Comments by "Peter S" (@Peter_S_) on "Ringway Manchester" channel.

  1. The customer is a polite way of saying 'a three letter agency' without saying a three letter agency. In the same manner, specific components of special weapons systems are called "items". Security clearances were specifically mentioned which doesn't happen in private industry outside government work. The customer was obviously the U.S. Government or a contractor for the same. The need is simple. It's for operational testing of radios, almost certainly mobile receivers.
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  2. My father worked at the phone company in a large city in California in the 1960s and said it was standard practice on Saturday mornings for a tech to scan the racks of wires for a juicy conversation about the previous night's dates which was then plugged into the PA system of the exchange.
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  3. Cool video, as all your videos are. Two and three months ago, the channel Machining and Microwaves covered this bug in some technical detail including a recreation. The videos are titled 'No Wires, No Batteries - Spying Changed FOREVER because of this invention!' and 'SOLVING the Mystery Behind a Soviet Spy Bug : A True Masterpiece of Technical Elegance!'
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  4. Quite a departure from the usual fare and perfect proof that Lewis will produce a brilliant video on any topic.
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  5.  @GhostOfLorelei  I'm a former contractor to a three letter agency. Once you know it's government, you don't need to know more. This was a test source. Simple. 99.9999999% it was a DoD agency testing radios in simulated tactical environments. All the good stuff is covered in great detail in this video; anything more is a sergeant taking a whiz on a cactus on a training mission. This is the big boy version of "can you hear me now?"
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  6. Brilliant!!! Please tell me this is just the opening track to the album!
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  7. Excellent content. 👍 Many of these Radars are only 2D, but that is typical for search Radar systems. Going back to the early days of military Radar, it was quite standard to have a search Radar which provided detection, azimuth, and range as well as IFF stimulus, and then a second tracking Radar for more. Interesting targets would be interrogated by a secondary "height-finder" Radar to get the elevation and a 2nd source to verify the range, as well as to provide resistance to countermeasures. The Height-Finder would be rotated to the detected azimuth where it would do vertical sweeps to range the target. Being able to use phased arrays for azimuth and elevation is powerful indeed.
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  8.  @sandybottom6623  It's far more mundane. It's testing radios on modern equivalents of Jeeps as they drive up canyons to see how the signals come in with a mountain between the transmitter and receiver. The mission is spelled out in the facility name. The reason for the various modulation schemes is to see how they perform for encrypted battlefield communications. This is standard radio testing of systems integration. How does antenna X with wiring Y and radio Z perform when mounted on top of a HMMWV or BFV and driven far into a box canyon? This is one place where the Army answers that question.
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  9.  @ElRel  What about them? Stock traders don't need LabVIEW based test instruments or tactical radio testing, except maybe on the weekends.
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  10. Excellent video and I appreciate the sample length with waterfall for each. Fascinating.
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  11. I almost always break what I'm up to when a new Ringway video drops. Excellent as always and the perfect length for 'short' content. Your videos are like miniature vacations; always relaxing and always welcome.
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  12. They blast it all the time in libraries. (*John Cage)
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  13. In the mid 1980s a friend was working at the local RadioShack electronics store and somebody came in with some knowledge about eavesdropping on cell phones. In those days the schematic and often annotated pictures of the circuit boards were just part of the standard manual. The visitor pointed out a strapping resistor (a resistor used to set a wire to a known voltage) which disabled the ability to scan the phone band and with screwdrivers and snips right off the store shelf he made the mod to the store's demo unit. I came by and heard what could only be probable "dealers" arranging transactions.
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  14. It's all very waterproof and designed to deal with passing hurricanes in addition to winter weather. Galvanized steel does quite well in the elements and antenna installers are masters of waterproofing connections.
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  15. Railway Manchester 🚂👍
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  16. The days of interesting signals from such places has just about passed. The complexities of modulation and encryption these days make the payload of the interesting stuff indistinguishable from noise. Back in the 1980s there were quite a bit of very interesting communications on HF to be heard around some embassies in large cities. They made for outstanding content in underground audio tape art montages.
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  17. Важно то, что твоя жизнь ничего не стоит и ты пьян. Вы принадлежите Путину. Ты простой инструмент. Все это видят.
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  18. The transmitter schematics used to be available on their website. Very standard high power triodes. Quite vanilla in one regard. I said much the same in a previous comment but words used seem to set in motion an automatic comment cleansing process. All I did was repeat the title with the add of who knew it was so easy? Touchy these algorithms are. Lol.
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  19. Very interesting you can get this close to a DVOR. I walked past the Squaw Valley VOR in California back in the 1980s while skiing and distinctly recall a large black conical antenna enclosure somewhat shaped and sized like a space capsule with clearly legible warnings saying "DANGER - R.F. HAZARD - DO NOT APPROACH WITHIN 50 FEET".
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  20. I think the maritime content is always a winner. Ships slowly moving make for plenty of beautiful video opportunities. Lock operations are certainly a thing which catches a lot of eyes and dockside operations are like a sudden blend of chaos and ballet, albeit without many radio cues. The specifics of the rigs and antennas used on ships might be interesting to many as well.
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  21. I saw that opening picture and immediately wondered, Ladybower?
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  22. You only need to run your desired image through what is essentially the reverse of a spectrum analyzer. In FM transmissions the carrier frequency is modulated over a small range of bandwidth and that's the width of what you see on the waterfall display. By outputting signal on some frequencies and not on others you can create what is in essence a row pixels represented by frequency bins. This is a very simple task in software when running on DSP hardware, but don't bother trying it manually with pen and paper.
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  23. Another option which is becoming popular these days are more general purpose and proper software defined radios. These can be had for ATS-20+ prices and even lower but don't come in a case or with a user interface. The user interface is provided by a single board computer such as a Raspberry Pi and gives features like waterfall displays and large touch screens. A very good starter rig can be had for as little as $100 US which brings features found in the expensive solutions with RF performance of the mid-priced solutions. As with all radio, understanding how antennas operate is paramount.
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  24. I lived in that area for 40 years, and it is easy to understand the traffic the jammer was affecting. I hold no ill will toward the jammer in this particular case.
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  25. I was quite impressed by the resistance to wind. Looks like a very decent comms and this was an excellent review with the real world test.
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  26. With large sky, you may be well situated to receive NOAA and ruSSian METEOR weather satellites on 137 MHz. You'll likely need a filter/LNA ($25) and then to make an antenna; either a V dipole for super simple, a crossed dipole for better performance, or for best omnidirectional results a Quadrifilar Helix Antenna which you can make from 1/2" copper pipe/tubing.
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  27. We had something similar in California with inland deep water ports in both Stockton and Sacramento. It was always odd to look up from a farm field 50 km inland and behind the coastal mountain ranges to see a large freighter moving along. The Port of Sacramento was 150 km from the Golden Gate Bridge by waterway, in the middle of a large agricultural region. We had to monitor marine channels 9, 12, 13,and 14 to keep up with all the traffic and bridges. I remember watching the single barge lock in Sacramento operate in the 1980s but it might have been one of final times it did. Great job on the music by the way.
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  28. I heard the woodpecker, but that was in the 1970s and I had no idea it was anything other than noise from the local international airport.
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  29. Very interesting to have a sort of "citizen's band" feature included. I wonder how quickly it would have gone downhill? At least with 40 channels in the US on CB there was usually room to get around the plonkers.
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  30. I vividly recall driving up to the guard shack about 850 m from inner reflector of the NSGA Skaggs Island antenna in the late 1970s where my father who was a Navy vet and a ham asked the guard of the antenna's purpose. The guard replied that he thought "it was some sort of nuclear thing". The family turned around and continued to our picnic and the answer was dismissed as silly, but later I learned the site was to be repurposed in the early 1970s for a phased array RADAR to guard the San Francisco area with Zeus and/or related missiles at remote launchers. An arms treaty which limited the number of interceptor warheads caused plans to shrink to just the Stanley R. Mickelsen Safeguard Complex in North Dakota so the answer was less silly than thought. I drove up to the same spot in 2014 but there was a locked gate and later that year the whole access road was blocked. Side note: the first station to receive Sputnik 1 in America was the Press Wireless, Inc station roughly 5.7 km North-East of the Skaggs antenna. That station continued to track later Sputniks for the Hearst Newspaper chain.
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  31. It was actually Elvis.
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  32. I often find myself watching the official video for Kasabian's tune Club Foot after these Eastern Block stories.
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  33. That buzzer station reminded me instantly of the baseline to Warm Leatherette by The Normal.
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  34. Brilliant! I used to have an Icom 706 mkII with a tunable inductance antenna (rather than a compensating antenna tuner). Great bit of kit, that. I would stand behind any Icom and the used market had some amazing bargains from time to time.
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  35. Will the reduction in band usage provide opportunity for a new golden age of pirate radio? QRP can have amazing reach in a quiet band.
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  36.  @retsamyar  Laguna Industries Inc. which owns MATIC is owned by the Laguna Pueblo people. Laguna Industries was founded in 1984 to bring jobs to Laguna Pueblo, where about 4,000 people live on more than half a million acres 45 miles west of Albuquerque. The Jackpile uranium mine was closing, leaving 600 workers, mostly Laguna Pueblo members, unemployed. The plan was to create a path for tribal businesses in contracting with the Department of Defense, the U.S. Army and other government agencies.
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  37.  @3v068  Very cool! What antenna setup do you use?
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  38.  @3v068  👍 Best wishes on your build! Once you get a larger antenna outside your listening opportunities will really open up. 73 from a former Travis County resident.
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  39. Not even close. russia is in the lead and America is trying hard to catch up.
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  40.  @chriswiltshire8720  Nobody other than yourself suggested any notion of Lewis not covering it, so what are you on about? All of his videos are brilliant and for viewers here who wish to know even more about the makeup and dive down the rabbit hole, I gave the additional resource. This bug has been covered in every amateur publication I know of. I recall an article about it from the 1980s in Radio Electronics magazine as well. It's still mysterious and elegant in ways we can appreciate today.
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  41. This is a fascinating and addicting series. I'm so glad I found your excellent channel!
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  42. I would rate this as far better. I spent years making test jigs (some with LabVIEW even) and everything here checks out 100%.
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  43. I wonder what the daily cost of electricity to run those 33 transmitters was? I'm sure they just consider the fine a cost of doing business. Now I'm curious what the transmitting triode renewal budget runs across those 33 stations? Those are not cheap valves.
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  44. Karaoke = Vogon poetry 😂
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  45. LOL  @ImproveConditions , You're still using a 1G mobile phone? Interesting.
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  46. Great video as always. I find the MW link frequency and distance information quite interesting for some reason. Using repeaters, my longest WiFi extension was 66km so I'm rather keen on that sort of thing.
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  47.  @deineroehre  Exactly.
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  48. Brilliant! This is the episode I would have requested were I to ask. Thank you, Lewis!
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  49. It appears to not have any actual filtering, instead it uses a 'ring' of capacitors to sequentially store the average DC level of the signal with a new capacitor being used for each 1/10th of a second time slice. As long as the transmitter and eliminator used the same rate, no sync was necessary as the pulses would just happen to line up on the same capacitor with each pass around the 'ring'. This caused the 'ring' to store up the profile of the low frequency pulses, also making them available to replay with inverse polarity. The level on the capacitor for that time slice was subtracted from the raw signal like combining anti-noise in a noise canceling headphone and there you go.
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  50. Thank you for another excellent video.
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