Nasa 926

[737mech]

Anyone hear Nasa926 on nellis freqs or other freqs lately? Flightaware.com has alot of mission history in the area lately mostly a racetrack pattern over Creech AFB. It's a WB-57 one of two that still fly. They go up as high as 50,000 feet. Please post if you hear him on any freqs VHF or UHF.

 

[com501]

Look at S-band and TDRSS instead. There may be very short comms on UHF as they near the TCA. Downlink is to Halligan Mesa.

 

[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 uploaded some audio I pulled off of the liveatc feed, chopping out all but NASA6. (Hope that doesn't violate their terms.) I put the link on Abovetopsecret.com. I will spare you a paragraph or two why I can't put the link here right now, but I will dig it up later once I'm at a desktop PC rather than phone. The thread is here:
abovetopsecret.com/forum/thread780549/pg1

 

[gariac]

WB-57 audio:
http://www.lazygranch.com/sound/nasa6_12212011.m4a

A photo of the plane at Nellis:
http://www.lazygranch.com/images/misc/wb_57.jpg

The audio is from this feed:
ZLA Sectors 16/34

The audio has a bad hum on it If you want to crop out NASA6 from it, I suggest you run Audacity and highpass filter the audio at 12dB/Oct with a corner around 150Hz. Then use the trim silence feature. This will cut the listening time down by a factor or 3 or 4.

 

[gariac]

Isn't TDRSS only for spacecraft? Do you know the mission of these flights?

TCA is a tough one. Do you mean Terminal Control Area?

Most of the telem around the range is L-band. What are you expecting on S-band?

 

[WAScanMan]

From 2006 but still relevant:
http://www.skywise711.com/misc/WB57/WB57.html

 

[MtnBiker2005]

FlightAware: NASA WB-57
http://flightaware.com/live/flight/NASA926
http://flightaware.com/live/flight/NASA6

 

[com501]

There are some calibration flights in progress for some new hardware. They are using some L-band and some S-band and TDRSS (as that is what the equipment under test is using) for comms.

 

[gariac]

Do you have more information on what exactly the WB-57 is doing. Project name and/or controlling entity. If not public, then something to FOIA? If you don't play "mother may I" properly on a FOIA, it just gets kicked back.

The NTTR is L-band city, mostly NACTS (formerly ACMI). I suppose they could find a hole for comms. S-band scanning will be a bit more difficult. Are we talking NFM here?

I don't know if you read that post I did on the AT&T comm shack, but I was surprised to find 1900 UTMS in use. Just another thing to get in the way of range operations. Yeah, everything is filtered, but 950 UMTS is better for rural areas.

 

[gariac]

Bringing Home the BACN to Front-Line Forces

Most likely the WB-57 is being used to develop BACN for the Global Hawk EQ-4B.

 

[davidp124]

Nasa 926 01/28

NASA 926 off of Nellis now w/Nellis Control 126.650 cleared up to FL500. 01/28 1010 local