Interference on Aberedw Hill GW/MW-022

On the Bands
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I climbed Aberedw Hill near Builth Wells GW/MW-022 Thursday night and I found a chunk of strong interference splatted across the main portion of the 40m band…

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Never seen this before, wiping out 40khz of the band and as far as i know, there is not a transmitter/antenna for miles ?!? but it was dark…

Any ideas… ?

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Russians

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Yes, Woodpecker Mk2.

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Military - not sure from where, but we get it here fairly regularly on 7 and 14 MHz.
It was really strong when I was operating on holiday on Cyprus last year.

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Incredible. Bet that would cause havoc with the weekend contesters, even the ones pumping out kWatts….

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There’s a long history of military OTH radar on the 40m band, e.g.

Unfortunately…. While these sort of signals are operating on exclusive amateur radio allocations, the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) Convention essentially gives military stations free reign in the spectrum.

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Because they have guns :wink:

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There was a fair bit of repetitive noise on a big chunk of the 15m band on Saturday morning whilst I was on GM/SS-104 so I just did 40m on HF and 2m from that hill.
It was gone by the afternoon when I was on GM/SS-105 so I managed some QSO’s out to Europe and a couple of s2s out to Italy.
Andy
MM7MOX

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