Tag Archives: Dennis Dura

Radio Waves: Bell Labs Horn Antenna At Risk, Tuckerton Tower, The Warsaw Radio Mast, and End of AM Car Radio?

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Radio Waves:  Stories Making Waves in the World of Radio

Welcome to the SWLing Post’s Radio Waves, a collection of links to interesting stories making waves in the world of radio. 

A special thanks to SWLing Post contributor, Dennis Dura, for these news tips! Enjoy:

Historic Bell Labs Horn Antenna At Risk, Holmdel Citizens Group Says (Patch.com)

Citizens for Informed Land Use is against a proposal before the Planning Board to reclassify the former Nokia site for redevelopment.

HOLMDEL, NJ — Citizens for Informed Land Use, Preserve Holmdel and others are rallying to preserve the Bell Labs Horn Antenna, which they say is threatened if the 43-acre site it stands on is reclassified for residential development.

The property at 791 Holmdel Road is home to the Bell Labs Horn Antenna, once used by Bell Labs scientists Dr. Robert Wilson, who still lives in the township, and Dr. Arno Penzias, to study microwave radiation from beyond the Milky Way, the organization says.

The site is also described by the group “as the highest point in Monmouth County, providing remarkable views of Raritan Bay and Manhattan.”

The scientists’ “research confirmed evidence of the Big Bang Theory as the origin of the universe and earned both men a Nobel Prize in Physics in 1978,” the land use group said in a news release.

But on Nov. 22, the Township Committee approved a resolution directing the Planning Board to study whether the former Nokia site in the Crawford Hill section of Holmdel – the site of the Horn Antenna – should be reclassified as an “area in need of redevelopment.” [Continue reading…]

New Jersey’s Disturbing Monolith Secrete: The Rise and Fall of Tuckerton Tower (YouTube)

In Tuckerton, NJ, a massive cement monolith sits out of place, and upon closer inspection, out of time. You see, this gigantic block was once the base of the tallest structure in North America and the second tallest in the world after the Eiffel Tower. Built in 1912, the Tuckerton tower stood at 825 feet and was the first and most potent transatlantic broadcasting tower ever, but here’s the twist, although it was on US soil, it was entirely built by and belonged to Germany.

Why the tallest tower on earth collapsed | The Warsaw Radio Mast (YouTube)

The Warsaw Radio Mast (Polish: Maszt radiowy w Konstantynowie) was a radio mast located near G?bin, Poland, and the world’s tallest structure at 646.38 metres (2,120.7 ft) from 1974 until its collapse on 8 August 1991.

Designed by Jan Polak, and one of the last radio masts built under Communist rule, the mast was conceived for height and ability to broadcast the “propaganda of the successes” to remote areas such as Antarctica. It was the third tallest structure ever built, being surpassed as the tallest by the Burj Khalifa tower in the United Arab Emirates in 2009 and Merdeka 118 tower in Malaysia in 2022. Designed by Jan Polak, its construction started in July 1970, was completed on 18 May 1974, and its transmitter entered regular service on 22 July of that year. The opening of the mast was met with extensive celebration and news coverage by the Polish Film Chronicle.

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NOAA weather radio “needs some serious upgrades”

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The Midland WR120 weather radio.

Many thanks to SWLing Post contributor, Dennis Dura, who shares the following article from Slate:

The Radio System That Keeps Us Safe From Extreme Weather Is Under Threat

NOAA Weather Radio needs some serious upgrades.

In March, a group of massive tornadoes struck communities around Des Moines, Iowa. Seven people were killed, including two children under 5. The crisis received attention not only due to its human cost, but also because of delays in emergency wireless communications: Thanks to a broken fiber optic cable at the Dallas-Fort Worth National Weather Service offices, wireless emergency transmissions were switched to an auxiliary satellite system, which all NWS offices use. Overloaded with extreme weather messages from elsewhere in the Midwest, the satellite messaging system found itself backed up just as the Iowa tornadoes reached their peak. This caused anywhere from a two- to nine-minute delay in tornado warning messages—and may have significantly reduced warning time at a moment when seconds count. The issue lasted for several hours as the deadly tornadoes ripped through the state.

NOAA Weather Radio, on the other hand, continued broadcasting effectively during the crisis. According to Bruce Jones, a weather radio expert and meteorologist with Midland Radio Corporation, “because the NWR broadcast comes direct from the National Weather Service local forecast office, those NOAA Weather Radio alerts and warnings were unimpeded and reached folks immediately.”

Often referred to as the “voice” of the National Weather Service, NOAA Weather Radio is a 24/7 public service that broadcasts weather information from more than 1,000 stations across the United States and many of its territories. And while Des Moines was a great success story for NOAA Weather Radio, the service faces mounting issues with aging technology and infrastructure, raising concerns over whether it will be able to continue protecting communities facing extreme weather.

[…]While NOAA Weather Radio has historically been an important, consistent, and life-saving means of emergency communication, it may not be for long. Outdated technology and failed attempts at modernization are threatening the NOAA Weather Radio system and resulting in extended outages for locations at risk. And as the climate crisis intensifies, this important technology is often vulnerable to the weather about which it’s meant to inform.

Interviews with NWS employees about outages reveal many local technical problems that take out communications, sometimes for weeks or months.

[…]Recent congressional action, however, has given new life to the possibility of systemic weather radio modernization. Rep. Stephanie Bice, a Republican from Oklahoma, has proposed the NOAA Weather Radio Modernization Act of 2021, which passed in the House of Representatives in May but has yet to pass in the Senate. From Oklahoma, Bice was well aware of the need for consistent weather communications during natural disasters like tornadoes, which affect her constituents.

The bill would authorize $20 million to expand coverage to the remaining 5 percent of the country without access to NOAA Weather Radio communications, as well as $40 million to modernize its hardware and software, including upgrading communication from copper wires to Internet services. According to Wesley Harkins, a representative from Bice’s office, “this paves the way for future development and provides failsafe options, so NWR is never down for an extended period of time.”

[…]The NWS itself acknowledges the benefits of this legislation. Maureen O’Leary, deputy director of public affairs at the NOAA, told me via email that improvements would include “expanding NWR coverage to rural and underserved communities, national parks, and recreation areas.”[…]

Click here to read the full article at Slate.com.

Click here to read articles relating to weather radio in the SWLing Post archives.

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CBS Miami features WRMI and the “Shortwaves for Freedom” campaign

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Many thanks to SWLing Post contributor, Dennis Dura, who shares the following article from CBS Miami:

Shortwave Radio Signal From Florida Cow Pasture Reaches Russia Carrying Latest News (CBS Miami)

Click here to view on YouTube.

MIAMI (CBSMiami) – A massive shortwave radio antenna sits in a cow pasture north of Lake Okeechobee in Central Florida.

“We have 14, 100,000-watt transmitters and 23 antennas beaming to all parts of the world,” said Jeff White, the general manager of Miami-based WRMI.

The multi-signal station is said to be one of the largest shortwave radio operations in the world.

WRMI stands for Radio Miami International and worldwide coverage means it can easily send signals into Ukraine and Russia.

Shortwave is old school technology, think of World War II or the Cold War, as American-produced news beamed behind the iron curtain. Now, during the invasion of Ukraine, Russia has shut down journalism as we know it.

Kate Neiswender, one of the guiding lights behind funding news programming for Russian audiences, said, “they were going to pass a law making journalism essentially illegal, facing a 15-year criminal penalty.”

Neiswender and fellow former journalists formed a fundraiser to beam news into Russia, where state-controlled media, at best, does not tell the true story of the invasion and many Russian citizens have no clue about the severity of the invasion.

“This is a journalistic pursuit more than anything else,” said Neiswender. [Continue reading at CBS Miami…]

Click here to read our previous post about Shortwaves for Freedom and contribute to the campaign here.

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Radio Waves: Old Gen FM Radio, Radio Burst Model Challenged, Iceland WebSDR, and Ida Destroys WZRH/KVDU Tower

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Radio Waves:  Stories Making Waves in the World of Radio

Because I keep my ear to the waves, as well as receive many tips from others who do the same, I find myself privy to radio-related stories that might interest SWLing Post readers.  To that end: Welcome to the SWLing Post’s Radio Waves, a collection of links to interesting stories making waves in the world of radio. Enjoy!

Many thanks to SWLing Post contributors Dennis Dura, Troy Riedel, Dan Van Hoy, and the Southgate ARC for the following tips:

FM Radio, the choice of an old generation (Hackaday)

Had the pandemic not upended many of this summer’s fun and games, many of my friends would have made a trip to the MCH hacker camp in the Netherlands earlier this month. I had an idea for a game for the event, a friend and I were going to secrete a set of those low-power FM transmitters as numbers stations around the camp for players to find and solve the numerical puzzles they would transmit. I even bought a few cheap FM transmitter modules from China for evaluation, and had some fun sending a chiptune Rick Astley across a housing estate in Northamptonshire.

To me as someone who grew up with FM radio and whose teen years played out to the sounds of BBC Radio 1 FM it made absolute sense to do a puzzle in this way, but it was my personal reminder of advancing years to find that some of my friends differed on the matter. Sure, they thought it was a great idea, but they gently reminded me that the kids don’t listen to any sort of conventional broadcast radio these days, instead they stream their music, so very few of them would have the means for listening to my numbers stations. Even for me it’s something I only use for BBC Radio 4 in the car, and to traverse the remainder of the FM dial is to hear a selection of easy listening, oldies, and classical music. It’s becoming an older person’s medium, and it’s inevitable that like AM before it, it will eventually wane.

There are two angles to this that might detain the casual hacker; first what it will mean from a broadcasting and radio spectrum perspective, and then how it is already influencing some of our projects. [Continue reading…]

New observations challenge popular radio burst model (Sky and Telescope)

Strange behavior caught by two radio observatories may send theorists back to the drawing board.

Fourteen years ago, the first fast radio burst (FRB) was discovered. By now, many hundreds of these energetic, millisecond-duration bursts from deep space have been detected (most of them by the CHIME radio observatory in British Columbia, Canada), but astronomers still struggle to explain their enigmatic properties. A new publication in this week’s Nature “adds a new piece to the puzzle,” says Victoria Kaspi (McGill University, Canada). “In this field of research, surprising twists are almost as common as new results.”

Most astronomers agree that FRBs are probably explosions on the surfaces of highly magnetized neutron stars (so-called magnetars). But it’s unclear why most FRBs appear to be one-off events, while others flare repeatedly. In some cases, these repeating bursts show signs of periodicity, and scientists had come up with an attractive model to explain this behavior, involving stellar winds in binary systems.

However, new observations by European radio telescopes may rule out this model.

Astronomers knew that FRB 20180916B, located in a galaxy some 475 million light-years away, produces multiple bursts about every 16 days, during a ‘window’ that lasts for a few days. “The idea was that the magnetar is part of a binary system with a 16.29-day period,” says Inés Pastor-Marazuela (University of Amsterdam), the first author of the new paper. If the companion star had a thick stellar wind that absorbs radio waves, the bursts would only be visible when the magnetar was on ‘our’ side of the orbit, she explains. [Continue reading…]

New WebSDR in Iceland (Southgate ARC)

Iceland’s IRA reports on August 24 Karl Georg Karlsson TF3CZ connected a new receiver over the internet covering 24-1800 MHz

A translation of the IRA post reads:

QTH is Perlan in Öskjuhlíð in Reykjavík. These are Airspy R2 SDR receivers for 24-1800 MHz (on VHF and UHF). The antenna is a Diamond D-190.

Karl Georg stated the following on FB:
The extension is not just for 2m, it can only be on one band at a time. So if one user switches, others who are connected also move between bands. (However, you can listen to each frequency within the same band). The receiver automatically tunes to APRS QRG 144.800 MHz, see the APRS website: http://SDR.ekkert.org/map

URL of the receiver
http://perlan.utvarp.com/#freq=24890000,mod=usb,sql=-150

Thanks to Karl Georg for his valuable contribution. This is an important addition for radio amateurs who experiment in these frequency ranges, as well as listeners and anyone interested in the spread of radio waves.

IRA Board

Source Iceland’s national amateur radio society, the IRA
https://tinyurl.com/IcelandIRA

WZRH/KVDU Tower Destroyed By Hurricane Ida (Radio Insight)

The nearly 2000 foot tower utilized by Cumulus Media Alternative “Alt 92.3” WZRH LaPlace and iHeartMedia Variety Hits “104.1 The Spot” KVDU Houma LA was toppled by the winds of Hurricane Ida.

The 1999 foot structure was constructed in 1988 to host both signals. Only the bottom 150 to 200 feet remain standing. Both stations are licensed to operate with 100kW/591m, but have low powered auxiliary sites in downtown New Orleans. WZRH is located on the roof of Place St. Charles with 630w/200m. KVDU is on the Hancock Whitney Center with 1.2kW/220m.

In addition to KVDU, iHeartMedia Gospel 940 WYLD is silent at its cluster. The company reports that the remainder of its signals are now operational after all but 93.3 KQUE and 98.5 WYLD-FM were off the air on Monday.

Cumulus Media states that its entire cluster of WZRH, Adult R&B 102.9 KMEZ Belle Chasse, Country “106.1 Nash-FM” WRKN Picayune MS, and Hot AC “106.7 The Krewe” KKND Port Sulphur LA are off the air. [Continue reading…]

 

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Radio Waves: New Ham Radio Store, SDR Market worth $14.5 billion by 2025, Retaining 87.7 FM, and Hard-Core-DX now on Slack

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Radio Waves:  Stories Making Waves in the World of Radio

Because I keep my ear to the waves, as well as receive many tips from others who do the same, I find myself privy to radio-related stories that might interest SWLing Post readers.  To that end: Welcome to the SWLing Post’s Radio Waves, a collection of links to interesting stories making waves in the world of radio. Enjoy!

Many thanks to SWLing Post contributors Tracy Wood, Bill Patalon, Dennis Dura, and Mike Agner for the following tips:

Amateur Radio Field Day synchronized with radio store’s Grand Opening (Ramona Sentinel)

Ham radio hobbyists will test their emergency preparedness skills alongside All Day Radios’ Grand Opening celebration in Ramona next weekend.

The Amateur Radio Field Day, a national emergency preparedness activity sponsored by the American Radio Relay League (ARRL), will be held in Ramona from 11 a.m. Saturday, June 26 and continues for 24 hours until 11 a.m. Sunday, June 27.

All Day Radios co-owner Peter Von Hagen will coordinate his Grand Opening in sync with Field Day from Friday through Sunday. The store is at 2855 state Route 67 between Dye Road and Hope Street, and Field Day will be held next door.

Von Hagen said the object of Field Day, held annually the fourth weekend in June, is to communicate on as many stations on amateur bands as possible to test the capabilities of communications equipment. Operators will be using backup sources of power such as solar power and batteries, he said.[…]

Software Defined Radio Market worth $14.5 billion by 2025 (Markets and Markets Newsletter)

The demand for software defined radios, especially in the commercial applications, such as telecommunication, transportation, and commercial aviation, has been affected to a great extent. Due to precautionary measures undertaken by many countries to stop the spread of COVID-19, several public/private development activities have been stopped, resulting in a drop in demand for software defined radios. However, this trend seems to vary from country to country. For instance, the demand for software defined radios in Europe and the Asia Pacific has been affected by the pandemic owing to the stoppage of development activities.

Based on application, the commercial segment of the software defined radio market is projected to witness the substantial growth during the forecast period

In terms of application, the market is segregated into commercial and defense. The rising usage of SDRs in commercial applications including aviation communication, marine communication, transportation, telecommunication is supporting the segment growth. Software defined radios are predominantly used in Air Traffic Control (ATC), transportation, and telecommunication applications. They are easily upgradable and provide high data transmission rate that further enhances its usage for commercial segment.

Cognitive/ Intelligent radio sub segment of the software defined radio market by type is projected to witness the highest CAGR owing to increasing improvements in cognitive radio products.[…]

FCC Report 6/13: Has A STA Based Doorway Been Cracked Open To Retain 87.7 FM Operations? (Radio Insight)

The FCC has sent another reminder to licensees of analog low power television stations regarding the July 13 drop-dead date. If an analog LPTV has not applied for a digital CP by that date its license will be cancelled and those that have Construction Permit’s but will not be ready to broadcast digitally will need to file a waiver request but still will be required to turn off their analog signal on the 13th and cease operation until ready to begin operating with their digital facilities.

This will of course affect the thirty something LPTV’s on analog channel 6 operating as radio stations on 87.75 MHz. While some of these signals will be moving to other channels, many will be remaining on channel 6 and have spent the past few years seeking loopholes to continue to broadcast an analog audio signal past the digital conversion deadline. Venture Technologies Group, which owns five affected stations, threw the door wide open this week with the grant of a six month STA for its KBKF-LD San Jose CA. KBKF-LD, which is leased to Educational Media Foundation to air its “Air 1” network, will be permitted to continue to offer an analog audio signal on 87.75 FM in its ATSC 3.0 digital video signal.[…]

Introducing: Hard-Core-DX Slack Chat (Hard-Core-DX)

From: Risto Kotalampi

Hi all,

Hard-Core-DX has been a pioneer in connecting shortwave listeners for nearly 30 years now. In its core it has been emailing lists and web sites and some other experiments which have either spun to become popular on their own (e.g. various ham related spotting sites or Online Log which is very popular in Finland) or not. Today we wanted to try to branch out into chat using Slack.

This is not the only chat there is… IRC, Facebook, Whatsapp etc have small circles for shortwave listeners but they have all been closed systems and not enabling an environment that can be used across devices and have conversations about any topics we choose. In the corporate world Slack has revolutionized communications amongst colleagues and partners in different companies. Much of work in U.S.A. small companies happens nowadays in Slack and not so much in emails.

Hard-Core-DX has signed up and created it’s very own Slack service.
If you want to join the HCDX Slack, please click this link and create your own HCDX Slack account:

https://join.slack.com/t/hard-core-dx/shared_invite/zt-rn83gamf-_UCfo9LYUVmoIBhb0~3cSg

Some basic rules of the Slack service:

  1. When you join it, you will see some channels that have been created already. You can join them or if you can’t find the topic you’d like to chat about, please create your own.
  2. HCDX will not be in the business of moderating what people are creating or discussing. If you create a channel, you will choose the policies of the discussion.
  3. This can naturally invite some abuse. We will deal with it with Slack’s policies as time comes.
  4. You are welcome to invite your DX friends to the HCDX Slack and grow the community. Invite happens from menu in upper left corner and link “Invite people to Hard-Core-DX”
  5. Let’s keep subjects within shortwave radio, broadcast, utility, pirate DXing & ham radio if possible to keep the service relevant to us
  6. This is an experiment… if it doesn’t gain popularity or becomes a burden, we will shut it down. But for now, if you want to experiment and see if this is where you want to chat with your DX friends, join the fun.

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Radio Waves: The Woodpecker, Gutter Antenna, Air Travel With Radios, and “A Spy in Every Embassy”

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Radio Waves:  Stories Making Waves in the World of Radio

Because I keep my ear to the waves, as well as receive many tips from others who do the same, I find myself privy to radio-related stories that might interest SWLing Post readers.  To that end: Welcome to the SWLing Post’s Radio Waves, a collection of links to interesting stories making waves in the world of radio. Enjoy!

Many thanks to SWLing Post contributors Dennis Dura and Dan Robinson for the following tips:

The Russian Woodpecker: Official Bird Of The Cold War Nests In Giant Antenna (Hackaday)

On July 4th, 1976, as Americans celebrated the country’s bicentennial with beer and bottle rockets, a strong signal began disrupting shortwave, maritime, aeronautical, and telecommunications signals all over the world. The signal was a rapid 10 Hz tapping that sounded like a woodpecker or a helicopter thup-thupping on the roof. It had a wide bandwidth of 40 kHz and sometimes exceeded 10 MW.

This was during the Cold War, and plenty of people rushed to the conclusion that it was some sort of Soviet mind control scheme or weather control experiment. But amateur radio operators traced the mysterious signal to an over-the-horizon radar antenna near Chernobyl, Ukraine (then part of the USSR) and they named it the Russian Woodpecker. Here’s a clip of the sound.

The frequency-hopping Woodpecker signal was so strong that it made communication impossible on certain channels and could even be heard across telephone lines when conditions were right. Several countries filed official complaints with the USSR through the UN, but there was no stopping the Russian Woodpecker. Russia wouldn’t even own up to the signal’s existence, which has since been traced to an immense antenna structure that is nearly half a mile long and at 490 feet, stands slightly taller than the Great Pyramid at Giza.[…]

Gutter Antenna, Ultimate Stealth Antenna? (Broken Signal)

Air Travel With Amateur Ham Radio Q&A (Ham Radio Crash Course)

A Spy in Every Embassy (Southgate ARC)

‘The intelligence coup of the century’. The extraordinary story of the longest running and most successful secret intelligence operation of the 20th Century.

For more than half a century, governments all over the world trusted a single company, Swiss-based Crypto AG, to keep the communications of their spies, soldiers and diplomats secret. But what none of its customers ever knew was that Crypto AG was owned for over 20 Cold War years by the CIA in partnership with the BND, the German Intelligence Service. The machines that many customers bought had deliberately weakened security – a window through which the CIA and BND could read the diplomatic traffic between their embassies, their trade negotiators and their own spies.

The BND sold out its share in 1993 for a tidy profit while the CIA continued until the company was broken up in 2018.

Crypto AG’s own secret was only cracked last year in a combined investigation by German ZDF television, Swiss SRF and the Washington Post following the discovery of a secret history, Operation Rubicon, that had been assembled by some of the operatives who had been involved in the deception.

A Spy in Every Embassy is the story of the story, presented by German intelligence journalist Peter F Muller, who produced last year’s television programme for ZDF, and British journalist David Ridd.

It gives the chronology of the manoeuvrings, arguments, successes and deceptions of the partnership that remained secret for a quarter of a century. Its revelations offer a new perspective on some of the landmark events of those decades – the Falklands War, the US bombing of Libya from British airfields, the negotiations that lead to the Camp David Accords and the Iranian Hostage crisis, as well as the daily churn of intelligence information from around the world about both friends and opponents.

The programme considers the collateral damage of deception on a grand scale. Most employees of Crypto AG knew nothing of the built-in weaknesses of the machinery they were building or trying to sell to governments in some very dangerous parts of the world.

Produced by John Forsyth
Assistant Producer: Alexandra Quinn
A Loftus Media production for BBC Radio 4
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000w499

Extracts read by Lanna Joffrey, Annette Kossow, Blanca Belenguer, Mike Christofferson and Thilo Buergel.
Archive by kind permission of ZDF Television, Crypto Museum, Harry S Truman Library, National Security Agency Archive and Bletchley Park podcast.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000w499

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