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Report #038 04/01/03 SW LISTENERS FESTIVAL - The 16th Annual Winter SWL Fest was superb. The seminars included demonstrations of Digital Radio and Satellite TV/Radio. Other sessions covered Pirate activity, DXing in various areas of the world and of particular interest to me was the presentation by Joe Buch of WWII. Radio and Propaganda. Joe had many different recordings from the National Archives which were accompanied by the printed text of the broadcasted material. Fest attendance was at an all time high with many first time attendees. For those who may have played with the cryptogram in last months column, the plaintext was "When radio enthusiasts greet one another do you suppose they give short waves?" Bill Oliver was the first Fest attendee to come up with the correct solution and he was awarded a copy of "THE UNDERGROUND FREQUENCY GUIDE". The Fest was most enjoyable and I am already looking forward to the 17th running which is scheduled for 13/14 March 2004. AGENTURA - This Russian web page (www.agentura.ru/english) often provides interesting tidbits. As mentioned previously it is unfortunate that most of the complete texts are in the Russian language. However the capsule English summaries are of interest. A 30 March 2003 item mentioned the NSA Intercept facility in Berlin and the spying by a US Army enlisted man who was caught in 1988 and was sentenced to 40 years in prison. There are also two items dated 20 and 21 March 2003 which deal with Iraq. At this same web site is the column "The Security and Intelliogence Digest from Aleksey Shcherbakov" which has not had any updating since 4 November 2002. Did Mr. Shcherbakov print something he should not have?? UNIDENTIFIED STATION - Go to www.wunclub.com/newsletter/v09/n01/numbers.html and look for the unidentified station using the callsign BR6. The text format rang a bell with me and I dug out some old items I had saved. I found an intercept provided by the late Dave White which he copied on 20 February 1988. I had also copied some traffic from this target and we both had noted that the 2L, 3L, and 4L groups that appeared in the messages were also used in chatter between operators. A brief bit of Vietnamese plaintext had once been heard on the frequency so we thought the communications were possibly Vietnamese Diplomatic. However the item which appeared ion the WUN Newsletter was tentatively identified as North Korean Hungul Morrse. I spent several hours going from web site to web site trying to obtain details on Hungul Morse characters. I did find http://langintro.com/kintro/romanize.htm which presented some information on Romanized Korean language characters but it did not definitively identify them as Hungul Morse characters. A related Korean piece was a copy I had from many years ago of Romanized Korean texts transmitted on RTTY. A sample follows: ()in here on text) DAUINZEGIMYE DAI8ZUYNGZEGIN CHAMDOIN GAZEMGEUL etc etc. One addressee I remember seeing was NIGALAUA or NIGALAGA which evidently was Nicaragua. This type of text matched the type shown in WUN newsletter v4//n03 in the Digital Review section.
RFE/RL NEWSLINE - This web site contained some extremely revealing things in the Russia section of the 28 March 2003 edition. See www.rferl.org/newsline/1-rus.asp. The first item indicated the Russian Intelligence Services were meeting daily with the Iraqi Intelligence agencies for discussions about Iraq developments. The second item reported a Russian newspaper saying that the Russian intelligence stations in Baghdad were directed to obtain the archives of the Iraqi secret services and send the material to Russia before the Hussein regime was defeated!
For further information on numbers stations, and other mystery communications we recommend . . .
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©2003 Don Schimmel.
