During my US Army days in DL land (1963-65), our embassy folk had large LPDA
arrays on the roof at the consulate building in Frankfurt used to monitor sw
and mw foreign broadcasts. There was a room with about 30 51J4s in racks
filling most of one wall.
Each night they would ship, via TTY, a translated summary of the received
news reports. It would go through our VHF/microwave network (long gone,
including the 300 foot tower I sometimes had to change the bulbs on!) to the
UK and to the US, probably by cable. It was reputed to end up on the
president's desk every morning.
We used to keep a TTY machine on the circuit, so we knew what was happening
before JFK and later LBJ did!
Regards, Joel
Joel R. Hallas, W1ZR
-----Original Message-----
From: tentec-bounces@contesting.com [mailto:tentec-bounces@contesting.com]
On Behalf Of Ken Brown
Sent: Friday, December 07, 2007 8:58 PM
To: Discussion of Ten-Tec Equipment
Subject: Re: [TenTec] Embassy Antennas
Only in very few outlying Embassies are there any over the air type
communications. Everything is or was on line encrypted. Basically any
outside wiring or antennas not allowed.
I have seen log periodics on buildings in Europe. I notice those kinds
of things. Most times, when I have investigated to see what is in the
building on which the antenna is mounted, it has been a foreign embassy.
(foreign to the country I was in) I would expect them to use encryption
whether by wire or by wireless, and to use wire most of the time. I
would think they might want to have a backup to wire. Wires after all
can be cut. Many of the installations I have seen may well be left over
from the days when satellite comm links were not commonly available.
Even so, I think it would be wise to maintain an HF backup to the
satellite system. Additionally, some scheduled transmissions, perhaps
sending null messages, would be a good idea to make sure the system
works when it is really needed, and so that the sudden resumption of
transmission after none at all, would not reveal anything. Much
intelligence can be gleaned from traffic analysis, without decryption of
the traffic.
DE N6KB
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