Midnight ALE Mystery Stations Strange ALE Automatic Link Establishment <http://hflink.com> experiences happened one mysterious night in 2005.
In 2001, early in the history of organized ham radio ALE, we had set up the original ALE ham channels on 30 meters at frequencies of 10136.0 and 10146.0 kHz. Everything was fine for 4 years with these channels until 2005. ALE radios had come down in cost by then and ALE started to become more popular among government and commercial HF communications. In early 2005 ham operators started to see some strange callsigns on 10136 and 10146 in our ALE logs. We didn't really know if these mystery callsigns were errors in decoding or not, so we didn't pay much attention to them... until... On 26 July 2005, it was after midnight in California, and I was testing HF long distance ALE linking with Graham VK6RO in Perth Australia, on the other side of the world from me. At about 0900 to 1100 UTC a really good propagation path between us opened up on 10MHz. As part of our testing, we had been sending ANYCALLs on 10136 kHz. (For those who aren't familiar with ALE jargon, an ANYCALL is a transmission that requests any ALE station that is scanning that channel to auto-respond and link.) To our surprise, several strange ALE callsigns linked with us in response to our ANYCALLs! The stations were strong signal levels for both of us... S9... so that added to the mystery. Here is an excerpt of our log that night: 10136kHz log: [10:42:53][FRQ 10136000][LINKED ][207 ] [10:44:28][FRQ 10136000][LINKED ][9VT ] [11:26:48][FRQ 10136000][AQC SND][ ][TIS][VUPPQ][AL0] BER 21 SN 05 NOISE 00 Also decoded address [TF1 ] Two of these stations turned out to be the Singapore Navy. Later that night, I was alerted by my ALE incoming call alarm, and surprised to find my station linked and responding with the "9VT" station (Singapore Navy Base) who was sending ANYCALLs on 10136 kHz! Not wanting to start an international incident, we sent them a "Sorry about that!" AMD message, and frantically locked out 10136 from our scan list. That left us only 10146 kHz for testing, but the night wasn't over yet. Shortly another mysterious callsign linked with VK6RO's ANYCALL on 10146! Had they followed us? Were we being stalked in some sort of global electronic war game? Well, this time we found it wasn't the Singapore Navy, but, yet another mysterious group of ALE stations using a "600" numerical series as their callsigns on 10146. Were these "600" stations trying to hide or RF-camouflage themselves on our well-published ALE ham net channels? We probably will never know the answer because we haven't seen them since. But that late night in July was one we will well remember. Later, while looking for an alternative 10MHz channel frequency, we found more mystery ALE nets, including one that was using animal names such as Jaguar and Tiger as callsigns. In August 2005, we ended up moving our ALE ham channels to 10136.5 and 10145.5, and we still use these channels today. We haven't seen the same mystery stations since... but you never really know what strange stations you might link up with on a good propagation night in the future. So that'sthe rest of story behind why we don't use ANYCALLS much anymore, and whey some of the International Amateur Radio Automatic Link Establishment Channels <http://hflink.com/#channels> are on 0.5kHz incremental frequencies... It seems that many private/ commercial/ government ALE nets tend to use 1kHz increments for their channels. In the 10MHz and other shared ham bands, we learned from our experiences like these... ALE Automatic Link Establishment <http://hflink.com> 73 Bonnie KQ6XA
