Re: [Propagation] Re: HF TEQ Propagation

["Mike Williams" <mj451@bellsouth.net>]

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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