The hams or amateur radio operators of Mumbai have written to the Sanchar Bhawan in Delhi including the PMO, the Mumbai police commissioner, the Gujarat Director General of Police and many others, warning them about the undecipherable signals that their sets have been catching in the past five months.

Ankur Puranik, a trader dealing in manufacturing of electronic products, is a ham radio operator in the city. Although there are over 200 amateur radio operators in Mumbai, not all use the set daily. Puranik says, "We hams meet during the night owls net, which is basically a roll call at 9.30 pm. There are about 70-80 of us, who have heard these voices using unrecognisable languages and what's suspicious is that they don't have a call name."

25,000 HAM OPERATORS



The radio does not seem to make much noise. During any given day, the radio starts playing as other sources of communication collapse. All over India, there are 25,000 ham operators. Puranik says, "With online sale of ham radios, there are many people using these illegally. One can decipher when such transmissions happen from unregistered sets. But the reason why these are suspicious is also because they keep changing their frequency and when some of us checked with our direction finding equipment (DFE), it was found that the signal was not coming from the coast of India, but from deep sea."

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The irregular signals are encroaching on the 144-146 MHz bandwidth allotted to the two-way radio transmission to the amateurs.

The ham radio operators discussed among themselves and finally decided to tip-off the authorities about these calls. The letters were shot off by them on November 16.

ANTI-SOCIAL ELEMENTS USE HIGH-FREQUENCY COMMUNICATION SYSTEM



Puranik explains that the reasons why anti-social elements also choose very high frequency system of communication is because, "You cannot be tracked in these communications. It is easily available these days and there is a possibility that they may not be registered."

The operators met Mumbai police officials who have asked them to record these conversations that could help in finding out the source of these activities.