of another. All the
test gear in the lab was thrown out of a second floor window and
burnt. I was acting as official photographer for my unit at the time.
When I walked into a small store room I saw all the equipment had been
thrown off the shelves on to the floor, but appeared to be intact. I
spotted a box of brand new packed German navy morse keys and decided
the time had come for me to acquire a small war trophy of my own. As
I bent down to pick up a key, I was horrified to see two large sticks
of gelignite perched perilously on the edge of a shelf. The explosive
was tied with white ribbon, with a weight attached to the other end.
I froze to the spot. Gingerly I lifted my trophy out of the box and
began to walk slowly backwards, being very careful not to knock
anything over. I breathed a sigh of relief when I was out of the room
and immediately alerted the engineers who came and defused the booby
trap. So this book might never have been written thanks to the German
army.

At the Athens broadcasting station transmitter site at Liosia my
unit erected a small temporary 'T' antenna which allowed the station
to come on the air again, but a short time later, when the ELAS
guerrillas overran the area they began using the transmitter to
broadcast their own view of events. We provided the broadcasting
authority with a BC 610 mobile transmitter installed next to the
Parliament building in the centre of town, using the same frequency of
610 KHz. Listeners in Cairo couldn't understand what was going on
when one moment they heard an official government announcement and a
little later a war communique issued by the Communist guerrillas.

8. Over-the-horizon or Ionospheric HF Radar--OTHR

As mentioned briefly in Chapter 1, it was in April 1976 that the
then Soviet Union first unleashed a diabolical noise on the HF bands
which caused widespread interference to all broadcasting and
telecommunication services between 6 and 20 MHz. On the first day the
"knock-knock-knock" went on continuously for over ten hours. Radio
amateurs, who were among the services that suffered from the
interference, soon came to call this noise "the woodpecker". By
rotating their beams when tuned to the 14 MHz band they established
that the transmissions appeared to originate from the vicinity of the
town of Gomel in the U.S.S.R.

The governments of many countries world-wide immediately
protested to Moscow, and all they got