Our speaker for the evening’s talk was Bill Steadman, Curator of the Military Intelligence Museum based at RAF Chicksands.

Bill’s very comprehensive talk began by outlining the attributes of the enemy, those which were positive and also negative. This topic was expanded to Intelligence and communications and how they affected happenings on the ground.

Next to be examined were planning aspects; looking at what went wrong in the past. This set the question about intelligence: what does it need to do? The answer was protect our secrets and discover the enemy’s.  Bill then went on to detail how this was accomplished. Also pointed out was the fact that intelligence could be used to deceive and confuse the enemy. He then listed the many aspects of intelligence that were carried out in Bedfordshire.

It was shown that years of planning produced the largest ever seaborne invasion and the most complex military operation ever undertaken.

Alan gave a talk on the uses of SDR based on his experience to try and get a weather station to work correctly.  The method chosen was to use GNU to help find the frequency used by the weather station and eventually see if he could pick up the data from the device.

He explained how the GNU programme could be used to see different o/p and represent them in various forms an example was a 1 KHz audio signal o/p and an oscilloscope giving a sine wave of the out put.  The programme uses various elements, which are selected to make the programme do what you want to do.

Alan had used several types of SDR in his experiments and he demonstrated how the signal from his weather station was represented on the waterfall screen. It was noted how members activation their car keys could also be picked up showing how wideband the SDR was.

Alan had used the Funcube dongle, the HackRF and other SDR dongles to help him find out about the weather station.  He pointed out that a shortcoming of  amateur SDR equipment was the sensitivity which can be overpowered by strong RF signal.

An interesting and different evening.

Report by David, G8UOD