Interesting that the Stasi chose to hide it in a car battery shell and bury it, ensuring that anyone who stumbled across it would be suspicious.
It did stay hidden for 30+ years
DDR Type 2 Short-wave spy transmitter
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Re: DDR Type 2 Short-wave spy transmitter
#12Did they try sending? Maybe the Lincolnshire poacher would reply?
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Re: DDR Type 2 Short-wave spy transmitter
#13Makes you think about what they've got nowadays. You can finds lots of recordings of Numbers Stations uploaded by amateurs on Youtube. Also look at http://www.spynumbers.com/
Re: DDR Type 2 Short-wave spy transmitter
#14Interesting that the Stasi chose to hide it in a car battery shell and bury it, ensuring that anyone who stumbled across it would be suspicious.
Are we sure it was buried intentionally, and not moved from its original place and eventually thrown away (presumably because the concealment worked as intended and it looked like a junk old battery) to where it ended up now?
There's a photo in the article of how it was concealed, it seems like it was very deliberately buried:
https://www.cryptomuseum.com/spy/ddr2/img/ddr2_cache_small.j...
Re: DDR Type 2 Short-wave spy transmitter
#15Nice work and superbly chronicled. I hope in 60 years someone will find my work and similarly finish all the documentation I never got around to writing today.
Are you certain you want to be compared with the Stasi?
Re: DDR Type 2 Short-wave spy transmitter
#16Is there a reason why they're so vague about which country it was found in?
It's repeatedly described in the article as "a West-European country", and that it was "close to the border of The Netherlands." That seems to suggest either Belgium or Germany. Is it just to make the location harder for others to find, or because borders are in dispute or have shifted since it was buried?
(Probably unrelated, but I see on Google Maps a forest & bog 20km from the Netherlands border, where the German border appears to be split in two by a Belgian railway line running through it.)
Re: DDR Type 2 Short-wave spy transmitter
#17Is there a reason why they're so vague about which country it was found in? It's repeatedly described in the article as "a West-European country", and that it was "close to the border of The Netherlands." That seems to suggest either Belgium or Germany. Is it just to make the location harder for others to find, or because borders are in dispute or have shifted since it was buried? (Probably unrelated, but I see on Go…
I don't think there are any border disputes in this area.
Perhaps the hobby-archaeologist wanted to remain anonymous because unearthing historical artifacts with a metal detector is illegal in some places. In Germany one needs a permit at least and must leave finds undisturbed so that archaeologists can see the context of the find. If the hobby-archaeologist is searching illegally, then he/she may be afraid that the location of the find may lead to him/her.
Re: DDR Type 2 Short-wave spy transmitter
#18Thanks for sharing, cryptomuseum.com on itself is quite interesting.
A question though: how is humidity handled in modern electronics? Is there any sacrificial used on mainboards, or is there any design pattern used on PCBs in general to achieve the same effect?
Re: DDR Type 2 Short-wave spy transmitter
#19Interesting that the Stasi chose to hide it in a car battery shell and bury it, ensuring that anyone who stumbled across it would be suspicious.
While it's true that a dumped car battery would at least raise interest or even suspicion, a buried one is significantly harder to stumble upon, however suspicion is still optional. Who is going to open a potentially highly acidic/hazardous car battery anyway? Something "rattled" inside, which suggested it was dry, and what ever rattles inside a car battery, everything is supposed to be fixed there, right? Besides, an ancient Varta battery - put that in a museum! There - the cover's blown.
Back in the days no one cared about dumped car parts. But nowadays just about anything raises instant suspicion if anything out of the ordinary lies about on the ground.
Re: DDR Type 2 Short-wave spy transmitter
#20Thanks for sharing, cryptomuseum.com on itself is quite interesting. A question though: how is humidity handled in modern electronics? Is there any sacrificial used on mainboards, or is there any design pattern used on PCBs in general to achieve the same effect?
Conformal coating or potting. Simply not exposing the components and board traces to environmental conditions at all is simpler and more effective - but then we no longer expect to need to replace vacuum tubes very often.