Drones

[spacellamaman]

quite right

Army ISR asset testing has previously been monitored on 277.35, 267.35 FM and some other FM freqs. Eventually they started using encryption.

Based on the MGRS you mentioned:
Camp Mackall hangar receives top industry awards > Savannah District > News Stories

Fort Bragg promises watchful eye over new unmanned aerial vehicle ahead of first flight - News - The Fayetteville Observer - Fayetteville, NC

so far i have only found the one....um...non-shared...so to speak... frequency (i ain't mentioned the others for fear of "it could be this xxx" type suggestions that inevitably are generated) so the others you offer up will be punched in and any more welcomed.

youre dead on about the grid reference. that second link you posted i found about 2 week after it was published, which was for me the first rock solid public acknowledgement i had found of what i suspected everything tied up with. that also was about 6 months after my first exhaustive attempt to find confirmation that drones were being flown and prob close to a year since i had first heard the operations, which i had seriously misconnected with a training exercise that was ongoing at the time i first tripped upon it. so they had been up in the air with something for prob bout a year before it ever was announced.

 

[freqhopping]

Any listening today spacellamaman? There has been something circling for hours to the west of Pope AFB. At first I thought it could be a helo based on alt and speed, but with this duration it's more likely to be a UAV of some sort. Still active now.

 

[spacellamaman]

Any listening today spacellamaman? There has been something circling for hours to the west of Pope AFB. At first I thought it could be a helo based on alt and speed, but with this duration it's more likely to be a UAV of some sort. Still active now.

dang i wish i had noted this earlier. i am fairly certain it was thurs and friday that i had been quickly perusing flightradar24 when i saw a new-to-me flight path. no n number or hex listed but was going under DSH8 if i remember correctly which turned out to be a bombadier Dash 8. it was flying a near perfect SQUARE flight pattern with barely rounded corners which were oriented roughly in a diamond shape.

it was just west of bragg with the far western corner just jutting into the uwharries. there was a cessna 337 doing standard circles farther to the east closer to bragg whose registration came back to a ISR Platforms LLC, which was a new one for me too.

next time you hear something like that check anything in a 30 mile radius of bragg on flightradar24, since i am not out there i have no way to confirm it but very often during regular business hours there are one or two aircraft out there, usually with 4 digit n-numbers (ie: NDKY NB4A etc) loitering at less than 130 kts and between 2-5000 ft.

i suspect those are drones.

now the other thing is, considering their purpose, i assume most drones have a minimal sound signature, but again i have no experience with real drones, i do have experience with aircraft that, over the airwaves, will declare themselves to be such, which brings us back to the 337.

as for what you heard, i have no experience with drones but i do with 337's. MAG Aerospace has one, N502CS that is used alot out my way for training. if you aren't familiar with 337's they were used by the military for everything from ISR to ground attack and have a push/pull engine/propeller layout. it has a very distinct, and different sound to it. its also a very small plane considering the racket it makes so if its up at 4-5000 feet, you can just about spend all day in an open field trying to spot it, and have little luck, even though you can hear it clearly,

just food for thought

N502CS:

https://www.flickr.com/photos/tags/n502cs

 

[freqhopping]

I wasn't listening to anything, that's why I'm asking. I'm 280 miles away. I was watching on ADS-Bexchange. Flightradar isn't going to show you the aircraft using military hex codes. ADS-Bexchange will show everything within range of feed providers.

 

[spacellamaman]

hot diggitty doggitty!

I wasn't listening to anything, that's why I'm asking. I'm 280 miles away. I was watching on ADS-Bexchange. Flightradar isn't going to show you the aircraft using military hex codes. ADS-Bexchange will show everything within range of feed providers.

Well...I clearly misread all that. as for flight radar, you are quite correct and it has been very rare to see a clear cut mil plane on there. the thing is i have slow net connection and little patience for trying out new sites and last time i did was prob 2013. i have been wanting to find a site that.....

is exactly like ADS-Bexchange!!!

or at least my brief perusal of it tells me that thanks for correcting me or else i prob would have never found that site

holy crap this feels like cheating. watching gecko88 right now, a bird that to track its flight path has previously required a high elevation, spotting scope, ton of radios and equal amount of gas to map what it was up to. this is just wrong. heh heh but it feels so right.

moving along, it does appear though that the feeds to each site arent equal cause that Bombardier Dash 8 Q200 going by"DH8B" is up again though doing standard circles, and isn't noted on ads-bexchange but is on flight radar24. on the chance you see this while its still in the air and might want to investigate the link follows:

https://www.flightradar24.com/DH8B/108ebf11

but thanks for the tip about the new-to-me site. maybe between the two we can get somewhere on all of this. for whatever point that will serve

 

[KO4RJX]

I can confirm its a Bombardier Dash 8 and not any sort of drone. From my understanding its used to some extent by the special ops guys from Bragg, I catch it all the time on my ADS-B receiver usually around 25k-27k. The gecko call sign is used often by the special ops teams from Bragg, this past week they have been doing jump training and calling out jumps on VHF air.

Drones do show up from time to time off the coast of NC and Virginia during training...usually above 50k.

Sent from my P008 using Tapatalk

 

[freqhopping]

The Dash8 that shows without details on some sites is N8200R which Dynamic Aviation is converting to an R0-6A like others they've done.

It's not what is using hex AE5201, which I suspect is a UAV.

The sites that show flights with registrations like N7GP, I think that is just bad data.

 

[737mech]

Dynamic Aviation

I saw those guys years ago here in Nevada. Here's the sister ship to N8200R.

 

[Mark]

Yeah should be 6 total DHC-8's recently bought for Army USOC via Dynamic Avlease Inc.

One already at work overseas in Civy colors N8200L
Logged here last Feb as ALLIED1 ((AB333E)

Couple of the old Dash 7's to the Boneyard..

One of US Special Operations Command's Newest Spy Planes Is Hunting Terrorists In Libya - The Drive

 

[spacellamaman]

Right on guys! Now we're getting somewhere. Yeah finally saw the Dash-8 full reg on ADS-bexchange. past week or so been around 25k on mult days, just like you said W4ZWA. Sometimes in the air north of 9 hours straight! Whatever it is they are doing, I have had zero luck intercepting anything radio-wise, and i have been trying.

freqhopping: i have thought about bad data as a possibility as well, but i am glad you think at least one is a drone and i am not nuts.

Mark: yeah the drive has a number of good article on Spec Ops stuff though that was one I hadn't seen

737mech: Nice pics man. I do my best trying to get pics of what i call the "spooky planes" as well, though i doubt i am gonna get a shot of the Dash-8 due to the "tyranny of distance" in the words of drone admins.

W4ZWA: So you are obviously familiar with the VHF freqs that GECKO pops up on. Have you ever been able to figure out if any are assigned to the various DZs or is there a different scheme they use? ie: i have heard em call out to LUZON on 143.3 a couple of times but then a couple of nights ago they asked HFF Twr what the DZSO was on cause they couldnt get in touch with them, said 148.9, then when in touch with DZSO on 148.9 said need to switch to 148.6. I think that instance was LUZON as well. The few references i can find with assigned DZ freqs are fairly old and related to the 440th, or whatever the group of C-130s that was disbanded used. those freqs i rarely hear, if ever, traffic on.

 

[lucky43113]

Thanks guys for keeping this thread going it is interesting

 

[737mech]

Dash 8

When they were out here years ago they used Grizzly as a callsign, then the smaller aircraft used Cub. Was interesting at the time they flew over the Test site here in NV. Mostly Mercury and DRA Airport. They had to contact Dreamland during the flights to let them know where they were. (Published VHF freqs) Mostly a racetrack pattern. Never heard comms from the aircraft outside of normal Nellis range stuff. Like I said years old info. I also try to find those different aircraft from time to time. How about this one... Belongs to NNSA. I've seen it in Vegas a few times.

 

[KO4RJX]

Fyi I saw a NOTAM for the FT Bragg area for the use of drones yesterday and today

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[spacellamaman]

Casa-212 gecko26

737mech: I actually saw GRIZZLY very briefly on one occasion via ADS-Bexchange during the recent period, as GRZZLY## or perhaps GRZLY##. Caught my attention before I realized it was one and same mainly cause i had never seen or heard that callsign before. crazy thing was while it was still in the air i was periodically checking the computer to see its progress and noted it had jumped into SW Virginia. But wait... no.. the Dash-8 was still over the FAY area, just no GRZZLY callsign. the one in Va. was a totally unrelated flight, a C-17 or KC-10 or something else i forget exactly. but the dash 8 was no longer displaying the GRZZLY callsign. weird.

also 737mech i cant quite make out the tail number on your plane pic, (which is very nice btw) what am i looking at?

Fyi I saw a NOTAM for the FT Bragg area for the use of drones yesterday and today

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I started up a daily routine about 2 years ago checking pilotweb like normal, well-socially-adjusted males check sports boxscores. I have a list in a notepad file I copy and paste in of all the identifiers that interest me and see whats going on. for UAS stuff, most of what i presume is strictly military and/or bragg related would look like

HFF
FBG
POB
SDZ

and sometimes FAY

Getting back to GECKO, W4ZWA my knowledge is limited by the Uwharries to my east blocking radio Rx of mostly anything below HALO and HAHO altitudes. to the west of the Uwharries, except on two occasions that i can prove photographically, GECKO is always a C-27J. yesterday at FOB Stanly (KVUJ) though I got a real lucky break and caught GECKO26 doing a drive-by missed approach and finally caught the tail number of the white US ARMY CASA 212 that was using the callsign. Tail # 00178. Thats the second time I can prove it was a CASA though i think it has been on a couple of other occasions over the past year.

My question to you is, being clearly familiar, and to a much higher degree than me, with GECKO flights, are there any other A/C you are aware of that use the GECKO callsign and how frequently would you say its the CASA212 instead of a C-27J?

 

[737mech]

N980ST

https://flightaware.com/resources/registration/N980ST

Also back on the drone subject, I'm hearing them out there this morning at Creech AFB.

One more item I just had a Grizzly19 fly over me, landing Nellis AFB. USMC UC-12W 169319 ae5c77

 

[Mark]

Logged a GRZLY 23 today (AB3343) N8200R DH8C FL250 1330z
Sounds like another Dynamic Lease now owned by the Army.