Fourth edition of the N&O column / Spooks newsletter

(Date: Tue, 28 Jul 1998 05:30:15 GMT)

High Pitched Polytone (XPH)

Andy Bell sent us the daytime (UTC) sked for the XPH station.

06.00 UTC	9441 kHz AM
06.20 UTC	11041 kHz AM
06.40 UTC	12141 kHz AM

Transmissions are on Wednesday and Friday.

There are also nighttime transmissions; the times and frequencies are unknown to me, but are probably at 21.00, 21.20 and 21.40 UTC, although I am not sure about this. Note that they change the frequencies each month.

The following freqs were used in June: 9394, 11494, 13394 kHz. Does anyone know if the same sets of freqs are repeated after a certain period?

Every now and then the station sends 'null' messages, just like the 'normal' voice and morse stations do.

Andy sez « Sounds like the station call up is 4 tones (ident?) repeated, followed by 2 tones (group count?) then into tone groups »

Hans-Friedrich Dumrese heard the following sequence:

4 Tones (like A-C-A-F) )
4 Tones (like A-C-A-F) ) repeated for 2 mins
4 Tones (like A-C-A-F) )
2 Tones (like G-D) )
and at the end I counted 12 tones,

Hans-Friedrich.

Following this scheme, this could mean

3 tones - id of the recepient
1 tone - number of messages
2 tones - group count
message
12 tones - two groups of six zero's

Do we have someone in the audience who can write a decoder program for these signals? Who wants to accept this challenge?

Comments are most welcome!