Beacon C was NAVY AF of Baltic Fleet beacon. At the beginning of every hour and every half hour 1 minute long transmission. Station was located near Kaliningrag, service 1977 - 1980.
Back in what was probably the late 80s I used to love scanning the airwaves for weird signals on the medium and long wave frequencies on my regular radio. One was a repeating morse code signal before I knew what morse code was. I used to listen to it so often and it was always the same signal. I used to repeat it back to myself so it kind of ingrained itself on me and it’s probably where my interest of radio transmissions stems from and the reason I subbed to this channel. ( a kind of nostalgia for me ). I’m convinced the sequence was -.-. .-.-. -.. However this was a long time ago so it might have changed in my head over time like a whale song. From what I remember it was right at the edge of the dial. There was another simpler signal which was a bit distorted which was a kind of .-. Possibly. For context I am in the UK
On 3227, 4031 and 4338 kHz, there is a 'V' letter beacon which broadcasts from Kiva in Uzbekistan. I'm guessing this is also a system from the Soviet times. The 4338 freq. is specifically shown in the ILG list, as the Uzbekistan Navy. I did a double take on this, as Uzbekistan is entirely inland and doesn't have a coastline. In fact their Navy is a river force, patrolling the Amu Darya river, which forms their southern border. I've sometimes picked up conversations in a language unknown to me, on 4337.5 and 4848.5, both using Lower Sideband, which are listed as Uzbek border force.
K and S are the next lot of beacons L was the third followed by K and S again I used to hear a Morse net with a handful of stations checking in on 6668KHz. All hand sent straight key stuff. Interestingly I heard a _backwards C_ character sent. A dit dah dit dah. Threw me a bit. Figured it must be eastern Russian given the time (around 7:30Z or 9:30PM aussie east coast. I picked it up on a local SDR, But one evening I checked a number of WebSDRs and was able to pick up the signals clearly in India and in Korea Plenty of interesting stuff out there if you go hunting for it
@@dshafterh3897On behalf of the Ringway Manchester Luminaries and Big Thinker Club. Last time that happened we had to apologise for weeks. We believe the tin foil used in our hats was not thick enough.
How much Satcom capability Russia has is probably the reason to still use more HF, considering its size. Consider, they use cellphones for tactical comms fighting Ukraine and that most of Russia has little or no service.
At some point back in the 1960's someone in Russia predicted that one day there will be a thing called the internet, and that there would be groups of people on the internet that love to discuss mysterious radio signals. Having a sense of humour, they set up these beacons, thinking "this will give them something to talk about, hehe" But how did they know that we'd all be here discussing it? There's clearly something going on. 😁
A few weeks ago i heard a single letter beacon on mediumwave band whilst tring to listen to country radio from Ceske Bujovici on 954 kilocycles dont know if was an image or the beacon was really there.
That's basically how aircraft radio navigation works in a way. GPS has mostly taken over that role, but things like Non-Direction Beacons (NDBs) and VHF Omnidirection Ranges (VORs) use radio signals. These single letter stations I think would be more like the old Radio Direction Finding (RDF) stations in which you'd just follow the strength of the signal to it's origin. Civil RDF receivers simply used known AM stations as transmitters, but I see no reason (as a laymen) that you couldn't use some other type of signal to do the same thing with a similar type of set, You could follow them from one to another by picking up each station as you go, and could triangulate your position based on signal strength. LORAN (Long Range Navigation) could be picked up from as far as 1500NM and was used during and post WW2. There's so many different types of civil and military radio navigation beacons that this is just a very short list of the more common ones. Perhaps these could be used as a redundant navigation system in the event of a conflict in which most other types of navigation have been destroyed. Just my 2 cents as an interested observer. For what it's worth, here in the US if you tune into a VOR you'll hear a morse code identifier for that specific VOR station. The voice is just so the person tuning in can confirm that they are tuned into the correct VOR. You of course can't physically hear the signal the receiver uses to plot your direction to or from the VOR station.
Transmissions used to determin if say Moscow still existed. If such a transmission stoped this might casue soviet/russian strategic nukelar forces to start a second strike against the west/US.
