HFU HF Underground
General Category => General Radio Discussion => Topic started by: chanito on October 06, 2019, 1855 UTC
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I always assume most of these are fishermen, by the content and context of the conversations, but some are cryptic. Talking about the 6000 khz - 7000 khz stuff. There are some persistently used frequencies, like 6900 khz, can be USB or LSB that seem to be more or less 'freebanders' as they never give out callsigns.
There are many others and one way to snag them is to monitor Fleetnet and Safetynet ground stations on 1539 MHz on Inmarsat. This is fairly easy with a small homebrew antenna, a RTL-SDR and LNA.
Use Scytale-C (free) or the pay decoders, like inmarsatdecoder or Tekmanoid. Scytale-C is actually pretty good now, and decodes almost as well as inmarsatdecoder.
You will often see marine stations requesting their buddies go to certain HF frequencies all up and down the bands, from 4000 kHz to 11000 kHz.
I use an antenna made of cardboard, aluminum foil and copper tape. Works great. I have a printout you can use as a form to build the helical coil, if interested.
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When trying to identify a suspected "pesky" transmission there is a rule of thumb that if the language is non-rhotic English and there is a 5:1 word to f-bomb ratio, these individuals are usually in the northeast, generally around coastal New England. These are also known as "Angry Bastahds". It's not clear if they captain fishing boats, or recliners. Very often found in 6000-7000 KHz.
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Haven't heard any of those. I was referring to the ones speaking Spanish, similar ratio of expletive:information, also very fast paced.
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40-41 meters is a fascinating area of HF -- hams, SW broadcasters, Russian single letter beacons, Spanish (and Portuguese) fishermen and outbanders, and Indonesian 'village radio' chanters in the early AM hours. Then you have the odd pirate around the 6900 khz range.
Of course, the past few years conditions haven't been terrific even in that swath of HF territory, but when I seriously tune HF, that's the region I usually concentrate on.
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40-41 meters is a fascinating area of HF -- hams, SW broadcasters, Russian single letter beacons, Spanish (and Portuguese) fishermen and outbanders, and Indonesian 'village radio' chanters in the early AM hours. Then you have the odd pirate around the 6900 khz range.
Of course, the past few years conditions haven't been terrific even in that swath of HF territory, but when I seriously tune HF, that's the region I usually concentrate on.
(https://i.imgur.com/0ZSLx53.png)