Friday, June 23, 2006

Military Satellite Intercepts


Yesterday while trying to catch a sniff of Air Force One comms on the UHF milsats, I ran across quite a few terrestrial comms from Latin America that are using some of the UHF Milsat birds uplink frequencies. They inadvertinly get downlinked and we get some reception. Here is a list of active downlink frequencies that was carry traffic from Latin America and the milsat bandplan associated with the frequency.


255.550 Flt Charlie/UFO Quebec, SS comms
256.850 UFO November, SS comms
256.950 Flt Alpha/UFO Oscar, SS comms
257.150 Flt Charlie/UFO Quebec (lots of military encrypted transmissions)
258.650 Flt Charlie/UFO Quebec, SS comms
260.575 Flt Alpha/UFO Oscar, sounds like a telcom transmission.
262.075 Flt Charlie/UFO Quebec, SS comms
262.375 Flt Charlie/UFO Quebec, SS comms and this is a known Hurricane Hunter aircraft downlink channel.
262.380 Flt Charlie/UFO Quebec, SS sports broadcast, might have heard some Italians here also.
263.875 UFO Oscar, SS comms
263.925 UFO Quebec, SS comms (even caught their DCS tone through the bird, a first for me - DCS023)
265.550 Flt Charlie/UFO Quebec, SS comms
269.950 Flt Charlie/UFO Quebec, two EE OMs not calls given.

The Uniden BCD996T did a great job in receiving the birds and when used in conjunction with my Icom ICR-7100, they are a great satellite monitoring combo.

I will have more milsat info here in the near future. This will be in conjunction with some Monitoring Times Milcom columns I am working on right now on military satellites, monitoring and their frequencies.