It will be interesting to find out what it is and I'm sure we will. It was
S7 here this morning at 04z, I haven't listened on 160 for a few weeks.
Interestingly last year a 59+60db carrier appeared on 1830MHz local to me
in NW England. Some folk could here it now and then 300 miles away. I DF'd
it with in 2 days of it coming on so it didn't really "go public". Here's
the tale.
To cut a long story short after 2 evenings DFing using a professional
Rohde-Schwarz receiver and hand portable DF gun it was found to be coming
from inside a Ministry of Defence transmitter site around 6 miles away.
It is in the public domain this site was the main transmitter site during
the Falklands War for submariner LF communication (I believe the rx was
somewhere on the south coast) I'm unsure what exactly goes on there now, but
I am told they no longer have any LF transmitters.
With trepidation I decided to try and get in touch with the site. A lot of
these places are remote controlled from hundreds of miles away these days
and the only local presence are contracted civilians.
After around 30 minutes of phone calls starting on the MOD website I got
through to someone on site, who listened with intent to my tail and must
have thought I was some sort of "nutter". They took my number and said
someone would be in touch. (when have you heard that before and it's never
happens).
A couple of hours later a guy from the MOD called who wanted to do some
tests with me. He wanted to switch off 8 transmitters, each in turn to see
if the carrier disappeared. When he switched off transmitter #6, bingo it
went. That was the night transmitter (he couldn't tell me what Freq its
fundamental was on, or should I say wasn't allowed to, but the day
transmitter on the same Freq didn't cause a problem, he would keep that
transmitter switched off and get an engineer to the site ASAP.
Less than an hour later a Lady left a message on my answer phone, advising
they had found a transmitter fault and thanked me for drawing it to their
attention.
Excellent customer care from the MOD.
Before I started this process the wife said to me "do you really
think the Ministry Of Defence are going to spend any time listening to you
about your amateur
radio noise." I must admit I was rather surprised with the service!
Let's hope Ofcom can find it and tell us what it was. I wouldn't be at all
surprised if it was a similar fault this time in another part of the
country.
Neil G0JHC
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