Who’s Jamming the Hams?

eHam.net News — City’s radio hams have been left baffled by cryptic signals in a foreign language which are originating in the deep seas off the Arabian coast. They have written to central government agencies asking for an investigation. Mumbai’s circuit of amateur radio operators — or hams as they are called — is being rudely interrupted by indecipherable signals originating in the high seas off the west coast, prompting the group to write to the union ministry of telecommunications and other central government agencies to probe the source of this suspect transmission. The blips, being picked up by the radio operators’ VHF wireless sets for five or so months now, became a cause for concern only after they were traced to about 100 nautical miles, or 185 kilometres, off the Maharashtra-Gujarat coastline. When the hams homed in on the origin point with their direction-finding equipment and antennae, they shot off urgent letters to the wireless advisor at the ministry, the Prime Minister’s Office and top defence officers apart from the police, alerting them to the disturbance. The spokesperson for the citybased group Ham Radio Operators, Ankur Puranik, told Mumbai Mirror that the irregular signals are encroaching on the 144-146MHz bandwidth allotted to their two-way radio transmission. About 70 of the city’s 200 hams have heard these fishy signals at various times of the day, but mostly at night. What makes it all disquieting is that the signal dispatchers do not use the mandatory call sign — a unique identifier for transmissions and broadcasting — by which each ham in the world can be identified and tracked, implying that they do not want their identity or location to be known. “And they speak in a language we don’t understand,” Puranik said.

from Ham Radio Update http://ift.tt/2f5HZk7
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