AWESOME Transmitters
AWESOME Transmitters
AWESOME Transmitters
A tmospheric
W eather
E lectromagnetic
S ystem for
O bservation
M odeling and
E ducation
Narrowband transmitter guide
By Morris Cohen
July 2009
The following document shows a list of narrowband transmitters commonly recorded by
AWESOME, though it should be noted that transmitters do change, so this list may, as
well.
LAT
LON
The three RA transmitters are in fact navigation beacons operated by Russia, are
powerful enough to be seen nearly anywhere in the world. The three locations alternate
between the three frequencies, so if monitoring a single frequency, you are actually
FREQ
Alternates
19800 Hz
22200 Hz
40750 Hz
45900 Hz
monitoring three different locations according to some pattern. The pattern is described
here by Trond Jacobsen http://www.vlf.it/alphatrond/alpha.htm.
JXN is a pulsed transmitter, turning off and on with long (few hours) periods.
The HWU and HWV transmitters have at times been at four different frequencies, and
since there are two fairly close to each other, it is difficult to distinguish which one
comes from where.
The best way to determine what transmitters are operating
is to look at VLF receiver broadband data.
Here is an example. You can use the vlf_spec Matlab
command to make a spectrogram, and zoom in on the
horizontal lines. With certain spectrogram properties, you
can even see the frequency moving up and down, which is
the communication signal. Each one is transmitter, and you
can correspond it most of the time with the list above in this
document. If you see something new, then perhaps one of
them has changed frequencies.
Here is a map showing the location of these transmitters, worldwide.