This is NOT a "sea story", it really
happened...
(see below for more)
==================
Here's another Navy related story, also
completely true.
I've finally written about what
I did on the air in high school...
1969, White Bear Lake,
Minnesota - I had just gotten my General
class ham license and was 16
yrs old, and a CW fanatic. I was using
an old home-made tube-type keyer that some older ham gave me
with a pair of straight keys bolted back to back for a squeeze
paddle. I had a Johnson Ranger 2 transmitter and HQ-110
receiver and a 40m dipole in the back yard of my parents
home. Late at night when the ham band got empty I would
tune around below 40m and discovered the
Russian ship-to-shore traffic nets. The net
control station was
usually zipping
along at 30 wpm or faster and it was fun
to listen to the ships check in. I figured out
that it was Russians
from the ITU assignments of the callsigns. When there
were no hams on 40m to work, I wanted to see if the Russians
could work me, nice DX with 40 watts! So I would listen
to the QTC tape and then break them and check in with the call
of one of the ships they had traffic for. Sure
enough, they always heard me in Minnesota and sent me down
freq to get the traffic. But it was almost
always below the range of the Ranger VFO, I couldn't meet the
op and after a few minutes of calling me the net control would
call again on the main freq. I'd answer, he'd speed up a
bit and be annoyed and send me down freq again, and by the
third time they would finally ignore my signal. But at
least I knew I could work DX ! I did this off and on for
a couple of years.
I graduated from high school, went to college
for a year, and in 1971 enlisted in the Navy in the Advanced
Electronics Program. I was selected
for a security clearance and became a CTM (Crypto Tech,
Maintenance) and went to ET school on Treasure Island, then
schools for KW-7 Crypto at Mare Island and Mod 28 TTY in
Norfolk. After 2 years of duty in Rota Spain (see above
article) I ended up at the Navy HFDF site at RAF Edzell in NE
Scotland. The building we worked in was inside
the huge Wullenwebber antenna array. There were about 14
Navy HFDF sites around the world linked by real-time encrypted
Teletype circuits.
1976 - I was on
CW on the ham bands a lot from Scotland in my off duty
time and could copy 45 plus wpm. At work (still in the
Navy) I repaired teletype equipment and we worked in some
areas of the receiver building where they copied all TTY
signals, and other areas where the CTR
ops (the ones taught to copy CW) monitored the
Russian ship-to-shore CW nets. When
a ship checked into the net, they would copy the
callsign and get a DF cut on the signal, which would then lock
in all the other HFDF sites around the world to the same
frequency to all get a DF cut on the signal, if it could be
heard. Every 3 months the Russians would change the frequencies they used as the bands
opened and closed each day, to confuse us, so the HFDF ops
would be really busy for a while figuring out all the
frequencies again (every Russian ship, cargo
ships and even fishing trawlers, were considered possible
military vessels and were kept track of).
One night on a mid-watch a Mod 28 printer broke
at the HFDF CW posit and I replaced it. I asked the
op working the
posit when there would be some traffic so I could be sure
the printer was working,
and he said we just had to wait until one of the HFDF sites
heard a new CW signal and the spot came over our secure TTY
net. So I stood around for a while, listening to the CW
net he was monitoring.
The Russian shore station net control was being
a real jerk, not slowing below 30 wpm, no matter how slow or
ragged the shipboard operators were. One poor guy on
a ship, probably bouncing around in the North Atlantic,
could barely send and the net control rudely chewed him out on
the air. I turned to the CTR
and said "man, that net control sure is being an
asshole". Wow, our op turned to me and half way fell out
of his chair, he was so
shocked that a Matman (what they called us Maintenance techs)
could copy CW. "You can copy that in your head?
He's doing
40's ?! (Navy term for going 40 wpm) You've been
copying the whole thing?!". I told him sure, I'm a ham
and I only use CW, 40 wpm isn't really that fast...
Well, once I had listened to the HFDF ops
for a while I realized what they had been doing every day and
night on the radio for the last 15 years, and I hoped they got a laugh from
my messing with the Russians :-) I was surprised
that the FBI never showed up at our door in Minnesota, asking
why I was using
a Russian callsign, but of course to ask that question would
give away that someone knew, and our HFDF capabilities were
Top Secret for many decades.
Glenn AE0Q (ex WA0VPK, GM5BKC, ZB2WZ)
CTM2 USN
NSGA Rota, Spain
NSGA Edzell, Scotland
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