Groom Lake scanner audio 11/15/2011

[gariac]

http://www.lazygranch.com/sound/groom_11152011.mp3

Callsign of the month is Hazel.
Hazel with two or three digits is a Janet 737
Hazel with one digit is a Janet Beech.
Large cargo is a 737. Small cargo is a Beech.
Tower is well tower!
Control is like approach/departure at most airports.
Ops is ground (generally fuel requests).

During the day, the non-Janet flightst tend to be Groom based aircraft doing proficiency training. I've witnessed F117s doing this back in the day. The "cougar" callsign aircraft are doing proficiency training, but you can't tell by the callsign what type of plane is being flown.

This audio covers from about 3AM to 9PM, obviously with the gaps removed.

 

[mdickerson17]

http://www.lazygranch.com/sound/groom_11152011.mp3

Callsign of the month is Hazel.
Hazel with two or three digits is a Janet 737
Hazel with one digit is a Janet Beech.
Large cargo is a 737. Small cargo is a Beech.
Tower is well tower!
Control is like approach/departure at most airports.
Ops is ground (generally fuel requests).

During the day, the non-Janet flightst tend to be Groom based aircraft doing proficiency training. I've witnessed F117s doing this back in the day. The "cougar" callsign aircraft are doing proficiency training, but you can't tell by the callsign what type of plane is being flown.

This audio covers from about 3AM to 9PM, obviously with the gaps removed.

Very cool! What frequency is this if you dont mind me asking? Ive been wanting to take a trip out there to monitor but assumed all radio traffic would be encrypted or ProVoice. Anyways thanks for sharing!

 

[kf7yn]

Awesome, thanks neighbor!

 

[gariac]

Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (BlackBerry; U; BlackBerry 9780; en-US) AppleWebKit/534.8+ (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/6.0.0.666 Mobile Safari/534.8+)

I don't post the frequencies for a reason. You post them and they change them. Dreamland is a published frequency. 126.15 IIRC. (I'm posting via BB.)

Dreamland and bird dog are related to the Nevada Test Site. I never bothered to scan the frequency until I heard another recording where the WB-57 (ex-NASA) entered the range via Dreamland. When you hear Energy 1, that is on the Dreamland frequency.
You can find tower and control in an hour just by bandscanning and locking out known frequencies. Ops (ground) takes a bit longer.

 

[gariac]

When looking for Groom Lake scanner frequencies, doing it at stupid O clock is best. Who else is flying between 4AM to 6AM? Maybe UPS or Fedex.

If you want mission frequencies, I suspect they get their flying done during the idle time when the Janets are not flying. Moonless times of course unless the mission isn't a secret. That would be from about 9PM to 3AM. Janets show up past 8PM and start flying a bit before 4AM.

It helps to have a bit of altitude when scanning the range. Of course, it always helps to have altitude, but the base is surrounded by mountains.] There are three well known locations. One is the Power Line Overlook. It is a nasty drive and the power lines make a lot of noise. The road up Tempiute mountain works well. Just don't take it too far, i.e. don't get blocked in. Next up is Queen City Summit. There is a spot by the side of the road that has a good ear into the base. I've also monitored from the parking area right at where Groom Lake Road meets the ET Highway. There is plenty of knife edge effect signal. You can also find some gravel parking areas by the ET Highway between Mail Box Road and Groom Lake Road where you can park and monitor.

From Vegas, you can hear the planes talking to "control". That's about it. If you are on the north side of town, driving to Mt. Charleston works. Also the road to Cold Spring can hear into the range, though I don't recall if you would hear the Groom side of the audio.

 

[2wayfreq]

Just Curious,
Anyone had any luck with confirming if the 410Mhz EDACS system is in use out there? Provoice? Encrypted?

 

[gariac]

Encrypted. I've been 99% sure of this in the past because I had more than one radio dealer verify this by the sound. DSD wouldn't touch the signal, and it ignores DES encryption, so at this point I'm 100% sure.

 

[primehifi]

It's possible it's AEGIS and not provoice. Has anyone ever taken a provoice or Aegis capable harris radio to it? Only way to know for sure if it's not enc. There's no way to tell for sure if an edacs system is ENC based on the sound.

 

[gariac]

Those radios don't just grow on trees ya know. ;-) I haven't searched ebay for a while. I happen to know exactly what radios the camo dudes use because I managed to photograph one through their windshield. I'll dig up what I have and do another post.

Some people think that getting a public safety band EDACS radio and building a mixer front end to get it on the federal band is easier than finding a federal band radio.