I kind of chuckled at the thought of a handful of gnat-like hams chasing
out the 800 pound gorilla Woodpecker. It's reminiscent of the guy doing
the little dance. When asked why, he said, "to chase away the lions".
"But," came the response, "there aren't any lions within thousands of
miles." "See, it works, doesn't it?" said the dancing man.

As Martin points out, the Woodpecker would sit at one frequency for a
while, then jump to another -- I heard it many times. But I hadn't
realized there were people out there congratulating themselves for
chasing it off when it did make one of its frequency jumps.

Roy Lewallen, W7EL

Martin Potter wrote:

gudmundur ) writes:


I used to love to drive the woodpecker crazy. It was easy to chase it
out of the ham bands.


The Woodpecker changed frequency all the time anyway, whether anyone tried
to interfere with it or not. It was part of their operational plan. And
the pulses carried a PSK coded pattern to make it easier to recover the
returned echoes, sorting them out of the interference. I doubt very much
that anyone could really interfere with them when they operated.

... Martin VE3OAT