Military Malfunctioning Transmitter--BEE-36?

[AlaskaMike]

I've kind of been off HF monitoring for a while, but when I got on tonight I came across what looks like a malfunctioning transmitter with an idling signal on 3978u on 24 Jan, 0908z. I've seen it in years past, and I can't remember if it's Russian BEE-36 or something else. Can anyone ID this?

When I found it, it was stable as can be seen at the very bottom of the waterfall screenshot in the link below, but it almost immediately began swinging up and down in frequency like I've never seen before. Whatever the problem was, it looks like they discovered it and pulled the plug in about 20 minutes.

Audio:

http://www.tibor.org/weird-bee36.mp3

Waterfall screenshot:

http://www.tibor.org/weird-bee36.png

Audio capture began at about 0908z, and it ceased transmitting at 0926z.

 

[ka3jjz]

A quick sweep of the UDXF logs doesn't show anything...it's certainly possible it's a malfunctioning transmitter but in the 75 meter ham band?

By the way the Worldwide Utility News group morphed into the Utility DXers Forum on groups.io. If you're into the non-broadcast side of things, this is where you want to be...

UDXF groups.io Group

The Utility DXers Forum - UDXF is centered around the exchange of news and information relating to "utility" radio stations and signals, below 30 MHz. The Utility DXers Forum - UDXF is centered around the exchange of news and information relating to "utility" radio stations and signals, below...

groups.io

Mike

 

[k7ng]

Stuff happens, mistakes are made.

Comes to mind one incident about 7 years ago, fax test page being received with black tone at exactly 14.000 MHz (white tone higher and in the ham band) - the transmitting station was clearly identified on the page - a USCG station!
It took me (former USN ET) and another gent (former USN CMDR working in comms) over half an hour to convince the OIC of the offending facility that we were for real and knew what we were talking about. (It got fixed).

I've seen Ham PSK31 transmissions running idle for long periods... I'd guess the ops had forgotten to switch back to RX after a QSO.

Stuff happens; catching it on the air is one of the amusements of the radio hobby!

 

[AlaskaMike]

Agreed about mistakes happening. I was actually in the 75m ham band intentionally, looking for ham stuff. It didn't surprise me to find this though--the Russians (military branches anyhow) don't seem to recognize ham bands. I've seen a lot of their stuff in 75m, 40m and 20m bands.

 

[majoco]

The 80m band ends at 3.9MHz for the rest of the world outside region 2.