1 November 2015

Why I think this is Harris rather than Thales


I think this signal is the Harris "RF-5800 selective call" waveform, parameters as the speed, modulation and ACF fit fine, although they are the same than Thales Systeme-3000 ALE (pic. 1): unfortunately these two ALE signals have the same OTA parameters but not compatible at binary level due to proprietary adds.
This argument was already discussed here and this time I have an almost safe argument in favour of the 'Harris' identification: if you look at the signal you may see some voice segments and listening to them reveals a radio-check, in Spanish, between the operators callsigns "mercurio" and "830", briefly:
- 830 from mercurio k
- here mercurio, how copy me k
As you can see in the link below, "mercurio" is a Communications (HF and VHF) BMR in service in the Spanish Army (BMR 3560.56, aka "BMR Mercurio 2000"):
http://www.ejercito.mde.es/en/unidades/Las_Palmas/ciatrans16/Organizacion/materiales/index.html 
But more likely, from searches in the web, "mercurio 2000" could also be the name of a set of communications equipment that is installed in vehicles of the Spanish Army such as Vamtac, BMR or even Land Rover (!):
Now, download this pdf and take a look at page 10: the new VAMTAC will replace MERCURIO comm-vehicles starting from Jan 2013, and just below the picture you can read a mention just about the Harris RF-5800 that is used as HF equipment set (pic. 2): 

So:
- since these new VAMTAC vehicles are equipped with Harris RF-5800 
- since the communication vehicles seen above belong to the same (mil) network
there is no reason because "MERCURIO" should use (or be) a different proprietary equipement (as Thales, in this case) that would cause  interoperability issues inside the comm. network.

It remains to observe, in my opinion, that while logging these signals it's hard to say Harris rather than Thales, and vice-versa, without some other useful item such as an on line chat (as in this case) or a well-known working frequency.

Pic. 1
Pic. 2

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