In my early teens at the beginning of the 60’s there were regularly news stories about radio monitoring stations having picked up radio signals from Soviet space satellites and cosmo-nauts talking! Since radio amateurs were also able to pick up these fascinating signals it seemed to me that I should also be able to do that and follow the struggle for space domina-tion between the Soviet Union and the Unites States “blow-by-blow”.

In October 1964, at the tender age of eighteen, I started studying for a M.Sc. in Engineering Physics at the KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm – diving into theory. But the lust for ”hands-on” technical work had been awakened during my high school holidays when I worked as an intern assembling sounding rockets at the temporary Swedish scientific sounding rocket base Kronogård in Northern Sweden using the nearby military missile range for rocket impacts. The rockets studied noctilucent clouds during the summers of 1962, 1963, and 1964. Such clouds appear only in the summer. This was a U.S.-Swedish project in which both NASA and the U.S. Air Force took part. So at sixteen I worked on assembling real rockets – because the Swedish Interplanetary Society arranged for its junior members to work as summer interns in the project. This got me hooked on space technology and practical work.

During 1962 I corresponded with space tracker Jan Jutander, who tracked Soviet and US satel-lites from his parents’ house near the Swedish city of Jönköping – he called it ”the Tolarp Tracking Center”. Jan convinced me that I could track Soviet satellites near 20 MHz with simple radios. The picture shows Jan with his main receiver, a BC-923.

In October 1964, just when I entered the Institute of Technology I invested in a cheap Lafayette HE-30 shortwave receiver in order to do something hands-on. I convinced my parents (I was still staying with them) to string an antenna wire to a nearby concrete wall. The HE-30 receiver did not have a very accurate tuning dial. The standard remedy to this problem was to use a crys-tal calibrator to inject signals at precise frequency intervals into the receiver. The HE-30 did not have this feature tuning the receiver was very approximate. I wanted to find the exact frequency 20.000 MHz, but I did not try awfully hard. I succeeded at the end of 1965 when I heard the time signals from the U.S. time standard station WWV at Fort Collins, Colorado, which trans-mitted on exactly 10, 15, and 20 MHz.

Now I finally could keep a watch on Soviet satellites. U.S. satellites used higher frequencies for which more sophisticated was needed and which were too expensive for a schoolboy. Also, US space activities were not secretive, while the Soviet space program was enigmatic and cloaked in secrecy – irresistible for the curious!

The Lafayette HE-30, my first radio.

Picking up my first satellite – getting started - Cosmos 104

So, at the tail end of 1965, a year after getting the radio, I could finally tune the radio accurately to the most common Soviet satellite frequency on shortwaves, 19.995 MHz. It was used by the Vostok spacecraft in which Yuri Gagarin and the early Soviet cosmonauts rode into space. Start-ing in 1962 it was also used by photographic reconnaissance satellites in the “Cosmos” series. These satellites returned a capsule with the camera and exposed film strips after eight days in orbit.

In early January 1966 I had just started my second semester at the Institute of Technology and was studying for exams, so I did not make a very systematic effort to track my first Soviet satel-lite. I needed a stroke of luck to get started.

On 7 January 1966 I returned home from school at 1330 local time. Uncharacteristically my father was at home from work. As I stepped through the door he said that radio news broad-cast an hour earlier had mentioned that the observatory at Bochum in Germany had picked up signals from a newly launched Soviet spacecraft. I switched on the radio receiver and made sure it was tuned to a frequency just below 20 MHz and sat down with my text books next to the softly hissing radio.

Around 1500 local time I heard ”bleeps” from the radio of a kind I had never heard before and started recording them. They faded out after seven minutes, but came back an hour and a half later – about the time it takes for a satellite in low earth orbit to complete one orbit around the earth. And it kept coming back for the next couple of days. It was obvious that I had picked up signals Soviet satellite Cosmos-104 that Bochum had heard and that newspapers reported about on 8 January.

But of course I wanted to share this accomplishment with someone. I had read articles in the British aviation magazine FLIGHT International about satellite monitoring at the grammar school in the town Kettering in Northamptonshire. Perhaps they could finally confirm that my signals came from a Cosmos satellite. So I wrote to senior physics master Geoff Perry and in-cluded a little tape with recorded signals. Geoff responded promptly the following week – very quickly in the days long before e-mail and fax machines. Geoff confirmed that I had heard Cosmos-104 and strongly suggested that I should listen for a similar satellite, Cosmos-105, that had just been launched. He urged me to get a stopwatch to make the reception times in my tracking reports accurate.

I still have the Omega stop watch, but it is broken. Anyway, these letters were the start of a 34 year long friendship with Geoff Perry – until his passing in January 2000. I became part of the informal group of satellite listeners around the world that communicated with Geoff – ”The Kettering Group”. When I use the pronoun “we” below I usually mean “the Kettering Group”. And, I got myself an external crystal calibrator! (see picture above).

I should point out here that this book is not an attempt to give an overview of the extensive ac-tivities the “the Kettering Group”. Exploits of the Kettering Group are described in detail only insofar that I was personally involved in a direct way. To write a definitive work on Geoff’s en-tire operation is a major task that surpasses my ability.

Why did Soviet media publish satellite radio frequencies?

US satellites were difficult to track by radio, partly because they seldom transmitted over Eu-rope, but mostly because they often used hard-to-receive frequencies. It may seem counterintu-itive, but the much closed Soviet society did actually publish transmission frequencies.

Radio transmission frequencies for spacecraft with a secretive mission have seldom been pub-lished, but during the early space age the Soviet Union published radio frequencies for the spacecraft that performed heroic feats like those who hit and photographed the Moon or brought humans into orbit. The idea was obviously that “the west” would “eavesdrop” on these space mission and become convinced and impressed! The United States, on the other hand, kept the frequencies for their first manned spacecraft Mercury rather confidential. When the two-man Gemini craft appeared NASA started to be more open. But the Soviet Union continued to publish radio frequencies for some of their satellites and strangely enough very often the frequencies of what must have been their most secret spacecraft – the photoreconnaissance satellites. Admittedly, they only published shortwave frequencies such as 19.995 MHz where quite simple and relatively undecipherable information was transmitted. But what was the pur-pose of regularly publishing these frequencies?

Geoff Perry and myself often discussed this question and the only explanation that we could come up with was that it was part of a ”cover story” to confuse the general public as to the real purpose of the short-lived Cosmos satellites – photographic reconnaissance. The openness about their transmission frequencies was meant to give the impression that they were scientific satellites – even if it was obvious that they were reconnaissance satellites. It was a matter of ”deniability” – to be able to ”flatly deny”. If the Soviet Union publicly admitted that these were photoreconnaissance satellites they would have been legitimate targets for a U.S. attack by anti-satellite weapons. If the public myth that they were scientific satellites was kept up an attack could be described as pure military aggression! But I doubt that the Soviet propaganda managers realized how much we could deduce from these beeping sounds.