Overnight Navtex reception on 518 khz 3/24/21 – 3/25/21

After the success of getting my first couple of successful Navtex decodes a couple of days back, I left my PC, SDRPlay and YAND running overnight to see what I’d receive from different stations during the night.

Checking this morning, I got several messages from a number of different stations. Around midnight I was receiving from the Cambria station in Los Angeles. Over the following couple of hours I received transmissions from almost all the West coast stations.

Each message starts with ZCZC (referring to the Navtex page on Wikipedia here), then the next character (B1 field) is the station identifier. Stations are listed on the Station List page here, but there’s also a useful table in this doc covering all Maritime communications which is an interesting read:

This doc also has a map showing the location of each of the US and Canadian stations:

Here’s the messages I received overnight, from Cambria, Point Reyes, Astoria, and Tofino stations:

Cambria, Los Angeles – Station ID = Q

Astoria, OR, station ID = W :

Point Reyes / SF, station ID = C :

Tofino, Vancouver Island, Station ID = H :

This one is interesting, a warning re. a sub-surface scientific platform west of Vancouver Island:

Warning re. COVID-19 pandemic:

Astoria, OR, Station ID = W :

This one is interesting, Whidbey Island small arms safety warning:

Receiving Navtex on 518khz

First time receiving some Navtext on 518 khz.

03/25/21 06:51UTC using an SDRPlay with an MLA-30+ loop and decoded with YAND.

I’m assuming looking at the schedule this was from the Cambria station near LA. The Character ‘Q’ in the B1 data field seems to confirm that.