HFU HF Underground
Loggings => North American Shortwave Pirate => Topic started by: ChrisSmolinski on February 06, 2019, 2141 UTC
-
2140 Carrier, too weak for any audio.
2204 Off
-
Nothing locally, but I have a carrier on the COMMSIGMA KiwiSDR at 2150 UTC on 6925 kHz. Some QRM from 6925 kHz LSB and 6920 kHz USB pescadore or freebander QSOs
-
And I have a weak carrier at 2157.
Ron
-
I just heard some strange people speaking on LSB here. Don't they know they do not belong here. Who are they. I hear a carrier on AM vaguely.
-
The people you're hearing on 6925 kHz LSB are Portuguese-speaking fishermen, likely out of Brazil. They use 6925 kHz and dozens of other frequencies for marine communications. They're not supposed to be there, but they are. 6925 LSB is one of their most active frequencies. They're also found on 6919 LSB, 6933 LSB and lots of other frequencies in the 6765-7000 kHz "43 meter" band.
They're commonly referred to as "peskies" (a play on the Spanish word "pescadores" - which means "fishermen"). You'll often hear Spanish, Portuguese or even English and other languages being spoken in both USB and LSB modes. Sometimes its fishing fleets, other times its land based stations operating out of band.
Check out these links for more info:
https://www.hfunderground.com/wiki/index.php/Pescadores (https://www.hfunderground.com/wiki/index.php/Pescadores)
and the peskies logging forum here on HFUnderground:
https://www.hfunderground.com/board/index.php/board,34.0.html (https://www.hfunderground.com/board/index.php/board,34.0.html)
-
The Brazilian speaking stations I hear everyday on 6925 LSB,
I call them "freebanders", for two reasons :
-I never hear the noise of the ship motor (as I can hear from European fishermen)
-the marine radio sets are only USB (as far as I know), LSB being used only from ham traditions
Edit :
I forgot a third point : those signals on 6925LSB are strong, probably from kilowatt amplifiers, and such amplifiers are not likely to be installed on small vessels.
-
Ray makes a good point. I have, however, logged several QSOs in LSB mode that were almost certainly marine traffic in that band, going by the topics discussed (OMs talking about how much fish they caught, things like that). Those transmissions were in Spanish however, not Portuguese, and were on other frequencies, not 6925 kHz. I imagine a lot of the transmissions heard in the 6-7 MHz region are freebanders or outbanders though. The line blurs when you have fishermen talking to land-based stations. Lots of husbands talking to their wives on these frequencies.
I know the 6900 LSB and similar frequency crowd are land-based. I believe that some marine radios do have LSB an option, but others are USB only.