Nearly anyone in Europe transmitting on FT8 on 28 MHz in 2020 will have been spotted by DS3SHI who is supposed to be in South Korea. This is the FT8 coverage for a station in the UK on 10-metres on the 18th of August 2020.
The first impression is that the UK station is being heard by other stations around Europe and by DS3SHI in South Korea. However, that is not the case and the DS3SHI spots are bogus.
A search on Google will show that other stations have been caught out by this and they believed that their FT8 signal on 28 MHz was reaching South Korea.
So where is this bogus DS3SHI station???
There was a very good Sporadic-E opening in Europe on the 29th of April 2020 and I made a record of the FT8 reception map for DS3SHI on 28 MHz.
Notice how there are so many European stations and there is nothing in China, South Korea or Japan? Another tell-tale sign that this station was not in South Korea and was located in Europe.
If we take a closer look at the map for Europe then you'll notice a large cluster in the east of Germany.
I've added in Yellow shading slowing the 'skip' zone which is largely free of stations with a doughnut of stations beyond that. From this, we can deduce that DS3SHI is in the southern part of east Germany.
So we can zoom in a bit further and you can see the concentration of stations. The centre of this concentration is somewhere west of the city of Chemnitz.
Over the Summer months, I have checked the FT8 map on 28 MHz for DS3SHI and I kept a record of the stations that were heard at 0dB or stronger. The approximate location of these are shown below with the three highest signal levels shown as well.
The whole area seems to be quite hilly so it may be possible to be close to DS3SHI but be quite weak if there was a hill in the way. However, it seems likely that this DS3SHI station is located near the small city of Zwickau.
As for why? Why is someone in Germany using a callsign (DS3SHI) and locator (PM48si) for South Korea? Is it someone using an online SDR receiver? Is DS3SHI even a real call sign?
The FT8 spots on 28 MHz that this person generates serve no useful purpose and just misleads people. As far as I can tell, this person is only listening on 28 MHz and is not transmitting.
Hopefully if people search Google for the DS3SHI call sign in future, they will find this blog post and discover that the FT8 reports from DS3SHI are bogus.
Update - 25th Aug 2020: Just after this post appeared, it was verified that the spots from DS3SHI were coming from an IP address in Germany. All spots from DS3DHI have now been blocked from the PSK Reporter site.
4 comments:
It's surprising this hasn't received more attention, as it's been going on for a while. I was taken in by it earlier in the year, but it doesn't take long to figure out it's all false.
The callsign doesn't appear as registered on any of the usual databases.
I'm not sure about the certainty with which we can treat any of the 'geolocating' of the person that is doing this. It needs sound physical evidence first.
It should be pretty easy for the person responsible for PSKreporter to examine the log files for this station and figure out at least which country the reports are being sent from.
Over the Summer months, I checked the FT8 map multiple times and there is a consistent pattern. The receiver is definitely near Zwickau in Germany.
Interesting article. It shows the shortcoming of the PSKreporter system or....the reporting software. I showed a similair thing in 2011 when I cheated and reported USA stations on 40m JT65 at the middle of the day. I used a webSDR in the USA for that. in that case I did use my own call but WSJT-X or other software accepts any call. Recently I received SWL reports for my PE75FREE activation from a South Korean SWL station that couldn't be possible. He clearly listened trough a webSDR in Europe. You can cheat everything but the question is what use it has. A strange taste of humor may be? 73, Bas
was caught out by this bogus station also, but he never TX's so not really that much of a problem, for some reason I just knew he was in EU as even after 12pm he was still hearing me...
As far as I am aware he has not posted any spots from me for a while now...so maybe blocked or has seen the light...we shall see in time
73 de jason MM3NRX
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