[CQ-Contest] 40M "Woodpecker"

VR2BrettGraham vr2bg at harts.org.hk
Fri Jun 17 22:10:07 EDT 2005


K8IA continued on from N7MAL:

>>Bob somewhere very recently there was an article about this new radar. 
>>Unfortunately senility is setting in and I can't find it. What I remember 
>>is it is a project being tested by the Australian Gov't. The web pages 
>>that reference the tests have been 'pulled'.
>>For information there have been several occasions over the last few 
>>months on 75m when the usual morning path to the Pacific has been 
>>completely useless due to this new OTHR. Some of the 'old-timers' have 
>>tried the old trick of matching their keyer speed to the pulse rate but 
>>it had no effect.
>>Good Luck in AA.
>
>Hi Mal.....What I was hearing, and confirmed by several others here in 
>CADXA with decent 40m directionality, was definitely not peaking towards 
>VK. Pointing towards JA/BY/DS etc (310 or so) peaked the woodpecker and 
>then going to VK (240-270) dropped the signal several s-units. This was 
>using a fairly clean pattern 3 el 40m yagi. This was repeatable throughout 
>the 5 hrs I listened.
>
>AA Test will be messy. Maybe I'll do something else. ;-)

 From VR, this thing is usually well over S9 & is fairly consistently 10 dB
down on a 13m high doublet than a GP, so for my distance to the most
likely BY location for such an OTH radar does not correlate with other
QTFs we have gotten.

I have been unable to get a null on it with a rotary doublet at 16m.

The same signal is QTF 230 or so from JA3, which is a little too far west
of VK6 for the RAAF's system called JORN (located in VK4/6/8, with
control from VK5).

 From 9M6, it is often 30 over on a GP.  Now have QSN with rotary
dipole there of good nulls either straight south or straight north of
there.

QSN from FT5XO also leaves us wondering, so please - anybody
with anything that shows directivity, please have a listen & put
a QSN on your local cluster, hopefully with a QTF.

There is also another Woodpecker run by RAF from ZC4.  IARU
Region 1 intruder watchers have thought this came from there &
from VR the null on a rotary dipole has always been pointing that
way.  However, unlike RAAF's JORN that we now have the best
assertion yet via WIA that not only it does not but _cannot_ operate
in spectrum it should not use, the UK seem to have no qualms being
an electromagnetic pariah state, terrorizing world-wide civil society by
ignoring the ITU Convention it signed up to.

The radiosporting community, if we can pull it together, is exactly
the opposite of what telecom authorities think of hams from my
15-odd years fighting the VS6/VR telecom authority.  We have the
hardware, familiarity with propagation & most importantly (I would
hope) a distaste for intruders.

Anyone who is the slightest bit enraged by this is encouraged to
Google on words like "Akrotiri" & "Pluto II" about the ZC4 intruder
& simply "JORN" for the VK system.  And there is more than that -
have a look at some of the reports at www.iarur1-ms.org of who else
is in primary, exclusive allocations to the amateur service by the UN.

If this is BY, it might be from BS/1S-area & that does jive with QTFs
so far.  If we can get some QSNs from HS, 9V, YB or VK & they
do start to suggest this, I do not know if HARTS & the VR2 ham
community can make it move like it appears we did to the 12m sea
surface radar that laid waste to that band for the past few years.
There are suspected to be three BY OTH radars, though the only
one I can find anything certain about does not fit our QTFs.

Remember, a rotary doublet (as in a non-reasonant dipole) will show
good nulls off the ends.  The direction(s) null(s) is/are seen off the
sides & back of a beam can be even more helpful than where the
signal peaks from.  When the signal is first heard & how that relates
to time-of-day is also helpful (in VR, it's big as life from well before
sunset to well after sunrise) - or arrival angle based on listening to
different antennas.

I believe all of today's Woodpeckers - from EP & also from ex-USSR
again - cannot be jammed like we used to be able to do.  As these
nasty pieces of work have been on IARU Monitoring Service's radar
screen (pun intended) for some time now, the time has probably
come for individual amateurs to approach their local telecom
authorities to complain.  Anyone with media connections might also
consider pitching in - if CNN International was interested in 2m
intruders here in VR, I'm sure there should be interest somewhere in
what is going on in ZC4.

73, VR2BrettGraham



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