BEGINNING OF MY FUNCTION IN THE AIRTRAFFIC CONTROL SERVICE.
Period 1955-1964
Herewith the working-out of the paragraphs 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 of the summary.
This is a compilation of those paragraphs because of the fact that the description of the subjects are to short to make separate paragraphs.
It was far from easy: I still lived in Leiden, not far from the naval airbase Valkenburg but I worked on the airport Schiphol near Amsterdam. Every day I travelled from Leiden to Schiphol. I was still a wireless operator in the aviation. The traffic was mainly civil and I was mainly active in handling communications in modes like Radioteletype (RTTY) and Radiotelegraphy. The radio- telegraphy was handled via shortwave frequencies in Morsecode, mainly A-1 (unmodulated) and now and then in A-2 (tone modulated). Schiphol Airport had for this purpose a radiostation in which teams of wireless operators worked continuously. The communications were with aircraft all over the world and also the so called point-to-point communications with other airports.
On this airport I worked until 1956. From there I was replaced to the airport Eelde near Groningen, For my wife and son this was very good for there we got a house. Over there I worked again as wireless operator and I was involved in the flight information service for aircrews. The whole environment, my house and my work were excellent for my hobby. I was able to do a lot with the reception of radiotraffic and I concentrated myself on the international developments. In fact the cold war was in fact very hot in the propaganda respects. East and West used the ether to dissiminate their ideas and doctrines to inluence the peoples of their adversaries. Continuously the Voice of America, the BBC, Radio Paris and stations in, for instance South America and other countries, were active with transmissions in the Russian language, but also in the languages of the satellite states in Eastern Europe. The Soviet Union and her allies tried to hinder listening to those transmissions with the use of strong jamming transmitters.
Very interesting was the transmitter in West Germany (Frankfurt am Main) of the N.T.S. This abbreviation stood for Narodnyy Trudovoy Soyuz. This organisation consisted of immigrants or refugees from the Soviet Union and the members were politically very active and got a strong support by secret services of the West. The organistation tried to undermine the Soviet system with radio propaganda and other activities, even illegal travels into the Soviet Union included. For me was listening to those transmissions a way to train my practical routine and knowledge of the Russian language.
Meanwhile I was always engaged in the monitoring of other transmissions on the Shortwave bands. In those years it was clear that the Soviet Union was energetically developping missiles for the long and medium distances. I discovered frequencies on which trackingstations of a group of radarstations were working. The main station had the callsign VIKA and the subordinated stations used numbers as callsigns. The frequencies used in this network were around 20 Mcs, so where later on communications took place with objects in space, to begin with the satellites in the cosmos series, and the well-known Sputnik-1 and later on the manned ships and stations. As soon as I knew that a Soviet object was launched I tried to find the beacon frequency. Sometimes this was easy for they published which frequency was in use, but that was not always so. Most of the Soviet satellites had the Cosmos number, but a lot of satellites did not have such numbers, but got other names. For instance the Elektrons 1 and 2 were very strong when they passed the perigeum and I even saw some of them during such passes. Then those signals were very powerful with a strong Dopplereffect.
A long time before the flight of Yuriy Gagarin I monitored as much as possible frequencies in the Shortwave bands trying to discover new systems and possibilities. I continued my observations in the framework of the ‘propagandsa war’ and listening to transmissions in the Russian language was a good way to maintain and even enhance my experience gathered by me during my naval carreer.
To extend my routine in conversations in the Russian language I had excellent possibilities in the area where I lived. In a building not far from our house lived 6 old Russian refugees. They left Russia in 1920 via Bulgaria and from there they had to flee to Yugoslavia. After World War 2 they had to leave that country and they came to our country. A welfare organisation supported those people with the help of our Queen Juliana. If there were problems with them I was called up to assist as interpreter. The building in which they lived belonged to the University of Groningen and there were a lot of contacts with slavonic faculties of the Universities in Groningen and Leiden. The meetings with representatives which I had over there were very useful for me for it produced positive results and these gave me the necessary networks for my further carreers.
But let me continue with spaceflight communications: the radiotraffic of Yuriy
Gagarin I did not receive directly. In fact nobody in Western Europe did. We
all had to depend on the repeats transmitted by Radio Moscow after the flight.
So people pretending that they theirselves had monitored Yuriy Gagarin himself
directly did not tell a true story, even that what the Italian brothers Judica
Cordiglia claimed can be ignored. Self-evident that this flight meant for
me a strong intensivation of my monitoring activities.
The soviets almost always used for spaceflight communications frequencies near
20 Mcs. Cosmonauts got a training in communications, even a modest training
to work with Morsecode. A lot of those cosmonauts regularly were brought in
as Capcoms on tracking- and relaystations during manned flights of their colleagues.
In the period between 1961 and 1964 the callsign Zarya was often in use during
the flights of the Vostokships. As much as possible I monitored the communications
during those flights. For me it was not always possible to maintain a continuous
watch, I had my work, other obligations and my electronic equipment was still
in the constructive phase. Nevertheless I was able to record some very interesting
communications, for instance on 14th of June1963 there was a contact between
Vostok-5 cosmonaut Valeriy Bykovksiy (Callsign Yastreb) and Nikita Sergeyevich
Khrushchov.
The used frequency was 20.006 Mcs. Bykovskiy was not yet a full member of the
C.P.S.U., but still a candidate member. On asked Khrushchov to be accepted
as a full member and very soon he was accepted as such. Many years later during
a meeting in Moscow I met Bykovskiy and told him that I had recorded his conversation
with Khrushchov during his Vostok-5 flight.
One time I found out that a new manned flight was going on. I had tuned in
on 20 Mcs and I heard that VIKA got the order to leave that frequency immediately
for a cosmonaut was working there. (VIKA немедленно уходите с этой
частоти здесь работает космонавт)
Аs far as my obligations and private circumstances permitted I was able to
monitor all Vostok-, and Voskhodflights.
But I was not only involved in spaceflight communications, for meanwhile
we had the Cuba crisis. For a long time I also monitored the shipsfrequencies
of the Soviet transport fleet underway from the Black Sea to Cuba. The ships
communicated in CW with the coaststation UFB (Odessa). The mainship of that
fleet was the Maslov. This ship, but also the other ships of that fleet, gave
2 times a day their position to UFB. always with the indication ‘srochno’
(urgent).
UFB had point-to-point communications with Moscow and via these channels all
reports from the rockettransportfleet were relayed to Moscow. The ships,
but in particular the Maslov also gave other reports, for instance when the
ships saw American warships or reconnaissance aircraft. I was an earwitness
of the end of the crisis when the Maslov reported to UFB that a group of American
officers had been on board and that the captain had opened the sealed envelope
with the instructions and that he had acted according to those instructions.
And immediately after this report I could determine that the ships changed
their courses to the East. I stopped listening and told friends and relations
that the war risk was over. Some of my friends said that I was crazy, but
20 minutes later news media all over the world confirmed my conclusion.
The operations with Vostok ships were concluded by the flights of Vostok-5 (Bykovskiy) and Vostok-6 (Tereshkova). In October 1964 the first Voskhod ship with 3 persons on board took place. I could monitor this flight partly for they used other frequencies in the 17 and 18 Mcs bands. Nevertheless I was the first person in the Netherlands to determine that this flight was going on and to report this to our news media and the astronomical observatory in Utrecht.
In 1965 Voskhod-2 flew with Leonov and Belyayev. I was not able to monitor
this flight extensively for I was too much involved with the activities in
relation to my replacement to another job in the Hague.
Via the ether I could monitor the radiotraffic of the rescueteams who tried
to find and save Leonov and Belyayev after their almost fatal landing in Siberia.
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Publication in newspaper Parool by Chris about the cold war propaganda via the ether. |
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Primitive turnstile antenna for reception Western satellites in the 136 Mcs band. |
Chris monitoring spaceflight
communications with self-built system. |
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Chris and Bykovskiy during meeting in Moscow. |
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