Posts Tagged ‘YADD’
YADD – Maritime HF Activity Revisited
October 12th, 2024 | 
Author: 
Before the HF maritime CW bands were closed back in the ‘90s, I spent many enjoyable hours listening to ships and maritime coastal stations all over the world while they exchanged CW messages or sent position and weather reports using the old AMVER system. It was a constant delight to hear various ship Radio Officers (ROs) using their keyers, bugs and good old hand keys to demonstrate their unique fists to the world, especially when using the latter two! Fists ranged from simply superb to downright awful, making one wonder if the ship’s oiler had been enlisted to send the nightly traffic! It was particularly interesting to plot their positions, as many of the vessels eventually showed up in the Port of Vancouver, an easy drive to where I was living at the time.
I often mailed reception reports to ship ROs and had a few invitational ship tours when they arrived in town. I was always impressed with the ship’s radio shack as well as the vessel's onboard cleanliness. Most were truly spotless!
Several years ago I wrote a blog describing my use of YADD, [Yet Another DSC Decoder] a brilliant piece free software written by the late Dirk Classsens. At the time I had been unaware that there was still a huge amount of HF maritime activity and that every large commercial vessel involved in deep sea travel was still on the air after all these years!
A look back at the earlier blog will explain many of the important things you might want to know about YADD and how to use it.
I recently fired YADD up again last week to see what was being heard and what I might be missing during these high sunspot days of Solar Cycle 25.
Some of the interesting catches, to me at least, began with a 2135Z decode of ‘CQ2283’ the bulk carrier AGIOS GEORGIOS S calling another vessel on 12577.0 kHz.
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| At 41,000 tons and 225m, she's a big ship, earlier named the ICARUS |
Flying under the flag of Portugal, she was bound for Kakinda, India, and almost at the antipode from my location
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| The AGIOS GEORGIOS S nears Kakinada, India, in the Bay of Bengal |
Next was the container ship MOL CHARISMA, C6WN8, calling RCC Australia (Canberra), also on 12577.0 kHz.
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| MOL CHARISMA - 21,000 tons and 316m long |
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| Registered in the Bahamas, the MOL CHARISMA was in the Aleutian Island chain near Dutch Harbor, Alaska, bound for Prince Rupert, BC. |
The general cargo vessel MAHO CORAL, 3FEP4 (Panamanian registry) was heard twice, calling the nearby oil tanker, ORIENT CHALLENGE, 9V5083 (Singapore registry) on 12577.0 kHz. A response was heard eight seconds after the second call.
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| The MAHO CORAL - 127m |
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| The ORIENT CHALLENGE - 183m |
I was surprised and delighted to see that the ship being called was right behind her and both were just around the corner from me in Boundary Pass, heading for Vancouver!
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| About to enter BC's Gulf Islands enroute Vancouver |
It was great to see the pair from my window about an hour later as they passed the Roberts Bank coal and container port.
A switch to 16804.5 kHz found the CMA CGM MAUI calling the coastal station in Valencia, Spain.
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| CMA CGM MAUI, a true leviathan - 154,000 tons 366m length |
At the time of my intercept, the French-registered CGM MAUI (FMYR) was off the southern tip of Italy, anchored at Valletta, Malta, in the Mediterranean Sea.
Next was the crude oil tanker YANNIS P, calling Guam Radio on 16MHz. After transiting the Suez Canal, she was in the Red Sea, bound for Singapore.
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| Yannis P - 81,000 tons, 274m |
Registered in the Marshall Islands (radio call V7A2246), the YANNIS P was hauling Russian oil from Ust-Luga to Singapore, a very long voyage! Her 0019Z transmission on 16804.5 kHz was made at 0319 local time in the Red Sea, demonstrating the great HF propagation to be had during these solar-peak years.
Shortly before my local sunset, I decided to drop down to the MF range for the evening and listen on 2187.5 kHz, not really expecting to hear too much. I was surprised to immediatley see a decode from the BBC XINGANG (V2GC3), a 125m long general cargo ship registered in Barbados.
The BBC XINGANG was at anchor in the St. Lawrence River, not far from Montreal ... a surprising catch for 2 MHz as the sky was still bright here on the west coast.
An all-night listen produced several hundred ships, mostly calling each other, in all likelihood to comply with their mandatory daily DSC system test. Ship positions ranged from the US east coast, to the Gulf of Mexico and west into the Pacific. Only one coastal station of note was heard, that being the one on Kamchatka Island, Russia. As conditions improve, I plan to do more overnight listening on this frequency as there are numerous coastals in the Far East that make for challenging DX targets.
All of the signals logged to date have been heard on my Yaesu FT-1000mp and simple half-sloper wire antennas. Listening has been from the east shore of Mayne Island, BC, midway between Vancouver and Vancouver Island in the Strait of Georgia.
My home on Mayne is a wonderful location for radio as it is extremely quiet and located right on the ocean. My best direction favors the east while my poorest is to the west, due to Vancouver Island. The path to Asia has a good saltwater start but eventually runs into Vancouver Island and parts of the BC mainland before reaching the open ocean.
As good as this spot is, it truly pales in comparison to that of fellow DXer, Walter Salmaniw, from Victoria. Walt also has a home in Haida Gwaii (Queen Charlotte Islands) located at the northern tip of the island.
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| Dream location! |
From here, Walt has recently been listening on the DSC frequencies as well, using a 450' N-S unterminated (bi-directional) Beverage antenna next to the ocean. With nothing but saltwater for hundreds of miles, Walt's reception on all bands is truly mind-boggling. His 2 MHz overnight run, netted dozens of ships in Asia as well as coastals from the Far East! On 16 MHz, for every single ship that I was able to decode over-the-pole from the middle east, Walt would log a half dozen or more. When not in Haida Gwaii, Walt can listen remotely from his home in Victoria ... truly the best of both worlds!
As mentioned earlier, some of my fondest radio memories were those times spent listening to HF maritime CW activity. Many 'prepared form cards' or PFCs were sent to the ships or coastal stations heard, with an amazingly high return rate. These prepared QSL cards left blank spots for the recipient (Radio Officer) to fill in. They were often returned along with several pages of handwritten letters.
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| The 'lakers' were very reliable QSLers |
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| Laker STEWART J CORT |
If you miss the maritime HF activity or want to collect some new maritime QSLs, the opportunity still exists ... but instead of sending a reception report in care of the ship's Radio Officer, it will now need to go to the ship's Electronics Officer (ETO) or to the Captain. Reports can be sent to the ship's company who will then forward them to an upcoming port of call.
There is an an active group of DSC maritime DXers in Groups.io DSC-List, where loggings are posted daily. The group also has several helpful files and guides that will be of interest to those getting started.
One of the group members, GM4SLV, has set up a wonderful website called YaDDNet devoted to collecting and posting listener's decoded loggings in realtime. One of YADD's features is the ability to automatically upload decoded signals, similar to PSK Reporter. It's an easy 30-second job to configure YADD to upload your spots to the net. His site also contains the latest MMSI look-up file used by YADD which is updated in real time from the latest log postings ... presently at 72,626 vessels!
Clicking on any of the uploaded ship names displayed in the real time YaDDNet log, automatically takes you to an online vessel-tracking site which usually has a picture of the ship along with all of its information, including its present position.
If you set up YADD to do some listening, I'd strongly urge you to also set it up so that your decoded spots are uploaded to the YaDDNet page in real time. Your latest logs will also keep the MMSI database up-to-date for all YADD users worldwide.
Good luck with your maritime listening or QSLing. Who says there's nothing interesting to be found on shortwave radio anymore!
DXing The Utilities (Part 1)
The following blog was originally posted in 2015 but might still be of interest to anyone with a shortwave radio! Although maritime CW has all but vanished from HF, ships can still be logged and followed on digital modes, using DSC or Digital Selective Calling.
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After building the house here on Mayne Island, in the early 90's, it was several years until I was able to set up a dedicated station. In the meantime, I limited my radio activities strictly to listening. I had a nice Icom R-71A set up in a hall closet and spent my radio-time, mostly on weekend evenings, listening to maritime CW, HF aeronautical traffic and, of course, NDBs below the broadcast band.My HF receiving antenna consisted of three inverted-V's ... one for 160m, the second for 80m and the third for 40m ... all fed from the same coaxial line at the top of a 70' Balsam. It didn't take long to realize what an exceptional radio location I had, living right at the edge of the ocean, with dozens of miles of saltwater in most directions other than due west.
I really enjoyed following evening airline flights across both the North and South Atlantic, and in the early winter afternoons, following the commercial air-traffic all over Africa. Even though listening on 5 or 6MHz, I was amazed at how strong the signals from airliners over Africa at 30,000 feet or more could become, this far to the west. In the early mornings, directions were reversed and traffic from the far east, right into India, was fairly common. Often, small single-engine planes, usually run by various missionaries, could be heard while on the ground, taxiing at remote field locations and calling in via HF radio to request takeoff and flight-following.
Now QSL's have always been one of my top radio interests and it wasn't long before I started sending and collecting verifications for both the aircraft and the ships I was hearing ... once I had figured out how to get my reception reports to their proper destinations.
A very small portion of my 'utility' QSL collection is shown below. For the most part, it consists of PRC's or 'Prepared Reply Cards', with blank portions to be filled-in by the verification signers. Surprisingly, my return rate was around 90% and verifications were often returned with long, hand-written letters and numerous photographs ... especially from the ship RO's, as I suspect their days at sea were often quite monotonous. Even many of the military and commercial aircraft pilots would return a handwritten note along with the filled-in verification card, which I found even more surprising. It seemed that most were very surprised to hear that their radio transmissions were even making it this far and could be heard so readily.
Some of the most interesting catches came from the Pacific, with a large variety of ships operating out of Japan. There are probably still several maritime CW stations operating in Japan. Many of these were owned and operated by commercial fishing companies and could be heard working fleet vessels throughout the Pacific on their daily CW skeds.This interesting catch from the North Pacific was the Japanese 'fisheries research vessel' 'M/V FUJI MARU'. She was about 1200 miles NW of her CW contact, JNA in Tokyo.
A Japanese cruise-ship, the 'M/V ORIENT VENUS' was logged early one summer morning while working JNA on 8355 KHz CW. Her position indicates she was in the Mariana Islands.
was the 'M/V Oglebay Norton', a huge bulk
carrier out of Detroit. Her 150W signal was loud and clear late one August evening while in contact with WLC, Rogers City Radio.
The U.S. Coast Guard is still one of the best QSLers around.Several of their stations will QSL with a nice printed card.
NMC (San Francisco) and NMO (Hawaii) were two
catches, regularly heard on the old 500 KHz calling
frequency.
Stormy weather often provided a good chance
to catch a search and rescue mission in progress.
'Rescue 6008' was an HH-60J helo enroute from
Chesapeake Bay to Elizabeth City, North Carolina during
a midnight rescue operation.
Although not my farthest HF maritime catch,
this was one of the most surprising. 'C4PC'
was heard early one February evening on 8 MHz CW, when conditions seemed terrible. No other ships were heard on the band at the time. As I learned later, the 'M/V MAIROULI' was at anchor near Beirut, Lebanon, a distance of nearly 7,000 miles from Mayne Island.
.... cont'd
YADD
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| Maritime Traffic - courtesy: www.marinetraffic.com/ |
Until very recently, I had believed that there were no longer any HF maritime operations left, other than various Coast Guard weather announcements and an emergency watch on certain USB frequencies.
Over the past week I have discovered that HF maritime activity is still alive and well, through the worldwide Digital Selective Calling (DSC) system, which has been around in one form or another since the early 90's as part of the Global Maritime Distress and Safety System (GMDSS) ... I guess I was just asleep at the switch, having not been aware of the HF DSC activity!
Although it's not CW, there's still ample opportunity to hear and follow global shipping traffic as vessels of all types contact coastal land stations or call each other. One requirement that keeps the DSC frequencies busy is the requirement for vessels to test their systems at least once per week, providing many opportunities to log various coastal stations or add a new ship to your logbook. Ships can be heard calling coastals for a routine signal test, setting up an SSB phone QSO on a specified frequency or just calling another ship for a test or a phone sked. As well, DSC can be used to send a distress message alert in times of emergency.
Messages are sent in an error-correcting FSK mode, similar to the Navtex system, using the same speed and shift of 100 baud /170Hz. There are a few programs that can be used to decode the DSC messages but one of the best and most popular is the freely available "YADD", by Dirk Claessens .
YADD stands for "Yet Another DSC Decoder" and is an offshoot of Dirk's equally popular and effective "YAND", a free Navtex decoder.
YADD and several other software decoders can be downloaded from the NDB List Info site ... the best source of hands-on information for topics involving NDBs, Navtex, DGPS, DSC DXing and more.
After downloading and installing YADD and setting audio levels correctly, YADD began decoding signals with ease.
The spectrum display at the top of YADD's screen shows the audio passband coming from the receiver. With the receiver in the CW mode, DSC signals will appear on the frequency that your receiver's BFO offset frequency is set for. I prefer an offset of 400Hz so the spectrum display shows the signal at 400Hz, with the tuning cursor centered on a signal. A narrow CW filter should also be selected but no narrower than 170Hz.
Each vessel using the system, as well as the coastal land stations, have a unique 9-digit MMSI number (Maritime Mobile Service Identity). Once the software detects the MMSI numbers being used, it can then display the vessel's name (or the coastal's location and distance) so you know who you are listening to ... it's all very slick!
After initially running my receiver for a few minutes on the 12MHz DSC channel, I decided to look up the location of the first two ships I had heard, using one of the Internet's marine traffic sites.
I was surprised to find that my first catch was a large tanker under way in Kola Bay, having just departed Murmansk, in the Russian Arctic. Vessel number two was also under way along the east coast of South Korea.
The YADD screen above is showing the large bulk carrier 'SALANDI' (3FEB9) calling Rio de Janeiro Radio (PWZ) today on 16804.5KHz.
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| Courtesy: Henk Guddee |
I soon discovered an active group of DSC DXers in Yahoo Group's DSC List, which I quickly joined and started asking a lot of questions. The 'Files' section also contains the latest list of ship MMSI numbers so that your YADD look-up text file can be kept up-to-date.
One of the group members, GM4SLV, has set up a wonderful website called YaDDNet devoted to collecting and posting listener's decoded loggings in realtime. One of YADD's features is the ability to automatically upload decoded signals, similar to PSK Reporter. It's an easy 30-second job to configure YADD to upload your spots to the net. His site also contains the latest MMSI look-up file used by YADD which is updated in real time from the latest log postings ... presently at 34,566 vessels!
Clicking on any of the uploaded ship names displayed in the real time YaDDNet log, automatically takes you to an online vessel-tracking site which usually has a picture of the ship along with all of its information, including its present position.
If you set up YADD to do some listening, I'd strongly urge you to also set it up so that your decoded spots are uploaded to the YaDDNet page in real time. Configuring this capability is very simple. Your latest logs will also keep the MMSI database up-to-date for all YADD users.
If, like me, you have missed the maritime CW activity on HF, you may find monitoring DSC traffic of interest ... both ships and coastals. I may even try QSLing some of the coastals again, many of which will still issue a traditional card QSL, upholding a long standing shortwave radio tradition ... but grab them while you can!
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| From my collection. Heard 4349KHz CW Aug '96 |
YADD
|
| Maritime Traffic - courtesy: www.marinetraffic.com/ |
Until very recently, I had believed that there were no longer any HF maritime operations left, other than various Coast Guard weather announcements and an emergency watch on certain USB frequencies.
Over the past week I have discovered that HF maritime activity is still alive and well, through the worldwide Digital Selective Calling (DSC) system, which has been around in one form or another since the early 90's as part of the Global Maritime Distress and Safety System (GMDSS) ... I guess I was just asleep at the switch, having not been aware of the HF DSC activity!
Although it's not CW, there's still ample opportunity to hear and follow global shipping traffic as vessels of all types contact coastal land stations or call each other. One requirement that keeps the DSC frequencies busy is the requirement for vessels to test their systems at least once per week, providing many opportunities to log various coastal stations or add a new ship to your logbook. Ships can be heard calling coastals for a routine signal test, setting up an SSB phone QSO on a specified frequency or just calling another ship for a test or a phone sked. As well, DSC can be used to send a distress message alert in times of emergency.
Messages are sent in an error-correcting FSK mode, similar to the Navtex system, using the same speed and shift of 100 baud /170Hz. There are a few programs that can be used to decode the DSC messages but one of the best and most popular is the freely available "YADD", by Dirk Claessens .
YADD stands for "Yet Another DSC Decoder" and is an offshoot of Dirk's equally popular and effective "YAND", a free Navtex decoder.
YADD and several other software decoders can be downloaded from the NDB List Info site ... the best source of hands-on information for topics involving NDBs, Navtex, DGPS, DSC DXing and more.
After downloading and installing YADD and setting audio levels correctly, YADD began decoding signals with ease.
The spectrum display at the top of YADD's screen shows the audio passband coming from the receiver. With the receiver in the CW mode, DSC signals will appear on the frequency that your receiver's BFO offset frequency is set for. I prefer an offset of 400Hz so the spectrum display shows the signal at 400Hz, with the tuning cursor centered on a signal. A narrow CW filter should also be selected but no narrower than 170Hz.
Each vessel using the system, as well as the coastal land stations, have a unique 9-digit MMSI number (Maritime Mobile Service Identity). Once the software detects the MMSI numbers being used, it can then display the vessel's name (or the coastal's location and distance) so you know who you are listening to ... it's all very slick!
After initially running my receiver for a few minutes on the 12MHz DSC channel, I decided to look up the location of the first two ships I had heard, using one of the Internet's marine traffic sites.
I was surprised to find that my first catch was a large tanker under way in Kola Bay, having just departed Murmansk, in the Russian Arctic. Vessel number two was also under way along the east coast of South Korea.
The YADD screen above is showing the large bulk carrier 'SALANDI' (3FEB9) calling Rio de Janeiro Radio (PWZ) today on 16804.5KHz.
|
| Courtesy: Henk Guddee |
I soon discovered an active group of DSC DXers in Yahoo Group's DSC List, which I quickly joined and started asking a lot of questions. The 'Files' section also contains the latest list of ship MMSI numbers so that your YADD look-up text file can be kept up-to-date.
One of the group members, GM4SLV, has set up a wonderful website called YaDDNet devoted to collecting and posting listener's decoded loggings in realtime. One of YADD's features is the ability to automatically upload decoded signals, similar to PSK Reporter. It's an easy 30-second job to configure YADD to upload your spots to the net. His site also contains the latest MMSI look-up file used by YADD which is updated in real time from the latest log postings ... presently at 34,566 vessels!
Clicking on any of the uploaded ship names displayed in the real time YaDDNet log, automatically takes you to an online vessel-tracking site which usually has a picture of the ship along with all of its information, including its present position.
If you set up YADD to do some listening, I'd strongly urge you to also set it up so that your decoded spots are uploaded to the YaDDNet page in real time. Configuring this capability is very simple. Your latest logs will also keep the MMSI database up-to-date for all YADD users.
If, like me, you have missed the maritime CW activity on HF, you may find monitoring DSC traffic of interest ... both ships and coastals. I may even try QSLing some of the coastals again, many of which will still issue a traditional card QSL, upholding a long standing shortwave radio tradition ... but grab them while you can!
|
| From my collection. Heard 4349KHz CW Aug '96 |
