Monitoring Military?

[trunker0205]

I got to tell ya I have the DX-394 and after a few minor mods it is a very good radio IMO..

Im not a huge HF guy but do like to listen in on SSB..

Check out the link...

http://www.monitor.co.uk/radio-mods/dx-394/dx-394.htm

 

[ka3jjz]

My first recommendation would be to can the 394 and get something else. I bought one new and have regretted it ever since. It will do Mil monitoring but it leaves a lot to be desired. Mine is on a 50' long wire and that helps but the performace of the radio plain stinks. It's a magnet for even the slightest RFI to the point one would have to turn off every appliance in the house to listen to it. I had to mod the radio with a cage around the chassis made from heater ducting to get close to anything reasonable. My computer just kills it and when your trying to decode rtty or fax its about useless. Had I known just how bad it was I would have taken my hard earned $ to ebay and bought a better used radio. perhaps something like a Kenwood TS-440 so it could be used later when I pass my 5 wpm.

The radio itself is not the problem - the antenna contributes to hearing noise, too. Using a simple long wire with no shielding is an invitation for every and all noise sources. HF is the real magnet for noise - anything from PCs, light dimmers, fish heaters, TV oscillators and lots more are easy to hear on HF, regardless of what radio you are using. There are steps you can take to reduce it (loops, using a balun on the longwire, ect.) but it does take some work.

As to hearing RTTY - apart from hams and the occasional aeronautical broadcast, there's almost no commercial RTTY on HF anymore - they've all gone to satellite. There are many other digital modes being used on HF - some decodable, some not. It depends entirely on just how much you want to spend on soundcard software (and these days, that is the way to go - hardware decoders like the M7000, M8000 or PK232 are not all that useful anymore for commercial RTTY, anyway...). The only thing that seems to be hanging on are some of the maritime NAVTEX and SITOR B transmissions, but even those are disappearing. 73s Mike

 

[Stabu]

Re:

I probablly should have elaborated a little more LOLOLOL. I spent almost 30 years playing with HF in the military mostly in tactical enviornments. So I suppose I got a little spoiled . There's nothing like building a field expiendiant antenna out of field wire and a few test bench parts and making contact with an F-111 strike flight heading your way from across the country, or making contact with your home station from halfway across the world. Then getting them to phone patch you to your house while your sitting in a hole in the ground but I digress. My long wire is being fed with about 50' of RG-6 up to the roof where the feed point is. The mods do work I've done all of them although some of the ones on the link appear to be improved versions of ones I've already done. May have to get out the soldering iron and give them a try. The DSP is a nice addition but the module costs more than you can buy the radio for. Do want to experiment with with some of the software based ones out there. The Navy and Canadians still run Rtty on their Wefax nets but it's a dying mode. I've never been able to pull any digital signals from outside the CONUS with that radio and lord knows I've spent countless hours at 2am trying to do it.

 

[ka3jjz]

I haven't seen a report of a RTTY xsmn from the USN in many years - and I've been with the WUN (now the Utility DXers Forum over on Yahoo) since its inception. Yeah, standard baudot RTTY is just about gone - very hard to find any of that anymore.

As you have discovered, there's a fair amount of what looks like clear RTTY but is encrypted (like the KG84 stuff...), and that's stuff we'll never be able to read. There's even been a fair number of logs of Link11 and other TADIL type modes that have been attributed to USN activity. The UDXF is really the place you want to be if you're into tuning the military and digital HF. It's a very active group. ALE - you probably know it better as Mil Std 188-141A - is really the hot mode these days 73s Mike

[edit] Here's the Yahoo link to the UDXF

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/udxf/

Tuning around blindly really doesn't accomplish much - you need to know where and when to look.

 

[Stabu]

I haven't seen a report of a RTTY xsmn from the USN in many years - and I've been with the WUN (now the Utility DXers Forum over on Yahoo) since its inception. Yeah, standard baudot RTTY is just about gone - very hard to find any of that anymore.

As you have discovered, there's a fair amount of what looks like clear RTTY but is encrypted (like the KG84 stuff...), and that's stuff we'll never be able to read. There's even been a fair number of logs of Link11 and other TADIL type modes that have been attributed to USN activity. The UDXF is really the place you want to be if you're into tuning the military and digital HF. It's a very active group. ALE - you probably know it better as Mil Std 188-141A - is really the hot mode these days 73s Mike

[edit] Here's the Yahoo link to the UDXF

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/udxf/

Tuning around blindly really doesn't accomplish much - you need to know where and when to look.

I will definately check the link, last time I was there was when it was still WUN. We got the KG-84s back in the mid 80s and that was a huge improvement over the old equipment. Stuff was boat anchors that were keyed with IBM data punch cards. Stuff before that was even worse lololol. Link16 and Tadil-J were coming on line when I retired. Mostly UHF application there but can be applied to HF. The capabilities are truly awesome. I got to work with ALE while it was still in development and initial fielding. That was back in the early 90s. They came in a modded a few of our URC-1444's to see how it worked under real usage. Great concept and worked fine on the bench, but it was'nt ready for prime time. Sent figuring out MUFs and LUFs to the trash heap (another lost art). Drove the 40lb brain engineers crazy, it's come a long way since then.

 

[hsdtech]

I can hear a frog fart in Fargo.

I didn't know Frogs farted. LOL