
DDR Type 2 Short-wave spy transmitter - jonke
https://www.cryptomuseum.com/spy/ddr2/index.htm
======
rkagerer
Nice 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.

~~~
eigenloss
Are you certain you want to be compared with the Stasi?

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SyneRyder
Is 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.)

~~~
staffanj
That railway and strange border is an old remnant of the Treaty of Versailles.

~~~
SyneRyder
Oh wow! I knew I'd get an interesting reply. That helped me find some more
info on the Travel StackExchange [1] & Fascinating Maps [2], if others are
interested. I'm especially fascinated by Rückschlag, a single house & garden
that is German territory within Belgium:

[1] [https://travel.stackexchange.com/questions/105503/is-this-
we...](https://travel.stackexchange.com/questions/105503/is-this-weird-area-
on-the-belgium-germany-border-a-walkway-or-something-differen)

[2] [https://fascinatingmaps.com/strange-german-exclaves-in-
belgi...](https://fascinatingmaps.com/strange-german-exclaves-in-belgium-
vennbahn/)

~~~
bchallenor
There's a fascinating YouTube series called "The Most Complex International
Borders in the World" about enclaves and exclaves. [1] There are even some
"counter-enclaves", e.g. a part of the Netherlands inside Belgium inside the
Netherlands. [2]

[1]
[https://youtube.com/watch?v=gtLxZiiuaXs](https://youtube.com/watch?v=gtLxZiiuaXs)

[2] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baarle-
Nassau](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baarle-Nassau)

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dschuetz
Thanks 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?

~~~
snops
Conformal coating is used, which is a thin layer of polymer sprayed as a film
over the finished and soldered PCB.

As modern components are normally much smaller and sit fairly flush with the
PCB, there are less nooks and crannies, and so the coating manages to fill
them all or bridge them over quite well. It's still not a step used in most
PCBs, there are downsides like requiring connectors and switches to be masked
off with tape, and so it is reserved for more extreme applications than
consumer electronics. Think electric gate control boxes, or marine
electronics.

It would probably have existed in some form at the time of the OPs radio, but
spraying the PCBs in it wouldn't have saved all the connectors, switches pots
and other front panel controls from moisture, and so a more general method was
needed.

Finally, a more extreme step is to "pot" the entire PCB by putting it in a
sealed container and filling the container with a "potting compound", a liquid
resin that sets solid or to a rubbery finish. This makes replacing or
repairing the PCB very difficult, requires a lot of thought as to connectors,
and it doesn't work well for high power electronics as the potting compound
traps heat. It allows you to fully submerse a PCB in water forever, stops
sparks if your PCB is working around explosive gases/powders, and is sometimes
used as a "security" method in hardware security modules or "secure" USB keys.

For security, potting only really works if tiny wires are embedded in it,
which on breaking wipe the encryption keys. Scraping off potting compound can
otherwise be done by anyone if they are willing to spend a long time.

------
CamperBob2
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.

~~~
Rjevski
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?

~~~
SyneRyder
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...](https://www.cryptomuseum.com/spy/ddr2/img/ddr2_cache_small.jpg)

------
pizza
Makes 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/](http://www.spynumbers.com/)

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emilfihlman
Heh, the title made me think that someone made a radio transmitter using DDR2,
the memory.

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ggm
Did they try sending? Maybe the Lincolnshire poacher would reply?

~~~
blattimwind
This is a transmitter, it can't receive replies.

But yes, they tested it:

> The transmitter produces a strong and stable signal at the fundamental
> frequency, but also produces strong unwanted harmonics, with the f2 being
> only 3dB down. Furthermore, the f3 is only 10dB down and the f5 is just 20
> dB down.

~~~
ggm
The reply would be encoded in the one time stream the numbers station sends:
you pick things like the Lincolnshire poacher up on another radio.

Btw, I think it was Russian not east German and possibly was over the horizon
radar or a deadmans switch or something else: we need a /j for joke marking.

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readhn
"The one shown here, was found in 2018 in a forgotten cache in a West European
country. Based on the manufacturing codes on some of the components, it was
probably manufactured in 1962. "

"forgotten" it was not - KGB does not forget! just deemed useless to both
sides and not worth the extraction risk later on.

also, i wonder if one of Putin's buddies used these back in the days when he
was stationed in East Germany in the 80's.

~~~
kryptiskt
But Stasi ceased to exist in an orgy of shredding, so it might very well have
been forgotten.

~~~
emptybits
Perhaps, but we were reminded just this week that some Stasi memories are well
preserved. [https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/dec/11/valdimir-
putin...](https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/dec/11/valdimir-putin-east-
german-identity-card-found-in-stasi-archives-report)

