Many thanks to SWLing Post contributor and noted political cartoonist, Carlos Latuff, who shares the following illustrated radio listening report from several recent broadcasts.
Carlos notes:
Death of cartel leader “El Mencho” via Vatican Radio, CGTN Radio, Rádio Nacional and Radio Mitre
Many thanks to SWLing Post contributor and noted political cartoonist, Carlos Latuff, who shares the following illustrated radio listening report of a recent Rádio Mitre broadcast.
Carlos notes:
Mexico cartel leader ‘El Mencho’ killed, Radio Mitre, 790 kHz AM
Many thanks to SWLing Post contributor Don Moore–noted author, traveler, and DXer–who shares the following post:
A Beginner’s Guide to ALE: Part ThreeDon’s traveling DX stories can be found in his book Tales of a Vagabond DXer [SWLing Post affiliate link]. If you’ve already read his book and enjoyed it, do Don a favor and leave a review on Amazon.
In the first two parts [Part 1 and Part 2] we looked at software used to decode ALE signals. Now let’s look at the stations and countries waiting to be logged.
If you’ve read the first two parts of this series then you know that there is no listening involved in ALE DXing. I know some traditionalists who would claim it’s not real DXing if you aren’t sitting next to the radio listening to a speaker or headphones. To me, DXing is having fun by logging new and interesting stuff. With ALE, the fun comes from researching the callsigns and frequencies to figure out what was logged. Every DX session produces numerous puzzles.
Identifying ALE stations may not sound hard. After all, one of the best things about monitoring ALE is that the stations are constantly identifying themselves. What could be easier? Unfortunately, it’s not always that easy to match up the callsign with what organization is behind it. Obvious location identifiers like ILLAPEL and VILLAVICENCIO2 are the exception, not the rule.
Around a third of the callsigns I decode stay complete mysteries as to who is behind them and where they are from. For about another third, the organization may be known (and, by extension, the country), but not the transmitter site. Only about a third of my ALE catches can be pinpointed exactly on a map as to where they came from. I wish it were more than that, but that doesn’t mean I haven’t logged some really interesting and unusual places.
Actually, it is surprising that I can pinpoint as many as I do. After all, every ALE network I’m aware of belongs to a government agency, a military, or some other government-affiliated organization. Bureaucracies like those are typically very careful about how they share information even when there is absolutely no security risk involved. Nevertheless, the utility DX community has gathered some excellent information over the years. While some of it is researched from public sources, I understand that some of it comes from inside sources that certain DXers have with people who install the networks. I don’t ask questions about where the information comes from and I’m glad to have the references and lists, which you can find in the links below.
The best source of ALE information is the Utility DXers Forum. The UDXF website has a lot of great utility resources that anyone can download. The best information, however, is the members’ loggings. To see those, you have to join the mailing list, where you can see member logs reported in the daily messages. But what you want to do is download the log compilations from the Files section (at Groups.io). Those go all the way back to the UDXF’s founding twenty years ago.
The first zip file is a compilation of all the logs from 2006 to 2019. After that, the logs are compiled into files for each year from 2020 to 2025. Download all of these and unzip them into a single folder. And periodically check back for newer files. At the beginning of each month, there will be a compilation for the previous month. Those will be compiled into a single file for 2026 at the beginning of next year. Finally, you need a way to search within the contents of an entire folder of files. A good text editor, such as Notepad++ for Windows, will do the job.
So let’s say I have a logging with the ID of 355013 on 8092 kHz. That really doesn’t tell me a thing about who could be behind the signal. Lots of organizations use six-digit strings as identifiers. I open up the Find in Files feature in Notepad++ and point it at the folder of UDXF logs. Now I type in the ID followed by a colon. Why a colon? Because in the UDXF logs, IDs are followed by a colon. By including the colon in my search term, I can eliminate any other random places that the same string of characters might be. (That’s more important when searching for shorter ID strings, such as three-digit numbers.)
I click Find All and get back a listing of every line in those logs that contains my search string. I can click on any line to open that file at that point. In the frequency column here, I see two hits for this ID on 8092 kHz. I think I can be certain that this is the Turkish Civil Defense station in Samsun province.
But what if I got these same results, but without any reports on 8092 kHz? That wouldn’t prove that I had logged Samsun even though the six-digit ID is a match on other frequencies. There are other organizations that also use six-digit numbers as IDs, such as UN Peacekeepers in several African countries. What I would do then is run a search for the frequency of 08092 (no colon) to see what other stations have been reported there. That turns out to be an important frequency in the AFAD network, so I could still safely assume that I had logged Samsun.
If the identifier doesn’t show up in the UDXF logs then there are some other resources (listed below) that can be checked. Sometimes the UDXF has complete network lists that include stations not yet reported in the logs. Another thing to do is look to see just what has been reported on that frequency. If there are lots of logs from a particular organization and the IDs follow the same pattern as the one you logged (e.g., six digits beginning with a ‘3’), then you likely got an unknown station in the same network.
If I get this far and still have no idea who is behind the station, then I have two options. I can delete the log and forget about it. Or I can put it in a ‘check later’ list, which I go through every year or so. I’ve identified a number of stations that way, especially from new networks. To be honest, which one I choose to do depends on how I feel that day!
Now let’s take a look at some of the places that stations can be logged from.
The US government heavily uses ALE and there is no question that you will log more stations from the USA than from any other country.
The most widely used set of frequencies by the US government includes 7527, 8912, 10242, 11494, 12222, and 15867 kHz. These frequencies are shared by several organizations, including the US Coast Guard, the FBI, the DEA (Drug Enforcement Agency), and the Customs and Border Patrol. The USCG is an especially heavy user, and it’s easy to log not only USCG bases but also USCG cutters at sea, as well as USCG aircraft. Another heavy user of these frequencies is the COTHEN network, or Cellular Over-The-Horizon Enforcement Network. This is a network of various law enforcement agencies and includes stations in some unusual places such as Limestone, Florida, and Lovelock, Nevada. Here is a string of Black Cat loggings on five different frequencies by MEM, the COTHEN station in Senatobia, Mississippi.
Another large US government ALE network is run by FEMA (Federal Emergency Management Agency), which operates stations at each of its ten regional offices. The callsigns include the region number, e.g. FC4FEM1 from the region four office in Thomasville, Georgia. If you are in North America, it won’t take long to log all ten regions. Much rarer are the stations in individual state offices, such as SD8FEM in South Dakota and TN4FEM in Tennessee.
Some state National Guard units also operate on ALE, but by far the most active are the Wyoming and Utah National Guards. These can be logged on several frequencies, including 7805, 7932, and 8065. The Wyoming stations mostly identify by the full town name, e.g. LARAMIE or GILLETTE, while the Utah stations use the first three letters of the local base, e.g. AME for American Fork or TOO for Toole. In September, I passed through Vernal, Utah, and took these pictures of the Vernal National Guard center and the HF antennas on the roof.
Finally, there are several regional government and quasi-government organizations that can be logged. The most active network is probably the Bonneville Power Administration in the Pacific Northwest. It operates a handful of stations with calls including 1121BPA and 1351BPA. Unfortunately, there is no information as to where the individual stations are located.
US government ALE transmissions are not confined to the continental USA. As noted in part one of this series, the US Air Force operates from bases around the world. The US Coast Guard operates from Puerto Rico, Guam, Alaska, and Hawaii. The DEA has a station in Nassau, Bahamas. Finally, the US State Department operates from many consulates and embassies around the world.
The Canadian military has a few ALE stations on the air. Aside from that, to my knowledge, there is no ALE activity from Canada, Mexico, or any of the countries in Central America and the Caribbean, except for that done by the US government.
The militaries of Brazil, Colombia, and Venezuela all operate ALE networks. The Brazilians seem to be particularly active. The police networks of Chile and Colombia, as mentioned in part one, are the most interesting as they identify with the station location. However, logging the Chileans in the northern hemisphere will require good conditions. I’ve only managed to get a few when DXing in the USA, although I have logged several more while DXing in South America.
Algeria is the heaviest user of ALE from Africa. The Algerian Air Force and Army operate from bases throughout this huge country, and in many cases, the exact locations of the stations are known. One of my favorite ALE logs is CM6 from Tamanrasset in the heart of the Sahara in southern Algeria. Sonatrach, the Algerian national oil company, also has a huge network of stations using four-digit numbers as identifiers. Unfortunately, there is no information as to the exact location of any of those stations.
Morocco, Mauritania, and Tunisia are three other countries with large ALE networks operated by their militaries and/or national police. Finally, United Nations Peacekeepers operate from several countries, including Mali, the Central African Republic, and South Sudan.
The United States may have the most ALE stations, but without a doubt, the most active ALE callsign is XSS from Forest Moor, England. Operated by the British military, this station pops up on dozens of frequencies throughout the shortwave spectrum. The previously mentioned Turkish AFAD operates what is probably the largest ALE network in this region. Another large network is Italy’s Guardia di Finanza, a sort of combination coast guard and tax enforcement agency. It’s hard to receive in North America, but I did once get one of their patrol boats. ALE is used by the militaries and border patrols of several other countries in this region. My best ALE catch from Europe is getting the Polish UN Peacekeepers in Kosovo. That’s my only logging of any type in that small country.
Australian state police run an ALE network with 10505 kHz being a favorite frequency. To my knowledge, there is no other significant ALE activity in the region aside from that of various US government organizations.
That’s just a general overview of the major users of ALE, but there is a lot more to be logged that I didn’t mention. Unlike a lot of things on HF, the use of ALE is expanding, not contracting. For example, the Colombian police network didn’t even exist two years ago. So, give ALE monitoring a shot. I think you’ll find it to be one more way to make the DX hobby challenging and fun. I do.
Many thanks to SWLing Post contributor and noted political cartoonist, Carlos Latuff, who shares the following illustrated radio listening report of a recent Voice of Islamic Republic of Iran broadcast.
Carlos notes:
Russia’s Lavrov warns against US strike on Iran, Voice of Islamic Republic of Iran, 15320 kHz
“…Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov has warned that any new U.S. strike on Iran would have serious and adverse consequences.
Lavrov called for restraint, urging a solution that allows Iran to pursue a peaceful nuclear program. He said Arab countries are also sending clear signals to Washington, calling for restraint to prevent an escalation of tensions, adding any move in that direction would be playing with fire.
Lavrov noted that U.S. strikes on Iran in June 2025 undermined the authority of the International Atomic Energy Agency and the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. He also said those attacks carried real risks of a nuclear incident. His comments came amid a sharp rise in threatening rhetoric from Washington and a massive U.S. military buildup near and off the coast of Iran…”
Many thanks to SWLing Post contributor and noted political cartoonist, Carlos Latuff, who shares the following illustrated radio listening report of a recent Voice of Islamic Republic of Iran broadcast.
Carlos notes:
Voice of Islamic Republic of Iran (in Hebrew), 15320 kHz
Many thanks to SWLing Post contributor and noted political cartoonist, Carlos Latuff, who shares the following illustrated radio listening report of a recent Voice of Islamic Republic of Iran broadcast.
Carlos notes:
Voice of Islamic Republic of Iran (in Hausa and Dari)
Many thanks to SWLing Post contributor Don Moore–noted author, traveler, and DXer–who shares the following post:
A Beginner’s Guide to ALE: Part TwoDon’s traveling DX stories can be found in his book Tales of a Vagabond DXer [SWLing Post affiliate link]. If you’ve already read his book and enjoyed it, do Don a favor and leave a review on Amazon.
In the first part of this series, I explained what the digital ALE mode is and looked at an easy way to get started monitoring ALE stations. In part three, I’ll look in detail at the dozens of countries and hundreds of stations that can be logged in ALE mode. But first, let’s look at a way to let software do the hard work in adding those hundreds of stations.
Run by longtime DXer Chris Smolinski, Black Cat Systems is a provider of over two dozen quality software programs for radio hobbyists. The one we’re interested in is the Black Cat ALE Vacuum Cleaner. The name describes exactly what it does. The user feeds it a large number of SDR spectrum recordings, and the Vacuum Cleaner sucks up the ALE DX and lists them in a file.
Let’s step through the basics of using the program. But first, you need at least an hour or two of SDR spectrum recordings covering frequencies with lots of ALE traffic. Some of my favorite ranges are 7500-9200 kHz, 10100-11500 kHz, and 15500-16500 kHz.
Here’s the main screen on the Vacuum Cleaner:
I recommend you check both USB and LSB. In the logs reported to the Utility DXers Forum, about 97% of all ALE transmissions are in USB mode. From my experience, if LSB is unchecked, the Vacuum Cleaner will step through the files about twenty percent faster, but you will miss a tiny number of stations.
The kHz settings determine how finely the application will tune in looking for ALE signals. I recommend just checking x.0kHz and x.5kHz. Almost all ALE signals on shortwave are transmitted on frequencies that end in either point-zero or point-five kilohertz. The main exception is the US Department of State, which uses frequencies ending in point-six kilohertz (e.g., 8058.6 kHz). Fortunately, the one-hundred Hertz difference from the point-five kilohertz setting isn’t enough to make a difference except maybe with the weakest of signals.
The next step is the Settings, which are found under the Edit menu. Most values can be left at the defaults.
At the top, the number of decoding threads should be no more than the number of cores that your CPU has. Check the Auto Log box, then enter a destination path to record logs to a file. (Otherwise, the logs that show up in the window will be gone when you close the program.) Next, select the file format of the SDR program used in making the I/Q recordings. Finally, set the file format for your logs. I prefer the single tab format so that I can later import the logs into Excel and sort by frequency.
Now it’s time to decode. Under the File menu, select Open I/Q Files and browse to a folder of spectrum recordings to decode. Click on Open in the file selection box, and the Vacuum Cleaner will start decoding the files. Now take a break and come back in fifteen or twenty minutes. The main screen should look like this.
The current settings and the frequencies being scanned are displayed at the top, under the settings checkboxes. There are actually only 1232 distinct frequencies in that range, but the number is doubled as each one is being checked in both LSB and USB. Below that, the output window lists each file as it is being scanned and ALE logs as they are found. (But be sure you are also recording these to a text file.)
To see a list of files still in the queue, select File > Show I/Q Files Awaiting Processing. After a few files have been processed, this will also show an estimate of how much time is needed to complete the queue. To add additional files to the queue, select File > Pause Processing, add the files, and then select File > Resume Processing. Note that the Vacuum Cleaner processes files in date/time order. If you add files that were recorded earlier, they will go to the front of the queue.
In the above image, notice that after each file is finished, the time taken to decode it is displayed. These files were all exactly 326 seconds long, and the first one took 262 seconds to decode for a speed of 1.24x actual time. That may not seem important, but it depends on how much you have to decode. In a couple of days of serious DXing with my three Airspy receivers, I can easily accumulate a couple of terabytes of spectrum recordings.
Processing time depends on several factors. The first is the bandwidth/sampling rate. Those files above were recorded with SDR-Console at 768 kHz wide. All other things being equal, a narrower sample will process faster and a larger one more slowly. Depending on the band being monitored, I sometimes record with my Airspys at the 912 kHz bandwidth. Those typically take about 25% longer to decode than 768 kHz files.
Another factor is whether or not the Vacuum Cleaner has to share processing power with other running applications. That slows things down. I mostly decode overnight or at times when I’m not otherwise using the laptop. Under those conditions, my 768 kHz files decode at 1.75x and my 912 kHz ones at 1.45x. But those numbers are for my nearly four-year-old main laptop. An older laptop I have at home tops out at around 1.40x on 768 kHz files with nothing else running. If you have a high-performance gaming laptop, you should get much better numbers than I.
Then there are differences between the various SDR applications in how they store data. I won’t go into the technical details that Chris explained to me, but SDR-Console is more efficient in this regard. In my own testing, I found that files of similar bandwidth and time length recorded with SDR-Console decode at least fifty percent faster than those recorded with the default Elad and Perseus software. I’m satisfied with SDR-Console, so I haven’t tried any other programs. If you have other favorite SDR applications, I suggest doing some comparison tests to see what works best for you.
One application that you shouldn’t use is HDSDR. Chris didn’t have good documentation on the file format for this one and wasn’t fully successful in reverse-engineering it. The Vacuum Cleaner will work with HDSDR, but almost all the callsigns that it finds will be errors. And that brings us to an important question.
When I started using the Vacuum Cleaner, my main concern was whether it would miss valid signals. There was only one way to find out, so I ran several tests. I would give the Vacuum Cleaner a few hours of I/Q recordings to decode, and then I would process the same recordings manually using Sorcerer, as described in part one. Black Cat not only correctly identified every single ALE transmission that I found with my eyes but went way beyond that. It also found and decoded weak and noise-covered signals that I couldn’t see in the Data Analyzer window but were there when I played them back.
As Chris points out in his documentation, the emphasis on weak signal detection does cause the application to sometimes falsely report bogus callsigns. Some of these are produced by random noise, fooling the system. Others come from poorly received signals. He could have taken a ‘high confidence’ approach and only presented callsigns that had been clearly received. But that would have meant some valid callsigns not being reported. Instead, he went with displaying everything. It’s up to the user to weed those out.
If the decode doesn’t contain any of the keywords (TO, TIS, and TWAS) then it’s probably an error. But poorly received signals can cause partial and incorrect callsigns to be reported with a keyword. Spotting those just takes the knowledge and practice that comes from using the program and ALE reference materials. (That’s the topic of part three.)
Black Cat ALE Vacuum Cleaner is a high-quality software available for Windows and macOS, and you can try it before buying. The cost is $99.99.
Is it worth it? If all you want to do is sample what ALE is all about, then probably not. But if you get serious about ALE monitoring and want to add hundreds of ALE stations to your logbook, this is the way to do it. I am 100% satisfied with the Black Cat ALE Vacuum Cleaner. I’ve decoded several thousand hours of I/Q files with it over the past few years. (When running multiple SDRs at a DXpedition, it’s easy to accumulate seventy or eighty hours per day.) The program also has a few other tricks I haven’t covered. For example, it is possible to actively monitor a folder and decode I/Q recordings as they are created.
In part three of this series, I’m going to take an in-depth look at the countries and stations that can be logged in ALE mode. Once you’ve seen how much DX there is to log, you might just be convinced, like me, that the program is worth the price. And you married guys can tell the wife that you’re buying a new vacuum cleaner that only you will use, hi!
The Vacuum Cleaner isn’t the only program that Chris has for ALE monitoring. Black Cat ALE is a different program that does live monitoring of up to twenty-four ALE frequencies simultaneously with SDR-Console, assuming your laptop has the resources to handle that.
Finally, Chris tells me that he’s been experimenting with using the Vacuum Cleaner with wide-bandwidth I/Q recordings on high-end laptops. On his M4 Max MacBook Pro, he’s able to process 32-MHz wide recordings at about 0.50X real time and 16-MHz wide recordings at about 0.97X real time. As he says, it won’t be long until it will be possible with the right equipment to monitor the entire HF spectrum for ALE signals in real time. And that will be fun!