Every once in a while, I do start listening to 8992. Sure, we can never figure out what is actually going on, but after listening for the past 6 years, at least I can give some guidelines. When tensions are higher than normal, or rocket man decides to fire off one of his toys, I do pay a little more attention. Background:: generally every 30 minutes when things are basically "normal" to "slightly elevated," You'll hear the station and the test count of a standard message of 30 characters. You almost NEVER hear main sail even with a test count. So, there's your background patterns in a nutshell. Since Putin made his threat, I did start listening again, and as the days progressed, I listened even more intently. Why??? it's because patterns suddenly changed. At least the good part is that I haven't heard any message orders from main sail, but for this past week, I've heard more main sail test counts this week alone, than I've heard in the past 6 years combined. Now, this morning, I've only heard one, but a fair lady station sent out several orders this morning, at least every 10 minutes for close to an hour's spread of time. IT was the standard 30 count messages, but the difference was that the receiver of the orders was repeated twice--which indicates it's considered an important message. In the past week, I've only caught one message greater than 30 characters, and it was a 56 character message. The other differences is that instead of repeating the standard 30 character message every 30 minutes, the stations are now only saying "standing by for traffic".
I bring this stuff up for a reason. Even in the past when DWS was a #3, the traffic was consistent. This time, it's waaaay out of the norm.
, so that they're brief and do not consume much bandwidth. This is why the skykings are so damn short - everything has been agreed upon beforehand, and also time is of the essence when nuclear war breaks out. However, every so often you end up having to transmit a nonstandard message - something they can't just look up in their codebooks. In such cases you do have to go letter by letter, and this results in a long message. Note that 216 characters is still really short - roughly the equivalent of a single Twitter post.
