SATCOM on 262.175 MHz: pirates on a military satellite

What you hear

Voices in Portuguese with the typical satellite hiss, as if from inside a barrel: short remarks, laughter, roll calls, sometimes music from a phone held to the microphone, sometimes tone bursts and clicks. It is narrow FM, several people taking turns, and none of them uses a callsign: first names, nicknames, towns. Spanish turns up now and then, English rarely. The signal comes and goes in waves, because the transmitters are hand-held radios and converted mobile rigs, and the satellite sends back exactly what reached it.

Somebody is on 262.175 MHz nearly always; it is the busiest of the frequencies. Next to it sit 255.550, 257.150, 263.625 and 268.400 MHz, and when the main one is quiet, the neighbours are worth a pass.

Who transmits and why

The US Navy FLTSATCOM and UFO satellites sit in geostationary orbit and work as plain repeaters: what arrives on 290 to 320 MHz goes back down on 243 to 270 MHz. The repeater has no protection, whoever transmits louder gets through. In the 1990s this was discovered in Brazil, a country of vast distances and poor communications, and the satellite became a people's radio. They call it the bolinha, the little ball. Truckers, Amazon loggers, fishermen and plain chatterboxes keep in touch over hundreds of kilometres without paying anyone. The US military knows, now and then catches the loudest, but the satellites are old, there is nowhere to move the traffic, and the chatter has gone on for years.

Listening is legal in most countries: the transmissions are in the open, and ShackDeck only receives. Transmitting to the satellite is illegal everywhere, and this is a description of the situation, not legal advice.

When and where to listen

The satellite stands over the Atlantic at the equator, around 15 degrees west, so it is heard from Brazil and Chile to Europe and West Africa. The best time in Europe is the evening and the night, when Brazil has daylight and the roads are full. From Europe the satellite is low on the horizon, the signal is weaker than from Iberia or the Canary Islands, but readable; receivers in Spain and Portugal hear it around the clock.

The usual online receivers up to 30 MHz are no use here: it takes an OpenWebRX with a profile on 240 to 270 MHz. There are a few dozen of those in the world, and the program knows which of them have the band.

In ShackDeck

Station catalogue, Military, SATCOM 262.175. The program takes a receiver that can tune the band and stands closest to the point under the satellite, sets the frequency and FM; no receiver of your own is needed. To choose the receiver yourself, open the receiver list and press the SATCOM chip, or type 262175 into the frequency field: only those with the band remain. If it is quiet, the second frequency, 255.550, is in the same rubric.