Hello everyone. Whilst scanning around the 5 MHz band, last night, I came across a CW transmission sending random groups of words in French and English at about 13-15 WPM on 5345,8 kHz. I started listening at around 21:25 UTC and stayed on frequency for almost an hour, decoding the many words sent, but never heard an ID or call sign.
It sounds like a training transmission and since there were some amateur SSB comms on a nearby frequency, I guess this must be some kind of channel scheme outside the proposed IARU 1 60m band.
I find this form of CW training quite interesting. Does anyone know who is responsible and what the schedule might be? The French vocabulary (neige, montagne, lune, chaise) might be a clueā¦
On the few occasions I listened to this station it sends 5-character groups of random letters, random numbers or punctuation.
I found this on the Internet: REF(French national radiocommunication agency) provides a service FAV22 transmitting in cw at various speed, texts in french (useful for those interesting in learning this language !) and random 5 characters-words. The transceiver (1kW) is located at about 80 km from Paris transmitting twice a day except on Saturdays and days off simultaneously on these two frequencies 6.825 MHz and 3.881 MHz.
Schedule during the week : 1000-1030 UTC & 1545-1615 UTC Monday 7 wpm, Tuesday 10 wpm, Wednesday 12 wpm, Thursday 14 wpm, Friday 15 wpm
*Schedule and speed on Sunday : 0800-0830 UTC at 7 wpm, 0920-0940 UTC at 10 wpm, 0940-0955 UTC at 20 wpm. * Information kindly provided by Phil F8AWA
Itās nice to know that some professionals still think Morse training is important.
DonĀ“t think it was like the usual numbers stations like FAV22, M23 and so on, since it was a very slowly paced transmission, with actual words, not groups of letters and numbers.
It looped random combinations of words like: book, montagne, voiture, chien, poisson, snow, air, flower, fleur and so on. Clearly intended as a learning aid, very easy to copy, started to decode some of them in my head, it was a good exercise.
Iāll keep an eye out tonight for more transmissions, if they happen again.
Iām getting it here as well (2020 UTC), but what is interesting there is a ādub dub dubā sound behind it - I wonder if that is a data transmission and the morse over the top is just to mask it?
The folks at the utility SWL group UDXF are also reporting this station since October and is a mystery for them, as well. Usually, they are the quite well-informed on this kind of stuff. So, not going to bother more with this, just gonna enjoy the ride and learn some new words, every evening.
