Conversation

Notices

1. Embed this notice
   Matt Blaze (mattblaze@federate.social)'s status on Thursday, 23-Jan-2025 18:34:24 JST Matt Blaze

   "CARTWHEEL" Tower, Fort Reno, Washington, DC, 2020.

   All the pixels, on a need-to-know basis, at https://www.flickr.com/photos/mattblaze/49576247768/

   #photography

   • Embed this notice
     Erich M. (harkank@chaos.social)'s status on Thursday, 23-Jan-2025 18:34:14 JST Erich M.

     in reply to

     @mattblaze
     
     None of these 3 large dishes is active. Same with dish 4 in the back, this one is for the Ku band. Dish 1,2 and 4 are equipped with skew angle gear & motors to squint into downlinks.
     C-Band modules - LNCs, filters & c - are all from Nortel Canada. The Ku band modules are from Swedish Microwave.
     Vienna is by far the largest and one of the few remaining #SIGINT stations in EU on Russki embassies.
     Tech staffers were all kicked out except here

     https://fm4.orf.at/stories/3029962/

   • Embed this notice
     Matt Blaze (mattblaze@federate.social)'s status on Thursday, 23-Jan-2025 18:34:15 JST Matt Blaze

     in reply to

     • Erich M.

     @harkank Extremely interesting.

     Are these receive-only (have you detected any signals coming out of them)?

     Glyn Moody repeated this.
   • Embed this notice
     Erich M. (harkank@chaos.social)'s status on Thursday, 23-Jan-2025 18:34:17 JST Erich M.

     in reply to

     @mattblaze

     And meanwhile we have sort of re-engineered three of these four-meter dishes and identified their targets. All three are C-band dishes and there are not that many C-band sats around any more in the segment from Greenwich to 15°.
     Posted a thread on this lately, always fediverse first, and I'm currently doing a longread for a magazine here.

     tl;dr: They are collecting signals intelligence mainly for their African putsch politics

     Russki #SIGINT 2.0
     https://chaos.social/deck/@harkank/113115103774149785

   • Embed this notice
     Erich M. (harkank@chaos.social)'s status on Thursday, 23-Jan-2025 18:34:18 JST Erich M.

     in reply to

     @mattblaze

     Ah ok, different network., rremember. As you mentioned thíngs going unnoticed in plain sight. Everybody passing by the Russian embassy to the UN in Vienna could see 4 large dishes on top. Nobody cared what they might be doing there for years .

     Late in 2022 we shot the roof with zooms & sent a drone up. Voilà: a full blown #SIGiNT station with a dozen dishes. And the NSA watching them from their "stateroom" hut above the nearby US embassy to the UN.

     https://fm4.orf.at/stories/3029201/

   • Embed this notice
     Matt Blaze (mattblaze@federate.social)'s status on Thursday, 23-Jan-2025 18:34:19 JST Matt Blaze

     in reply to

     • Erich M.

     @harkank That was a different network. The horns and microwave dishes on that tower were disused, and the tower repurposed as a cell site.

   • Embed this notice
     Erich M. (harkank@chaos.social)'s status on Thursday, 23-Jan-2025 18:34:21 JST Erich M.

     in reply to

     @mattblaze

     If I remember correctly you already posted one of the other towers of this microwave network. Wasn`t that the one featuring these large horn antennas below and 4G/5G dishes on top?

   • Embed this notice
     Matt Blaze (mattblaze@federate.social)'s status on Thursday, 23-Jan-2025 18:34:22 JST Matt Blaze

     in reply to

     The upper white section of the tower is actually a plexiglass radome, concealing various microwave and UHF radio antennas.

     CARTWHEEL and its cousins were decommissioned around 1990. Most of the towers, mainly atop mountains in remote areas, were demolished or left to rot. However, CARTWHEEL and CORKSCREW (on a mountain near the Appalachian trail in central Maryland) have been maintained in good condition, now repurposed by the FAA.

   • Embed this notice
     Matt Blaze (mattblaze@federate.social)'s status on Thursday, 23-Jan-2025 18:34:23 JST Matt Blaze

     in reply to

     Captured with the Rodenstock 23mm/5.6 HR Digaron-S lens (@ f/6,3), Phase One IQ4-150 back (@ ISO 50), Phase One XT camera (1/25 sec exposure).

     This unassuming cylindrical tower, at first glance perhaps a grain silo or water tower, was part of a secret "continuity of government" microwave communications network. Built in the early 1960's, a network of similar towers located around the capital region linked the White House with critical sites such as Camp David, Raven Rock, and Mount Weather.