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----- Original Message -----
From: "Mike Williams" <mj451@bellsouth.net>
To: "David J. Ring, Jr." <n1ea@arrl.net>; "Thomas Giella KN4LF"
<kn4lf@tampabay.rr.com>; "a RSGB PSC eGroup" <PSC.Committee@rsgb.org.uk>; "a
HCDX Prop Channel" <propagation@hard-core-dx.com>; "a Propagation Reflector"
<propagation@contesting.com>; "a PropNET eGroup"
<PropNET-Online@yahoogroups.com>
Sent: Sunday, November 14, 2004 1:53 PM
Subject: Re: [Propagation] Re: HF TEQ Propagation
Dave,
I read your account of the ship in distress to be absolutely fascinating;
you might consider sending it to the ARRL or other radio web sites for
others to enjoy! Good job OM,
Regards,
Mike Williams W4DL
----- Original Message -----
From: "David J. Ring, Jr." <n1ea@arrl.net>
To: "Thomas Giella KN4LF" <kn4lf@tampabay.rr.com>; "a RSGB PSC eGroup"
<PSC.Committee@rsgb.org.uk>; "a HCDX Prop Channel"
<propagation@hard-core-dx.com>; "a Propagation Reflector"
<propagation@contesting.com>; "a PropNET eGroup"
<PropNET-Online@yahoogroups.com>
Sent: Saturday, November 13, 2004 12:55 PM
Subject: [Propagation] Re: HF TEQ Propagation
Hello Tom,
Sorry about the article, for some reason part is missing.
I have the article in text format. You didn't miss much in the pdf
format.
The frequency was 500 kHz - that is stated in the article, and also
because of the activity - e.g. sending SOS, contacting other stations,
etc. If H/F was being used, it wouldn't have been as noticeworthy.
The ship in distress thought that the nearest coast station SHOULD have
heard her, but a station half way around the world did. What strange
propagation.
I'd guess that the time was around midnight local in Canada.
Here is the story:
For well over ninety-five percent of the people living in Canada,
isolation is just a word. We sit huddled next to the U.S. border with
our communications networks of roads, railways and telecommunications.
Yet there is a vast land which stretches north, almost to the Pole; a
vital part of our growing country, that most of us never see or
understand. A land which depends almost wholly upon aircraft and
telecommunications as a lifeline to the rest of the country. Over forty
years ago, I had my opportunity to see, first hand, what those
communications can mean.
Passing through a broken cloud layer, the aircraft touched down on the
hard ice of the bay on the Labrador coast, close to a very small village.
The single engine Beaver revved up its engine and then died. Now that we
were safely down, I opened my eyes and peered out the window. Straight
out of the ice covered bay the cliffs rose 700 meters to craggy peaks
capped with ice and snow. Just to right, hugging the cliffs as if
searching for warmth, was the village itself. Painted radio towers,
dwarfed by the cliffs beyond, were set slightly to the east of the
village. Not one tree in sight. "I wonder what the huskies do", I asked
myself. Just then I spotted a figure running from the village. The
figure quickly became a man carrying a suitcase, dressed in a parka. He
jumped up the ladder and scrambled into a seat. "Get me the .... out of
here!" he shouted to the pilot. "Welcome to the Great White North," I
muttered to myself.
I had been hired by the Federal Government as a radio operator a few
months before and after the usual training in weather observations and
circuit discipline, I was assigned to this "outpost" on the coast of
Labrador. The station was comprised of a bunkhouse, a cook house, a radio
shack and a diesel hut with two recently installed 25 kW diesels. The
village itself consisted of some 25 or thirty buildings including a
church, school, RCMP office, Department of Northern Labrador store,
private dwellings and the original church built in 1750 which was being
used as a storehouse.
The radio station had two operators and a cook during the winter months as
well as a local handyman.. There was no running water and the toilet was
a "honey bucket" which the junior operator ended up having to empty! The
station was operated as a ship/shore facility from the first of June until
the first of December. During the off season we were reduced to sending
and receiving commercial traffic for Canadian National Telegraph on twice
a day schedule as well as making weather observations every three hours.
This traffic was sent to Goose Bay via a High Frequency radio circuit.
Except for an aircraft every six weeks, weather permitting, we were
conveniently forgotten by the rest of the world.
The end of January saw a great white sheet of ice stretching outward from
the coast for nearly 150 kilometers blocking the passage of any shipping.
The Canadian icebreakers stuck to the coast of Newfoundland, the Gulf of
St. Lawrence and Nova Scotia during the winter. They knew better than to
test their strength against ice that had slipped from the Greenland
Icecap. Even the remnants of that ice had sent many "unsinkable" ships,
including the TITANIC, to a watery grave.
It was a bitterly cold, clear night with the wind straight off the pole,
making drifts a couple of meters high. The aurora borealis, the beautiful
Northern Lights, were playing a symphony in soft blues and greens directly
overhead, and radio conditions, in the vernacular, were the "pits". My
last weather message for Goose Bay was lying, unsent, on the counter in
front of me. I stared at the accumulation of the other undelivered
weather and commercial traffic sharing the counter-top. They stared
right back, accusing memos of a job left undone. Those symphonies of
colour, playing in the winter sky, were the result of the worst magnetic
storms that "Ole Sol" had thrown our way since the advent of radio. My
calls every three hours to Goose Bay had gone unanswered for the last
eight schedules.
The wind was howling around the building and even though it wasn't that
warm inside, it was a lot warmer than trying to get back to the
bunkhouse. Hoping to hear a few friendly sounds, I decided to try to tune
the receiver on the AM broadcast band. Normally, broadcast reception at
night was excellent from both Europe and North America, but the "blackout"
was affecting even the BC band. The only station I could hear was
Julianehab in Greenland speaking Inuit with a Danish accent. So much for
the world on the Broadcast Band.. I turned on another receiver and tuned
to the Morse Code International Distress frequency, 500 kilohertz. The
nights are indeed long, when all you have for company is the "dits' and
"dahs" of distant stations.
The frequency was quiet. My eyes skipped to the clock on the operating
consol. It was 15 minutes and some seconds after the hour. "The
International Silence period," I thought. (It's a three minute period
twice an hour at 15-18 and 45 and 48 minutes after the hour, giving ships
in a distress situations a chance to be heard). I was just reaching to
turn off the receiver and wind my way through the two meter snow drifts to
the bunkhouse, when weakly, but clearly I heard the Morse characters
didididahdahdahdididit, didididahdahdahdididit, didididahdahdahdididit,
SOS, SOS, SOS, the International Distress signal!
Instantly, warm bunkhouse forgotten, I was listening very intently. My
pencil began following the flow of Morse characters transcribing them into
English. "From Liberian tanker AIRESQUIP/5LQQ position Latitude 43.07
South Longitude 33.03 East. Struck by giant wave. Sinking in 40 foot
waves. Boilers out, no power. 36 crew, require immediate aid."
Nothing more was heard. Silence continued for another few ticks of the
clock, then a strong signal from Cape Cod, Mass. began calling with a
traffic list, obviously unaware of the call for help. I looked at the
message again. Had I been imagining things? 43.07S 33.03E. Surely I
had copied that incorrectly. I had no world map at the station, but if
memory served, that would be somewhere in the eastern South Atlantic or
even the Indian Ocean off South Africa. The old RCA AR88LF I was using
wasn't on the TITANIC, but it was designed around 1935, and heavens only
knows where it had been in the interim! With dozens of coast facilities
hundreds and even thousands of kilometers closer, someone else must have
heard that Distress call. But if so, why was it "business as usual" on
the frequency? I sat as if petrified, straining to hear anything further.
Nothing. Absolutely nothing! Halifax called with a traffic list, and
then a weak station in Venezuela was heard calling a ship. Was I the only
station that had heard the call?
I was in a quandary. The high powered transmitter for my station had
developed trouble, almost as soon as the technician, who had installed it,
had left for warmer climes. The outage had been reported to Regional
Office in Montreal. The Department was undergoing a cyclic economic
"freeze", so the cost of sending in a technician was out of the question.
The reply that came back was along those lines and ended "and anyway you
won't need it until June." Even though officially, my station was not on
watch, it was my duty to report this information immediately so that
Search and Rescue could be notified. My options were extremely limited
however. First I could call Goose Bay on the High Frequency weather
circuit, with little hope of success, as the operator would not be
listening for me until the next schedule in two and a half hours. Even
if he were listening on the frequency, I had had no success for the past
five schedules because of the magnetic storm. Second, the "back-up"
transmitter for the Distress frequency. I giggled! If the receiver was
considered old by the "modern" standards, then the Marconi LTT-4 could
only be considered ancient. On a good day it might have generated 100
watts input with a pair of 201s But it was the only hope I had of
passing on the information to S&R. Somehow I had to trust to luck and call
Belle Isle or maybe Ocean Station Delta which maintained listening watch
on 500 kHz all year around. I reached over and turned on the power
switch. No cloud of blue smoke! I waited for a few moments allowing the
vacuum tubes to warm up and then tentatively, I tuned the transmitter and
tapped out a call to Ocean Station Delta, call-sign 4YD.
"Cheepcheepcheepcheepchaw Chawcheechawchaw Chawcheecheep" (what a chirp
that transmitter had!) No reply. I then called Belle Isle, VCM. No
reply. Well, I didn't expect one did I? Suddenly the speaker piped in
Morse "SOS VOH (my call-sign) de 5LQQ" The station in distress was
calling me!
"SOS 5LQQ de VOH k"my station replied. "Thank you VOH," ARIESQUIP
replied. "Would you please relay to Search and Rescue the following......"
and he repeated the original distress message. My Morse key stuttered "R
R R AS" (Roger, standby). If I was in a quandary before, panic was
setting in now! Neither Delta nor Belle Isle had answered my call and no
one else had confirmed receipt of the distress message. The officers and
crew of the ARIESQUIP had little chance for any length of time in open
boats with those high seas. How was I going to get the information to S&R?
The American Pole-Vault relay site for the DEW line was located about 3
miles away
but it was over 2000 feet straight up! We had no communications with the
site as the commander of the base and the last officer-in-charge of our
station had been on the "outs". I could try and make the trip, but it
would take a couple of hours in the daylight. This was the dead of night,
through snow drifts two meters high and the temperature/wind combining to
give a chill factor of minus 40 or either scale! This coupled with the
fact that no one was expecting me, and they had automatic weapons at each
of the doors. My mother didn't bring up a complete idiot! "Thirty six
men on a sinking ship," my mind misquoted "Ho, ho, ho and a bottle of
rum!" Cut it out, boy, THINK!
The frequency was completely quiet, but who would hear me if I did call?
Was it just possible, I asked myself, that some coast station in the area
of the ship might hear me? After all, the ship and I had exchanged
communications. I called Belle Isle again with one hand while the other
was searching through the International List of Coast Stations, which
lists all the Marine coast stations in the world.
Still no reply from VCM. No map and only a vague memory of some island or
islands south and east of Cape of Good Hope. Were they French or South
African? My glance fell to an unfinished letter to a girlfriend of
mine. A girl's name, something clicked. Alice?, Bertha? Deborah? Freda?
Helena? No St. Helena is in the mid-Atlantic!. Jeanne? Mary? No but
that's closer Marie? Maria? Miriam? No but maybe.......I flipped the
pages of ILofCS under the Union of South Africa. There it was, Marion
Island, call-sign ZSM!
As poor as the chances were of my getting through to S&R, the chances of
the crew of that ship if I didn't, were much worse. The Southern Ocean
with its Roaring Forties is unforgiving to anyone or anything that falls
into its clutches.
"ZSM de VOH" I sent slowly on the Morse key. My weak signal was scattered
to the four winds of the ether via the ice covered vertical antenna
stretching up 40 meters above the radio shack. Loud and clear came the
reply "VOH de ZSM QSA 5 QRK3 k" I was completely dumbfounded Marion
Island had copied my signal and answered me. "Marion Island", I
replied, " the following message received from the ARIESQUIP/5LQQ....."
and relayed the distress message. "Roger VOH, your message received."
HURRAH! ( I silently promised to clear out the mouse's nest and cobwebs I
knew must be in that transmitter!) "VOH de 5LQQ" sounded the speaker.
"We are unable to copy Marion
Island, but understand they have the message. We are closing down and
taking to the lifeboats. Thanks to you all and God bless. 5LQQ OUT" I
confirmed the receipt to AIRESQUIP and relayed it to Marion. "VOH de
ZSM," Marion replied, "for your information help has been dispatched.
Many thanks for the relay.," I called 5LQQ with the welcome news but there
was no reply.
Was there anything further that I could do? I had typed all the pertinent
information into the station radio log, so I continued to listen on the
frequency. The normal operation of the closer stations was continuing.
They had, apparently, heard nothing. About 15 minutes later I heard ZSM
calling the AIRESQUIP, but no reply form the ship. A few seconds later
Marion once again, but this time barely perceptible. A very loud US East
Coast station drowned out any further communications. I said a short
heartfelt prayer for the crew. Now that the excitement was over I noticed
that the temperature in the radio shack was on a par with a Norwegian
hell.
That warm bunkhouse was beckoning and I had done what I could. I reached
over and switched off the ancient transmitter, giving it a friendly pat.
The green pilot light blinked a couple of times, almost as if it too was
content, and went out.
Was the whole thing a hoax? There were definitely two other stations
involved, not just because of the strengths of the signals, but because of
the signal tones. Pretty elaborate, and although I had heard some pretty
good stories and had taken part in a couple of them myself, this time it
wasn't likely.
Two days later, when blackout conditions had lifted allowing contact with
Goose Bay again, I reported the incident to Montreal. I received a
message from Region a couple of days later, that, not to subtly, suggested
that I had been on the Coast for far too long (just over a month?!!),
with the attendant loss of mental capabilities.
Since no one else had heard a sound (remember all the coast stations north
of Belle Isle were closed for the winter) no one could have confirmed the
incident. Officially, that was the last I heard about it. Unofficially,
I was classified, more colloquially, by the operators in Goose as being
"bushed". Let them think what they would, I knew that it had happened
Oh well, Sic Gloria transit mundi! Carpe diem! Ich dien!
There was no mention of the sinking of any ship in the newscasts when
radio conditions resolved themselves, and since mail drops came only every
six weeks, weather permitting, I never subscribed to any newspapers or
periodicals. I left the bleak coast of Labrador to the Inuit some months
later and was posted, to another isolated station in north central Quebec.
The coast station that signed VOH was closed in the late sixties as better
methods of communications developed. The station radio logs are long
gone, as are most of the people who would have remember anything about the
episode. I wondered from time to time over the years what had happened to
those
thirty-six men in the open boats after my part in the rescue was finished.
My graveyard shifts on the commercial radio circuits ceased three decades
ago. Now my only radio operation is on the Amateur bands. Some fifteen
years ago I made a general call on the twenty meter band and was contacted
by a station in the southern United States. After the usual exchange of
pleasantries, we discovered that we both had been commercial radio
operators. I mentioned that I had been a ship-board operator and later a
coast station operator in Labrador and Quebec in the late fifties and
early sixties. "Did you operate VOH?" he inquired? I replied in the
affirmative and told him the approximate dates. "Do you remember a
distress incident in late January of that year involving the ARIESQUIP?"
He had been the operator on the doomed ship so many years before! He had
heard my chirpy signal calling VCM and was even more surprised than I had
been when I replied. He thought he had copied the call incorrectly and
that I was a station in India or Australia.
During the conversation I discovered that all but two of the 36 of the
crew survived. Everyone had broken bones, bruises and many with serious
cuts from broken glass when the 30 meter wave broke over them. One of the
officers died of complications in a life boat and one of the crew was
washed overboard when the wave struck. The crew was finally rescued by a
cruise ship on its way to Antarctica. They spent a pleasant two weeks
recuperating. When they returned to shore, a court of inquiry was held
regarding the loss of the ship.
The courts findings was that the size of the wave was grossly exaggerated
and that the hull had been broached by one of the large cranes that had
come loose from its moorings.
After the trial the radio operator had written a letter to the station
giving details of the incident and asking the operator who had been on
duty to contact him. Unfortunately, I never received the letter. We has a
wonderful chat and I was looking forward to many more. Regretfully, some
months later, I saw in one of the radio magazines a notice that he had
passed away.
The winter nights are still long, the pastels of the Arctic symphony still
coldly play the skies and isolation remains a way of life on much of the
Labrador Coast. Living as I do now within sight of the US border, I can
meet more people in one hour than I saw that whole year on the Coast. Yet
I still remember that one cold early January morning over four decades ago
when a lonely operator wanted some company. Happenstance? Devine
intervention? What were the odds? Regardless, it is enough that the
distress message could be relayed from the land of the aurora Australis to
the land of the aurora Borealis and back again.
Addendum:
I was reminded of this story a few days ago after I had watched a very
interesting PBS program on giant waves. In the past decade a great deal
of investigation has been conducted regarding these "rogue waves". It was
first thought that they were the result of conflicting ocean currents
found relatively close to shore. In places like the east coast of South
Africa and the west coast of Norway there had been a number of such
incidents. Ships were warned to take precautions and all was thought to be
well, until two separate giant waves incidents were reported in the
Antarctic within a few days of one another far from land where there were
no conflicting currents. Satellite radar equipment was used to scour the
oceans to see if any such occurrences could be found. The result of
the findings were that not only do they exist, but that there were far
more of them than any one had imagined.
73
David N1EA
----- Original Message -----
From: Thomas Giella KN4LF
To: a RSGB PSC eGroup ; a HCDX Prop Channel ; a Propagation Reflector ;
David J. Ring, Jr. ; a PropNET eGroup
Sent: Saturday, November 13, 2004 9:31 AM
Subject: Re: HF TEQ Propagation
Hi David,
I had trouble following the article because of the way it is laid out.
Page 1 ends in mid sentence and I can't find where it begins elsewhere. In
any event I still get the gist of the article. I traveled the seven seas
including both poles as a Space and Atmospheric Weather Forecaster,
Physical Oceanographer and Radioman while in the U.S. Coast Guard and also
with other government agencies and saw the phenomenon that is described in
the article.
There is not enough information in the article like bands, times, seasons
to give a definitive answer as to what's going on. However Tran (TEQ)
propagation across the Equator is very common actually. Until recently it
was pretty much a mystery but now we know of the existence of an F3
propagation layer that is found predominately along the magnetic equator.
This may be the source of TEQ.
Here are a couple of links on F3 layer propagation.
http://www.ips.gov.au/IPSHosted/STSP/aip/arayne/f3web.pdf
http://www.kn4lf.com/F3layer.pdf
73,
Thomas F. Giella, KN4LF
Retired Space & Atmospheric Weather Forecaster
Plant City, FL, USA
Grid Square EL87WX
Lat & Long 27 58 33.6397 N 82 09 52.4052 W
kn4lf@arrl.net
Propagation eGroup:
http://lists.contesting.com/mailman/listinfo/propagation
PropNET Beacon Program: http://www.propnet.org
KN4LF Daily Solar Space Weather & Geomagnetic Data Archive:
http://www.kn4lf.com/kn4lf5.htm
KN4LF HF/MF Frequency Radio Propagation Theory Notes:
http://www.kn4lf.com/kn4lf8.htm
KN4LF Amateur & SWL Radio History: http://www.kn4lf.com/index.htm
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