[bars] Gibberish CW on 40?

[Adam Smith]

I've seen reports from other sources of a wide-spaced, two-frequency 
mode, like RTTY but I think spaced 7MHz, may be what you're hearing.  
With a standard 3kHz passband you'd only hear one half of the signal at 
a time.

Ah, found the email reference, will include below.  It was posted on 
CWOps mailer, then I saw it forwarded to YCCC mailing list. But at 
least, a matching report (from late January).


Adam


---------- Forwarded message ---------
From: *Tim Shoppa via groups.io <http://groups.io>*
Date: Thu, Jan 29, 2026 at 11:10 PM
Subject: [cwops] The intruder on 40M CW bands past week+
To: <main at cwops.groups.io>


For the past week+ there has been some on-off keying intruder on the 40M 
CW band easily heard on both coasts of North America.
It is occasionally QSY'ing anywhere from 7.04MHz to 7.07MHz and may be 
outside that range goo. It is often on a whole multiple of 500Hz.
Although we are most often hearing one CW frequency with our rigs set at 
a normal bandwidth, I can often find an "evil twin" which is key-down 
while the other one is key-up, so I think it's more likely to be 
super-wide shift FSK. Below for example is me putting receiver 1 on 
7.063MHz and the other on 7.070MHz circa 0400Z on Jan 30 2026. You see 
when one is key up the other is key down.
The basic signal rate seems to 0.05seconds (20 Baud). Our CW-seeking 
brains seem to try to interpret it as CW because if we here one element 
at 0.05seconds we think it's a dit and another at 0.15 seconds our brains.
I do not recognize 7kHz 20 baud FSK as a standard encoding anywhere but 
someone might know better than me.
I'm gonna record some longer patches and see if I can recognize any framing.
Tim N3QE





On 3/29/26 5:50 PM, Andy Wallace via bars wrote:
> A friend alerted me to basically unreadable CW on 7 Mhz. Sounds like someone with a terrible “fist”. Elements are not 1 and 3 units long that’s for sure.
>
> There are two on right now (21:47 UTC).
>
> 7048.5 and 7041.5. Both seem to be repeating the same short phrase. At first I thought it might be a railroad/landline telegraphy net but it’s just …sloppy.
>
> Anyone? Spies? Foxhunting gone very wrong?
>
> Maybe someone should report this as a band intrusion to the ARRL.
> Andy
> KA1GTT
> _______________________________________________
> bars mailing list
> bars at w1hh.org
> http://mail.w1hh.org/mailman/listinfo/bars_w1hh.org
>
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