COMMUNICATIONS UPGRADE
Berkeley County in West Virginia has plans to upgrade the communications of all emergency services. Recent testing resulted in good receiving capabilities beyond County borders. One deficiency does need to be eliminated and that is the dead spot which has always existed in the vicinity of the Town of Hedgesville. The upgrade project is anticipated to be completed in late 2005 or early 2006.

MYSTERY SIGNAL
I still have not been able to track down the exact location or source of the signal on 269 kHz. This signal continues to continuously reflect changes to something. There does not appear to be any relationship between the signal and the weather or time of day???

OTHER SIGNALS
Some additional unidentified transmissions have been detected below 500 kHz. On 457 kHz the signal consists of strings of pulses. I have seen as many as 25 short pulses with as few as a single pulse before resuming the longer strings. And on 290, 301, and 307 kHz there are RTTY sounding transmissions. The three signals, while similar, do not seem to be identical. The signal on 307 kHz is definitely the strongest. Listening to all three at the same time, I believe they are not identical in content. Somewhere I recall reading about Power Companies utilizing low frequencies for power line condition reporting. Perhaps that is the purpose of these transmissions??

STRANGE BEACON SIGNAL
SYS, Somerset, PA beacon on 209 kHz is clearly received on one side of the signal. However tuning just a bit to the other side, the signal sounds like UIED plus a long dash. Initially I thought this was a case of negative keying but when I tweaked the tuning and heard SYS, I realized it was not negative keying.

End of Report

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