November Monitoring Times

I've received a few emails from folks upset by the photo caption: "Israeli Defense Forces female soldiers slouching toward Jaffa with guns and radio." I was at fault in not putting "slouching toward Jaffa" in quotation marks as this was the exact description by photographer Helena Cobban. I just liked the way it sounded...

I did not intend the phrase as a political comment, but Helena no doubt did. The phrase is apparently a reference to a poem "The Second Coming" by W.B. Yeats, in which the last two lines read:
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

My apology to anyone who was offended; no offense was meant.

Beginners Corner

Sharp-eyed readers will have noted that the captions under the lawnmower monitoring post installation were reversed. Also, one reader noted that dust and dirt can be a problem with electronics. So now you can picture this installation enclosed in a zippered plastic bag!

CORRECTIONS AND UPDATES

Update:
Says Mark Cleary, who provides the updates for the US Coast Guard Assets document just posted yesterday on the MT Readers website: "They always change things up after I send it out! From intercepts today (Oct 2):

6025 is now at Clearwater vice San Diego
6596 operating out of Key West/Miami vice New Orleans
6012 now at OPBAT
1703 logged near Kodiak

OCTOBER 2007 Corrections -

First Look - Phone number to order Radiosophy HD-100 is 877-4HD-RADIO (443-7234). Although it is toll-free, the prefix is 877, not 800 as stated in the article.

Scanning Report - Jim Richardson of Mountain NewsNet reports that “Regrettably the information you provided regarding Glenwood Springs, Colorado in the October issue is outdated. All city and county agencies have moved to the states P-25 Digital Trunked Radio System (DTRS) over the summer.”

Missing an Issue?

If you are missing your July or August Monitoring Times, it may be because the ink on your label smeared and the post office could not deliver it, nor could we tell who didn't get their issue! Please call 800-438-8155 or email order@grove-ent.com with your name and address to report a missing July or August issue. We believe the problem has been resolved with the printer, and hope it will not be a problem again. Thanks for understanding!

JUNE MT "On the Bench" column -

Downloading the DReaM.exe program -

If you tried to locate the pre-compiled DRM software and couldn’t find the file referenced in the June article, go to http://drm.sourceforge.net/forums, click on Support. Pinned to the top is an e-mail with a number of places where you can download a pre-compiled program without having to compile it yourself from source files. However, for those wishing to compile their own, the source files are available from http://drm.sourceforge.net

KS4ZR BEACON CHANGES

Ken Reitz KS4ZR, columnist for Monitoring Times, has made some changes to the beacon we introduced in this blog a few weeks ago. He has reprogrammed the message and put up
a separate antenna for the beacon (so he can use the
other one!) The new antenna is a vertical. He has also relocated to
28.259.5 MHz. Everything else is the same: 10 watts out CW from a
Uniden 2510 controlled by Communications Specialists ID-8.

Multipsk Website

Some readers have reported problems accessing the F6cte website for downloading the Multipsk software reviewed in April's "Computers & Radio" column. The following site is an FTP site for downloads in the U.S., and it provides links to several other reflector sites as well.
http://multipsk.eqth.org/

Happy decoding!

Tune in to 10 Meter Beacons!

Watch for the May issue of Monitoring Times and Ken Reitz's article on "Exploring the World of 10 Meter Beacons." After he finished the article, Ken decided to put his own amateur radio beacon on the air, which he did on March 28. Give a listen for KS4ZR/B on 28.222.2 MHz out of Virginia. He is using an old Uniden 2510 transceiver with reduced power to 10 watts feeding a dipole at 25 feet. A Com-Spec ID-8 controller runs the beacon.

Correction to April Digital Digest

The illustration which was supposed to show the Russian RFSM2400 program decoding MIL-188-110A was instead a screenshot of a Link11 signal, intended for the May column.

The correct illustration is shown here.