Did anyone listen for KPH yesterday?

The Maritime Radio History Society ran an event yesterday, where Maritime Station KPH was sending five letter code groups in which listeners were to decode a message using a WWII Enigma machine simulator.

https://www.radiomarine.org/mrhs-events?mibextid=Zxz2cZ&fbclid=IwAR2xzJ9-IqeqaOjs7wUPrvfe-TJ9nl8fU1kGAMcXLMqEKd5HNn-O6qYzObU

I wasn't participating in the event myself, but my friend Tim Koeth, K0ETH, the son of my friend Bill W2WK (SK) was. He had sent me a message during the week asking if I would copy the code groups as a back up to his effort.

At 4:00 PM local time, I ran down to the shack and fired up the KX3. Since the transmissions were way out of the Amateur Radio bands, I bypassed the internal tuner so no "last settings" from our bands could possibly attenuate whatever signal I was able to receive.

The KPH CW frequencies are (in kc):

426 (after an announcement on 500)

6477.5

8642.0

12808.5

17016.8

22477.5 

The only frequency on which I was able to copy was 17.0168 MHz. The signal was not bad, I'd say a decent 579, but QSB was pretty significant and my background noise was at least S3 on the W3EDP. I did not switch to the Butternut, and I should have as it's a bit quieter as far as background noise is concerned.

Anyway, the transmission of the code groups was at 15 WPM, so when I had solid listening, it was easy copy. I had two code groups where I only got 4 characters. The rest I got complete, but with band conditions, I highly doubt all were correct. But I DO know that if this were an old school FCC Code Test (remember those? WHEW!) I'm 100%! confident that I would have at least one minute's worth of solid copy. At the same time, if the Allies had depended on me alone back in WWII, the free world as we know it today, might have been in big trouble

I sent off my copy to Tim and wished him luck. He had several other people listening for him besides me (and himself). I hope he had a set up with the ability to copy the same in a RTTY message which followed the Morse Code transmission. But my own experience is that knowing that RTTY is not a Forward Error Correcting system, that copy might be as dicey as my old ears listening to CW being sent from 3,000 miles away amidst the QSB, background noise and static crashes.

So........ did you listen? How did you do?

72 de Larry W2LJ

QRP - When you care to send the very least!