A friend of mine, whom I'm grateful, sent me this interesting and rather uncommon example of the Akula 250Bd/500 FSK waveform. Transmission was recorded on 9202 KHz around 0800 UTC utilizing a nipponese SDR: as you see, the values of the FSK parameters are the half of the usual ones (500Bd/1000)
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| Fig. 1 - Akula 250Bd/500 |
The demodulated bitstream shows the average Akula "stuff" (Figure 2):
- reversals
- sync group (6 code words followed by 6-bit "0"s separator)
- preamble group (7 code words with 2 different, but varying values arranged as 4 x 1st code word + 3 x 2nd code word)
- data block
- End-Of-Message group + EOT group (which never varies and consists of the 5 code words 010000 011101 011101 010000 100001)
3 x 100101 + 110101 + 2 x 110001
and the characteristic 1 obtained from the demodulation of the 500Bd/1000 waveform:
4 x 100101 + 3 x 110001
further registrations are needed before we can say that this is the characteristic preamble of the 250Bd/500 waveform.
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| Fig. 2 - Akula 250Bd/500 demodulated bitstream |
It's worth noting in Figure 1,3 the continuous carrier in absence of messages, as already seen in another recordings [1]: most likely this is due to the adopted ship-shore "paradigma". While in many of the western navies the shore stations are utilized to broadcast a list of available listening frequency (FABs/CARBs) (1), it could be that the Russian shore stations transmit a carrier on their known listening frequencies at scheduled times on behalf of subs which have something to comunicate to the shore station itself. That's evidently my and my frield's guess.
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| Fig. 3 |
It's very interesting to note that a day after, and on the same frequency, a short speech was noted: "GREYDER ya DALNIE", more over the Ministry of defence of the Russian Federation web site reports about an anti-submarine exercise in Peter the large Bay by the Pacific Fleet just on 8th November (Figure 4) [3]. Note that "Peter the large Bay" is located in the Sea of Japan, northwestern Pacific Ocean, in the Maritime (Primorye) region of far east Russia and that the Akula example was heard utilizing a distant KiwiSDR in Nagano, Japan. Just a coincidence?
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| Fig. 4 - https://function.mil.ru/news_page/country/more.htm?id=12484855%40egNews |
https://disk.yandex.com/d/kGyl5tQco6hKWg
(1) CARB is the acronym for Channel Availability and Receipt Broadcast, these transmissions radiate information on the frequencies available for ship-shore traffic and to pass control and receipt messages; sometimes besides indicated as FAB or Frequency Availability Broadcast. These procedures are utilized to automatically execute a channel-link before a message could be sent [2].
[1] http://i56578-swl.blogspot.com/2022/04/akula-quite-unusual-session.html
[2] http://i56578-swl.blogspot.com/search/label/FAB
[3] https://function.mil.ru/news_page/country/more.htm?id=12484855%40egNews
