Electronic surveillance for the ham bands?
USS Barb, Adak, Alaska, 1985. Photo by AE5X.
Various blog postings and DX forums have recently discussed the poor behavior of many DXers in pile-up situations - intentional jamming, pirates and other forms these folks have of demonstrating their inbreeding.
“What to do about it” is an ongoing theme…but it is a theme that can’t be implemented without knowing who they are.
With today’s DSP capabilities and with powerful computers and sophisticated software, there may soon be a way to tell who these people are. I believe the possibility could exist.
Being exclusively a CW op, I’ll speak strictly from that perspective:
First, consider the software that enables skimmers. Before VE3NEA developed it, most of us couldn’t even have imagined its existence. When it was released, it took the contest community by storm. It was a game-changer and new rules regarding its use had to be implemented.
A modern home computer can now decode multiple CW signals over a broad portion of spectrum and display the decoded text in real-time…and display the numerous signals in a frequency domain presentation.
Now consider this:
Each transmitter has its own electronic signature. This is true of ham transmitters, commercial TV stations, radar…everything. For example, no two Elecraft K3′s form a 20 wpm dot or a dash in exactly the same way. They will differ in terms of rise time, fall time, harmonic content and other parameters.
Each individual rig has a unique fingerprint. Could modern software be written that would allow a number of calibrated receivers to discern one transmitter’s signature from another’s? If so, could a database then be built?
Phone would be even simpler. Everyone’s voice has its own timbre and numerous other characteristics. My smart phone has an app that will allow me to place it near a music source. After a few minutes of “listening” – during which time it digitizes the song, sends that data to an online database for comparison and identification - it displays the name of the song and the singer.
It may sound far-fetched – and perhaps it is for this application – but such techniques have been used for decades by various militaries who had the technology to do it. Today, we have more computing technology in our shacks that a nuke submarine had in the 1980′s.
Back in the 1980′s - when the words Snoop Tray, Snoop Plate, Sheet Bend (Google them if you wish) were a part of my daily vocabulary - we routinely discerned which platform we were hearing. Not which radar type – but rather which individual radar and therefore which individual ship, submarine, etc.
Submarine sonar surveillance does the same thing with acoustic signatures.
I can’t go into any more detail on what was possible back then, but it was amazing. And that was 30 years ago.
I think the solution to much of today’s problems lies not in blacklisting or any of the other solutions that have so far been offered. All of those methods can be beaten. The solution will be software-driven.
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Themocracy
Oh, mention the anti-radiation missile launched by a drone with just enough power to take that very specific station/antenna out, hi, hi… and then the FCC comes in to demand restitution for the price of the action…
Hey, we’re still two weeks away from April 1!
interesting off road trip into the Russian naval radars. Google is our friend.
Mike
And here was my receiver:
http://www.fas.org/man/dod-101/sys/ship/weaps/an-wlr-1.htm
What about using a network of SDRs to do multilateration on the offending signals?
Yes, that would be another possibility, due to GPS timing capabilities we now have regardless of location.
It’s a shame that technology is being considered as a solution to a problem that decent manners previously rendered irrelevant.
That technology would definitely allow you to develop a ‘fingerprint’ database of rigs/offenders, but how does that bring you any closer to actually identifying ‘who’ they are?
In the same way that the Reverse Beacon Network knows that I (or you) called CQ on a given date, time, band and CW speed – by listening for CQ’s and then storing that data. No one can call CQ anymore without it being received and stored by at least one SDR receiver on the RBN.
The sytem I envision would also store CW or digitized voice, RTTY, etc data of legitimate QSO’s for future comparison purposes.
Or how’s this:
When I bought a brand new Glock handgun a few years ago, it came with a spent casing. In other words, a bullet had been fired from it at the factory…the projectile is on file somewhere with my gun’s rifling characteristics for comparison purposes to help solve any future crime comitted with this gun. In a similar way (and for a similar reason), transceiver manufactures could cause an embedded ID pulse to be transmitted every time a rig was keyed. It would be brief and undetectable in normal communications, but it would ID the rig.
I know that’s extreme and it would be a sad day for our hobby to come to that – in fact, I’d leave it long before then. But the idea (and legal requirement) for us to ID ourselves on the air need not remain at our voluntary discretion. Future rigs could “self-ID” – there’d be no jamming then.
There are no more anonymous phone calls and I’m not referring to caller ID but to the numerous info that gets stored regarding each individual cell phone every time a call is made. Anonymity doesn’t exist on the internet or on cellular networks. Can ham radio be far behind…
How would a lack of anonymity affect behavior on the ham bands?
(No, I’m really not a conspiracy theorist!)
I understand what you are saying now…building a database off of every day activity, and then using that for comparison against misbehaving signals.
Exactly.
Hi John,
I was just thinking along similar lines the other day:
With Skimmer, it is possible to identify the out-of-turn callers / continuous callers in a pile-up. Most of these people will sign with their real call-callsign (as they really want to make a QSO).
By hooking into the DXpeditioner’s logging program (AutoHotKey can do that for us), it is possible to know when the DXpeditioner is in the time period between giving a signal report to some station and sending the “thank you” message.
All the stations that Skimmer captures in that time period, are calling out of turn. Count each station’s number of offenses, cut off the bottom x percent (that may be genuine errors) and take action on the rest.
Action may consist of: sending a polite e-mail (in case the offender never learned what correct procedure is), followed by either silently or publicly blacklisting if the station keeps performing the same way.
A pity that I even have been thinking about putting technology to use in this way, but I’m really fed up with the way that part of my EU colleagues behave in a pile-up.
73, and good dxing – no matter what,
Frank PA4N
It’s not just Europeans – in recent pile-ups for H4, there were very rude and persistent calls from a PY2 and an FM5. I’ve heard the FM5 a number of times, continuously sending his call even after the DX has responded to a specific station. And of course that N3 we all know.
Good DXing to you too, Frank – see you in the war zone!
Here’s an idea :-)
http://www.noiseblankers.com/hijinks/2013/1/18/fcc-establishes-national-qrm-frequency.html