Military experts say radio amateurs "highly knowledgeable asset in HF communication"

Thanks for posting the links. I was actually (pleasantly) surprised at how much interest there was in this paper / presentation.

And I very much enjoyed @SM0AOM Karl-Arne's post on this topic - absolutely hit the nail on the head, so to speak.

 

Lots of muddy thinking here. Also wishful thinking. Reality is, when an enemy denies the US military it's SatCom links the whole of the US armed forces come to a screeching halt (as the paper cited points out in blunt language)
Denigrating HF, MF, LF (Loran anyone?) communications because it does not have the bandwidth of a satcom link is intellectual snobbery. When you have NO communications a crackly voice link will seem like nirvana.
The point of my original post was that an enemy that cannot afford to spend a half-trillion dollars to design fighter jets that cost a 100 million dollars a pop to contest US fighter jets, will spend one billion dollars on methods to deny our military its satcom communications. At that instant an F-35 or B1B, or even a carrier fleet, is just an expensive toy.
In war, no different than in space flight, redundancy is life itself. Is a pot bellied old timer with a battered set of Drake twins and a J-38 going to be the savior for the US military? (if you think so, you have inhaled waay to many solder fumes) But, the US military ignores inferior low-bandwidth obsolete, but redundant, communication systems at it's (our) peril.

 

Those that believe amateur radio today doesn't have ANY potential role in future militarized regional conflicts ought to read and reflect on what happened in Lithuania in 1991. (see article below)

Aggression toward the Baltic nations only increased with their admittance into NATO. As that alliance has become politically strained, the Russian military seems to have renewed interests in resolving long desired ambitions. The occupation of Crimea being an example, and the first OP article (one of many like it) illustrates the next target is likely to be a strategic reconnection of the Kaliningrad oblast with its mother country via a similar fait accompli action taken along the Poland-Lithuanian border (Sulwaki Gap) creating a non-NATO occupied land-bridge.

Russian military use of Cyber and Electronic Warfare technologies, jamming LOS radio, spoofing GPS, cell phones, internet messaging, etc, has greatly advanced in the last couple of decades and is very actively used. As experts within the defense profession point out, the US DoD and NATO as allies have not as yet responded well with proven plans and methods to counter those threats and actions. See Denial of Spectrum Denial (DoSD) which mentions Ham Radio and ... Morse code! )

73, John, WØPV

How Lithuania’s Ham Radio Operators Outfoxed the Soviets in 1991 - By: Paul Goble



LY2WR/A, the Lithuanian parliament's amateur radio station, October 1990

Dictatorial regimes of all kinds have always sought to control communications, especially between those in their own countries and the outside world. With the Internet, their ability to do so has been much reduced; but it is important to remember that, even before the World Wide Web, their control was never quite as complete as many now think. In the struggle between those seeking freedom and those seeking to suppress it, the former have often been able to find ways to outfox the latter.

One of the most remarkable, if least known of these efforts, was the creation by ham radio operators in Lithuania of a news bridge to the United States and the rest of the world in the dark days of late 1990 and early 1991, when Mikheil Gorbachev’s regime was doing everything it could to block the recovery of Lithuanian independence. At a time when the Soviet authorities blocked telephone calls and when there was no permanent diplomatic presence in Vilnius, a group of a dozen Lithuanian ham radio enthusiasts ensured that the US and other Western countries received real time information about what was going on. Had they not done so, Western governments would not have been able to keep up, Moscow would have won an undeserved victory, and Lithuania’s march to freedom almost certainly would have been more difficult.

Historically, dictatorships have tended to hold an ambivalent view of amateur radio operators. On the one hand, they dislike the fact that such people can connect with their fellow enthusiasts abroad. But on the other, they see ham radio as potentially useful both in terms of ensuring communication within the country when natural disasters disrupt other forms of contact and as an advertisement of their supposed liberality (Eham.net, April 26, 2009; Archive.org, June 1965).

Lithuania has a long history of ham radio, both under the Soviet occupation and since that time (Lrmd.lt, accessed July 8). And Lithuania’s hams had a secret weapon that Moscow failed to count on: a large group of amateur radio enthusiasts in the Lithuanian diaspora in the United States that was ready to work with them and pass on the information they supplied to US officials. The KGB monitored their contacts, but for most of the Soviet period, the ham radio operators avoided the kind of political conversations that might have resulted in this bridge being shut down.

However, when Soviet forces launched their murderous attacks on Lithuanian demonstrators at the Vilnius TV tower, twelve Lithuanian hams became the voice of free Lithuania to the outside world. Rytis Žumbakis, Tadas Vyšniauskas, Arvydas Bilinkevičius, Virgis Zalensas, Rita Dapkus, Vilius Vašeikis, Viktoras Peteraitis @LY1A , Valentinas Mackevičius, Alfredas Turauskas, Gintautas Gaidamavičius, Remigijus Lašinis, and Jonas Baniūnas set up ham operations at the television tower and in the parliament building with the respective call signs of @LY2WR and LY2WR/A. A video showing them at work survives. It is available on YouTube (video posted on April 11, 2011).

Initially, these Lithuanian ham radio operators broadcast almost constantly to Lithuanians in the US and elsewhere. But after a few days, they became more systematic, issuing three main news reports each day, otherwise breaking radio silence only if there was a serious development. In the United States, Lithuanian hams took down their broadcasts in Boston in the early morning, in Chicago midday, and in San Francisco in the late afternoon, east coast time. Their efforts were coordinated by Rimas Pauliukonis, who lived in New Hampshire but worked in Boston. He was assisted by Vidas Bysniauskas of Detroit.

The Lithuanian-American ham radio operators recorded what their partners in Vilniius—and other Lithuanian cities as well—were reporting and gave it to Asta Banionis of the Lithuanian American Community’s Washington office, who passed it on to US government officials, including this author, who at the time worked as the State Department’s desk officer for Lithuania. Whenever Banionis’s calls came in that there was news from LY2WR and LY2WR/A, this author always felt the frisson that many feel at the end of the movie Air Force One, when the pilot of the rescue plane announces that his aircraft has had to change its call sign from its ordinary one to that of a plane carrying the President of the United States.

Of those who were most immediately involved in this effort, all but Žumbakis remain alive. Their heroic efforts deserve to be remembered as a model of a remarkable way in which those struggling for their freedom can find ways around oppression. Happily, a generation after these events, Lithuania no longer has to rely on this unique channel of communication; and equally happily, the twelve brave Lithuanian hams are now to be memorialized with a plaque at the Vilnius television center. And a copy of that plague will be displayed in the Lithuanian embassy in Washington, DC.

 

RYRYRYRYRY

 

The whole premise of Amateur Radio is just that... you remember the old ARRL principles of ham radio?

I'd assert there is a HUGE difference between the old General Radio License of yesterday to any Amateur Radio License of any era. The communications I learned in the US Navy at Radioman A School, and as a Technical Controller in the fleet, and now being being an Amateur Extra... I am shaking my head at your post. I think your statement is nuts.

Of course, I realize that other hams may hold a BEE degree, with a much more vast knowledge of BEE than an average ham, but seriously, I have not found how any ham is an asset to the country!

That's just me... but hey, why not spin down to 3910 and tell me those guys are an asset to the country! Ding ding, you win, give the man a Hi-Viz Vest!

 

2359Z... unless you have a 12 hour key!

 

Well I did work Miami - Loncoche a 6600Km + hop with a Piece of Wire on the Chevy last week

 

Some information can be found here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starfish_Prime

WQ4G

 

You could make similar arguments about Horses and transportation... Old technology, slow, cumbersome, etc., etc.

What the 'decision-makers' do not seem to realize (IMO) is that the U.S., even WITH all of its 'high-technology,' could be reduced to a third world country within about 30 minutes. Old technology radios and horses would then become the new 'high-technology.'

What's the simplest way to destroy a Satellite? Sprinkle a little sand in it's path.... It's devastating for a Satellite traveling 7,000 mph.

Dan WQ4G

 

Art Collins and Leo Meyerson would have disagreed.

 

no commnet

 

Thanks for mentioning me @W0PV I haven't really followed these forums until someone recently mentioned a few of my HF articles repost here. We have done some amazing tests with NVIS, and we should have expanded upon that sentence now that I read it. The bottom line is we want to have all communication possibilities available and deny our adversaries the same. I was asked to look at HF from a research perspective which is partly why I started writing these articles--and it is my hobby so any time I can do HF at work is a win/win! So, we think of things in terms of the PACE plan, Primary Alternate Contingency and Emergency, along with LPI/LPD in those modes. We have to operate under the assumption any comms link can fail, and what is our backup. Clearly the ionosphere won't just stop working (except maybe in an eclipse), but the fail we are referring to could be anything from radio failure to antenna cable failure to even operator failure (what's that freq again??).

I'm trying to push the message that you don't have to have a VTC, you need to be able to operate in low bandwidth, and HF can't be learned on the fly so we need to train on it. I'm also trying to change the narrative that HF is cold war comms. With the digital modes, we can do way more than we could 15-20 years ago. I've done NVIS JS8 using 100 milliwatts--this totally blew my mind. And it worked perfectly. Thanks for the comments and I'll keep it in mind when we write about HF again.
73 de KJ5HY

 

Yup--and ALE timing is about the same (~2 seconds or so). If you are within that, you can sync to the time of day server. GPS will get you there, but without that, you can lose timing in about 12-24 hours. It would probably be best to coordinate timing over a short digital message in a GPS denied environment--or maybe setup a 1 frequency ale net for syncing--I'll have to try that out.

 

Check out this video from Defense Flash News, Tactical Communications Operators Test Equipment in the Arta Range of Djibouti.

Ham LEO sat ops will love that super-Arrow crossed yagi. Looks like a group of candidates for Young Ham of the Year doing a SOTA activation!

Gee, if HF prop conditions were great maybe they could have dialed into an amateur band and passed out some pedestrian-mobile DX'ped QSO's for semi rare J2 !

An excellent spoken description by the leader "Rocky" starts at 3:43 into the video.

Obvously this type of training is very basic, and just fine to start off military novices. This type of communications may work OK in asymetrical conflicts with adversaries ill-equipped or not savvy with EW, but its doubtful to hold up against a modern super-power threat.

IMO there needs to be an advanced training level where the challenge is more then just plug-and-play, unfolding and aiming antennas, making a contact under ideal conditions. And not just tactical, but for command and control.

As Rocky says at 5:30, "The utility of this training is for them to learn how to establish comms in degraded environments, luckily they had full coverage throughtout this whole AOR, but mainly for them to IMPROVISE, ADAPT and OVERCOME ... cause you're always gonna be given your gear, but not be given EVERYTHING, and even then it will be up to your to determine what will be the best suit for said events and anything that can come between that and your mission."

What's needed is a Top Gun type school for todays MIL radio operator leaders, to include training for being in potentially highly degraded environments where traditional SAT and LOS high-bandwidth means are problematic, and gives a glimpse into possible HF alternatives.

Kinda like doing the CQWW SSB contest this weekend

 

I departed from USS KITTY HAWK in
August 1966. Eventually moved here to Bremerton WA and wound up with a job involving repairs and modernizations of USN ships being done by private-sector shipyards. Toward the end of my working life as a Ship Surveyor, it happened that Kitty Hawk was being prepared for her last overseas trip, becoming the USN's only "forward-deployed" carrier. So one afternoon I went to Radio Central, which was exactly where it had been 35 years earlier.
Walked in, noting that the old CW operating positions were still in place, minus the straight keys. The watch crew asked if they could help me and I told them that I had formerly occupied THIS position when I was on watch. A female chief walked over, asked a couple of questions involving CW and whether I had ever used it. I said yes, I had; she replied "Why didn't you just send it up to the satellite?"

"Chief," sez I, "back when I was being a Navy Communicator, the only satellite we had was called "the moon". And it was below the horizon half the time so it wouldn't have been very practical." Her eyes popped a bit at that point. "So you really did use CW?"
Yes, Chief...we did.