy Carrier "George Washington" is on Full alert, and in Attack
mode, with full Flt at ready"
Also several repeat messages saying "This is not a drill."
I used to talk like that on HF -- my CB radio -- back when I was 13 years of age & pretending to be the skipper of a USN aircraft carrier, sending my battle group to war.
8971 (used to be 8972 for decades) has been a USN/NATO Safety of Flight channel for a long time, & has had a huge amount of fascinating traffic on it related to IFEs, counter-narcotics, MAD-MANs (magnetic anomaly detection of submarines), training ops, and the usual mundane flight-following type stuff. The Anti-Submarine Warfare Operations Centers used to hang-out on their own discrete HF channels plus monitor 8972/1, as-did the main East Coast USN P-3 bases like NAS Jax & Brunswick. GOLDENHAWK was a fixed-station very active on 8971. It was the Commander, Patrol Wing FIVE Tactical Support Center (new name for AWSOC) at NAS Brunswick. The HF site was an annex just a couple miles off the base. A lot of the cool stuff that was on 8972 back in the day switched to TADIX-B/TRAP & the other UHF-SATCOM based information exchange networks. I seem to recall the Royal Australian Air Force stuff used to be adjacent on 8973 or 8974 & not right on 8972/8971 but I'm not going to check my logs.
Ya gotta realize that there are a lot of nutjobs who are into the radio hobbies, because it's a fairly passive activity that they can do from home. There are also a lot of newbies that thanks to the Internet these days, can make an authoratative-sounding post somewhere that hundreds of people end-up seeing.
I'm glad & lucky that back in the late '70s/early '80s when I started out, and was making mistakes like thinking the E-3A AWACS planes were ID'ing as "Century ##" (it was SENTRY ##!), or assuming that references I heard to "Wawca" was some guy named Walker (it was "WHCA" - White House Communications Agency), etc. were honest mistakes that I kept to myself, because there was no Internet to post my loggings too.
Craziest of all were the old 1980s days where the "BOOKSHELF" Net was on 13204 or 13205 -- wargame comms between the battlestaff aboard EC-130E Airborne Battlefield Command Control Capsules talking to Tactical Air Control Parties (go ROMADs!), Forward Air Control & Attack aircraft. First time I tuned in, they were giving out locations of Soviet BMPs, T-72s, giving 'Weapons-Free' status to units, locations of downed allied aircraft, etc. & it sounded quite real, plus this was the height of the Evil Empire days, so for the first couple minutes I thought the Big One had finally started & didn't know whether I should just sit at home & monitor until my home was wiped-out, or run out onto the streets & start grabbing women. Good thing I couldn't send out the alert via the Internet... Once one of the TACPs on the ground asked the Battlestaff Director aboard BOOKSHELF what to do about a strange plastic bag with a vile smelling brown substance that had corn kernels embedded in it, I finally decided this was probably an exercise...
OK, enough waltzing down memory lane. My point is there are plenty of innocent new people, as well as complete & utter morons who have been posting on-line & even writing chronically erroneous junk for profit (magazine columns, books/hobbyist guides, etc.) for decades. Anyone with an IQ of at least 100 that's been serious with this hobby can tell them apart, and we need to correct, but help the new guys with the hobby, and expose the others who are either just amazingly stupid, or intellectually lazy (because they have enough groupies that treat their utterances as Gospel, they no longer bother to fact-check their pontifications.
For example, one of these long-time military comms 'experts' who derives his income from the hobby wrote a column about the US military awarding an radio contract to Icom, Inc. Nope! The idiot saw "ICOM" in the DOD press release & didn't comprehend that "ICOM" was a rather common military communications vernacular meaning Intergrated COMsec, meaning the radio had built-in encryption. Instead of even bothering to check with Icom, Inc, he writes his column about how Icom Inc got this contract for the HF radios.... That example is a year or two old, but I don't waste time reading the guy's columns too often, so it's the most recent example I have.
