From: John Boyer (johnboy@johnboy.to)
Date: Sat Jan 22 2000 - 09:18:07 PST
Geoff Perry, IMHO one of the greatest "Hackers" of all time has just passed
away. I saw a 60 minutes on him years ago, truly inspiring.
Using simple equipment, including scavenged taxicab radios, he and his
students tracked the soviet space program. At times they did it better that
anyone, including the CIA.
"He had this quality of self-aware eccentricity," McDowell says. "His
importance was that he combined that with the
highest standards of research. He showed you could compete with the CIA
using the cheapest equipment and a
class full of high school students.
"And in some ways, he was a precursor to the Internet generation," McDowell
adds. "You can do it yourself and
establish a reputation based on what you can do on your own."
article pasted below
http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,1282,33825,00.html
also...
from Sven Grahn's site [http://www.users.wineasy.se/svengrahn] ...
Here is a picture of Geoff Perry at his radio
http://www.users.wineasy.se/svengrahn/trackind/getstart/gptrack.htm
And the *Whole* lab
http://www.users.wineasy.se/svengrahn/trackind/getstart/Kettlab.htm
[for more on modern tracking see
http://www.fas.org/spp/military/program/track/overview.htm]
Quiet Passing of Unlikely Hero
by Dan Brekke
3:00 a.m. 22.Jan.2000 PST
By appearance alone -- in a fuzzy black-and-white photograph on the Web,
for instance -- amateur space analyst
Geoff Perry looked like he could have played in one of the postwar Alastair
Sim comedies set in English secondary
schools.
In a white shirt and tie, draped in a cardigan that must have been
mustard-colored, and just a little dumpy, Perry
would have been cast as a dour but mildly dotty faculty member. The
combination would have produced moments of
delight for students and audience and perhaps a profound discovery or two.
So it comes as something of a surprise -- looks can be deceiving and all
that -- that Perry played something close
to that role in life.
Perry, who died this week at age 72 at his home in Cornwall, England, was a
physics teacher who -- armed with
inexpensive shortwave radio equipment and an army of eager students --
managed to uncover closely protected
secrets of the Soviet space program during the 1960s and 70s.
Perry and his Kettering Grammar School group became celebrities in 1966
when, listening only to shortwave tracking
signals emitted by orbiting spacecraft, they discovered that the Soviets
had begun launching from Plesetsk, a new
facility in northern Russia. Perry's work won him recognition as a Member
of the Order of the British Empire and,
when he retired from Kettering in 1984, a job as space analyst for
Britain's ITN television network.
Jonathan McDowell, a Harvard astrophysicist who works on NASA's Chandra
X-Ray Observatory project and publishes
the Jonathan's Space Report on worldwide launch and satellite activity,
said Perry's importance goes much deeper
than the Plesetsk discovery. McDowell argues that Perry represented a link
between the old English tradition of
somewhat off-kilter science amateurs and the Net ethic of developing
independent authority.
"He had this quality of self-aware eccentricity," McDowell says. "His
importance was that he combined that with the
highest standards of research. He showed you could compete with the CIA
using the cheapest equipment and a
class full of high school students.
"And in some ways, he was a precursor to the Internet generation," McDowell
adds. "You can do it yourself and
establish a reputation based on what you can do on your own."
Perry's technique was simple, but required painstaking observation.
When the Soviets launched the first Sputnik in 1957, radio amateurs noted
that the craft broadcast a signal on an
easily accessible frequency. So early on, many radio buffs were listening
to the cosmic beeping. Perry's genius lay in
deciphering what might have sounded to the casual observer like random noise.
"There was a complication when you listened in," McDowell said. "The
satellites were moving very fast, so there was
a Doppler effect" -- a change in apparent intensity of the signal observed
as the transmitting vehicles passed the
fixed point of the radio receiver. "But with some tinkering, you can
measure the Doppler effect as you follow the
signal, and work out the satellite's orbit."
That was impressive enough, but Perry and his students also figured out how
to decipher the information the Soviet
satellites were sending to ground controllers.
"They were like code breakers," McDowell says. "Geoff noticed that certain
kinds of satellites emitted what was
almost like Morse code -- an on-off signal, a pattern of long beats and
short beats. So a language became familiar
to them and they started to notice certain patterns. Some signals appeared
to come from satellites that went up for
just eight days. They had a certain pattern, and satellites that were up
for longer had a much different pattern."
From close observation, Perry, his students, and several dozen volunteers
around the world who joined the Kettering
Group were able to infer the various missions various classes of satellites
were destined for -- military
reconnaissance, navigation, or unmanned tests of new spacecraft -- as well
as their orbits and where they had
been launched from.
After identifying a series of unmanned test flights for what turned out to
be the Soyuz spacecraft, McDowell
recounts, Perry heard something different one day.
"He noticed some new telemetry that had been activated. It turned out that
there were cosmonauts on board, and
what they were hearing was a monitor that was transmitting pulse rates. So
they could even hear the cosmonauts'
heartbeats from the ground."
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