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Report #040 08/01/03 Sorry about the lack of a column for several months. I required eye surgery. I am happy to report that my vision is now terrific due to the removal of cataracts from both eyes. AGENTURA - Another check of the Web site showed there still has been no update for over a year of the "Security and Intelligence Digest" formerly written by Aleksey Shcherbakov. I suspect he may have made remarks about some subject which he should not have included in his column. ORAL MORSE CODE - Recently I noted a WUN monitor item which described an activity sending the message by speaking the dits and dahs of Morse code. This caused my memory cells to kick in and in searching through some old file material, I found material which had been copied in the 80s. The communications were between the Ethiopian Embassy in Washington DC and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MFA) in Addis Ababa. The Embassy used the assigned callsign of KNY44 but in addition sometimes used NDL as his callsign. The MFA used ADL as his callsign. FTK and WSL were also noted as callsigns on the frequency but they were unidentified. The Embassy operator had an absolutely horrible fist and evidently was broken frequently by Addis to request repeats. I have to point out that the Morse code the Embassy operator sent in the voice mode was a vast improvement and completely readable as opposed to his hand sending. BERKELEY COUNTY COMMUNICATIONS - A West Virginia newspaper, The Martinsburg Journal, recently reported on the conflict between the Sheriff and the County Commission . The present emergency communication system in use in the County is very old and suffers frequent outages. The Commission decided to give cell phones to each of the 41 Deputies. The Sheriff wanted to turn the cell phones back in and use the savings for an increase in the Deputy salaries. The Sheriff maintained that all of the Deputies had personal cell phones and they were willing to use them for official purposes. However the Commission did not approve of that. A new repeater is being considered but it was pointed out it was only a partial fix. The problems with the county system would be overcome by the installation of a completely new system utilizing a number of radio towers. This subject is being looked into but the Commission was told such an installation would take a year to complete. According to the article a shouting match broke out between the Sheriff and the head of the County Commission. It will be interesting to see how this situation plays out and is finally resolved.
SHARES - Since 2001 there have been 28 more radio stations added to the SHARES network thus now having a total of 1101 HF stations. These stations represent 91 Federal, state, and private industry resources. This is an increase of 6 since 2001. The SHARES stations are now located in every one of the States and at 20 locations overseas. The list of SHARES Resource Contributors can be seen at www.ncs.gov/n3/SHARES_Resource_Contributors.jpg.
For further information on numbers stations, and other mystery communications we recommend . . .
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©2003 Don Schimmel.
