Watching the world from BBC Monitoring since 1981. Radio, history, geopolitics. Feel free to add to my pinned 254-post🧵on the BBC's history on longwave.
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Jan 7, 2023 • 6 tweets • 2 min read
Ukraine's current hacking of Russian TV: There's been a lot of engagement with my🧵below (thanks everyone!) so here's a new🧵with more details:
- Ukraine is uplinking its own multiplex (a "mux") to various Russian satellites, mimicking the mux being uplinked by Russia
2/ The Ukrainian uplink is much stronger than the Russian one, fooling the Russian satellite into relaying the Ukrainian uplink instead
- Ukraine has also given the individual TV channels on the "fake" mux the same IDs as on the Russian one
Nov 8, 2022 • 14 tweets • 5 min read
🧵80 years ago today! A milestone in information warfare as Britain's secret "Aspidistra" radio transmitter is launched. Its first task is to support Operation Torch, the invasion of North Africa. Its signals are so strong that listeners in Morocco think it's a local station. 1/n
In fact, Aspidistra was in a large hole in the ground in Sussex. Operated by the Political Warfare Executive (PWE), it relayed the BBC's French service that day, airing messages by Roosevelt, Churchill, Eisenhower and De Gaulle in support of the allied landings. 2/n
Sep 26, 2021 • 17 tweets • 4 min read
A long and nerdy thread about two obscure incidents in the Afghanistan war:
Big history is made up of millions of small mistakes that go unnoticed by those who make them.
This thread is about two of the tiniest of such errors, from US information operations during the war. 1/17
The first story:
When the US invaded Afghanistan in October 2001 it aired radio broadcasts in local languages for the local population. 2/17