Many thanks to SWLing Post contributor, Gene Paradis, who writes:
I have something to share…It is on every night on 5.620 MHz around 010 UTC some folks talking language unknown..It goes on most of the night..This is an aero frequency but these folks are there every night. Hope to find out more. Maybe fishing vessels or something else–? It is these mysteries that make this hobby fun!
My schedule as of late has not allowed dedicated listening time on this frequency. I would certainly suspect fishing vessel communications, but can’t confirm.
Post readers: can you help Gene identify this over-the-air chatter? Please comment!
The latest update from ILGradio lists these possibilities.
5620.0 Colombian Navy 0000-0800
5620.0 Medecins Sans Frontier 0000-2400
Nothing on the Klingenfuss database for this one, nothing reported in the last two issues of TSM either.
It could be about anything as there is a lot of unauthorized use of HF by private networks, especially in Asia and Latin America. My Spanish is very good and over the years I have tried to figure out who dozens of these networks were but rarely had any luck. A few I was able to narrow down in the 1990s were Mexican police, the Peruvian army, and a Venezuelan mining company. Overall the quantity of these kinds of networks has gone down considerably as cell phone service has permeated into more and more remote locations. But there are still plenty of places with little or no cell service. That’s why fishing fleets are a common source of these networks, but they aren’t the only source. Two weeks ago I was in Humahuaca and San Antonio de los Cobres, two towns high up in the northern Argentine Andes. Both towns had cell service and 2G data coverage, but I noted that several official buildings had HF antennas (folded dipoles) on the roof. There are probably a lot of little villages in the mountains that still don’t have cellular coverage and HF would work a lot better in that mountainous country than VHF/UHF.
In April 2018 I did some monitoring of the 6200-6400 kHz range while DXing in San Ramon, on the edge of the jungle in central Peru, and found lots of communications networks. From the context, most were connecting jungle villages with a central base station. One was concerned about when their shipment of soft drinks was going to arrive. But the stations just used their own nicknames for IDs and I wasn’t able to pin down where any station was other than one base station was in Pucallpa. Another network – apparently belonging to a trucking company – had messages about shipments running along the PanAmerican highway from Lima to various cities in northern Peru. The PanAm there is a beautiful four-lane divided highway but there are long stretches in the desert there without cell coverage. But not a single one of those Peruvian networks was authorized. I know that because the Peruvian Ministry of Transport and Communication has an amazingly good website where, among other things, they list all their frequency authorizations. Not one of the ones I heard was listed. And I’ve seen that the Ministry updates the listings about once a month. For full details about the MTC frequency listings, check this page on my website:
http://www.donmooredxer.com/lam/sam2017/dxutes/peruutes.html
I kind of hoped there was some recorded audio of this chatter, i’ll look for it on a receiver tonight.
Dunno, but ive heard a group of asians (japanese?) on 80 meter USB almost every night around 4 am lately. 3600 to as high as 3850. No call signs used, 5-8 people. Also had some spanish speakers in USB last year. Fairly strong, base stations, on/near the east coast.