UK Vintage Radio Repair and Restoration Discussion Forum - View Single Post - Memories and other stories from Pye etc PMR engineers.

G6Tanuki · 15th Sep 2017, 7:46 pm

I vaguely remember Pacnet being mentioned: though we all knew it as "the Tractor" because thats what it sounded like when it broke through.

[c.f. "the Russian Woodpecker" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duga_radar - which was active on the HF bands in the same timescale, and whose pokka-pokka-pokka pulses could occasionally be heard as breakthrough in the background of VHF comms when it transiently chose 10.7MHz on which to radiate its hundreds-of-Megawatts]

I never bothered hacking the likes of Pacnet: though some of my colleagues built a really rather simple 3-transistor interface that would take the audio from a scanner and, with the help of an original IBM-PC, decode POCSAG into plaintext.

15th Sep 2017, 7:46 pm	#43
G6Tanuki Dekatron Join Date: Apr 2012 Location: Wiltshire, UK. Posts: 14,007	Re: Memories and other stories from Pye etc PMR engineers. I vaguely remember Pacnet being mentioned: though we all knew it as "the Tractor" because thats what it sounded like when it broke through. [c.f. "the Russian Woodpecker" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duga_radar - which was active on the HF bands in the same timescale, and whose pokka-pokka-pokka pulses could occasionally be heard as breakthrough in the background of VHF comms when it transiently chose 10.7MHz on which to radiate its hundreds-of-Megawatts] I never bothered hacking the likes of Pacnet: though some of my colleagues built a really rather simple 3-transistor interface that would take the audio from a scanner and, with the help of an original IBM-PC, decode POCSAG into plaintext. Last edited by G6Tanuki; 15th Sep 2017 at 7:54 pm.