“I am coming to you… you will explode after a few minutes.”

This quotation may well be the VHF radio equivalent of “All Your Base Are Belong To Us” according to El Reg.

Apparently, there is a phenomenon on marine monitored VHF frequencies known as the “Filipino Monkey” which quite literally refers to a ‘Troll’ who transmits on the monitored marine channel 16 in order to ‘grief’ diligent radio operators at the other end. (All ships at sea must maintain a watch on channel 16)

While this may nominally mean generic insults about the operator’s mother or other lineage, it can also be a somewhat comical response to broadcast anti-collision warnings or more formal transmissions.

So how does this relate to last weeks ‘confrontation’ between the US Navy and Iranian fast patrol boats. Well, as the register points out, the USN can’t be sure that the transmission they heard actually came from the Iranian boats.

We cannot make a direct connection to the boats… It could have come from the shore, from another ship passing by… I guess we’re not saying that it absolutely came from the boats, but we’re not saying it absolutely didn’t.

It could just as easily have been transmitted by a bored Oman ship’s radio watch operator 20 miles away who was tired of listening to USN posturing that day.

Now the US Navy are understandably twitchy about people proclaiming that they are ‘going to explode’ because the USS Cole was bomed back in 2000 by Sudanese suicide bombers. Of course, this isn’t the [demonstrated] style of the Iranian Navy who seem to do things the ‘old fashioned’ way using various projectile weapons and torpedoes.

I’d like to think that if the Iranian navy were actually intending to broadcast a declaration of war via ship-ship VHF, they’d at least prepare a slightly less comedic sounding statement beforehand.

It has been not so widely reported in the last few days that a Chinese Type 039 Submarine (NATO reporting name “Song Class”) buzzed the USS Kitty Hawk on the 27th of October while the Kitty Hawk was on maneuvers in the western Pacific Ocean.

The event seems to have caused much consternation for NATO and the US Navy as apparently the Song Class had sneaked up on the 7th fleet unnoticed before surfacing with 5 nautical miles of the US Supercarrier.

This is bound to be causing a few headaches at the US Navy as 5 nautical miles is well within the Song Class’ firing range for both torpedos and anti-ship missiles. The Song Class carries Yu-4 torpedos with a range of ~8 nautical miles at up to 30 knots and the YJ-8 anti-ship cruise missile which has a 43 nautical mile range at just under the speed of sound and a ‘hard-to-hit’ flight profile which comes in down to 3m above wave-height.

The Chinese, of course, deny that they were shadowing and intercepting the Seventh Fleet. I can just imagine the look of anguish as the Chinese boat captain realised that he had accidentally surfaced in the middle of an American Carrier Group

Now, my theory as to how the Chinese managed to creep up on the Seventh Fleet is thus: The Song Class firstly has a latest-generation design prop which makes it particularly quiet. Secondly, the Song probably makes a different sound to a Russian submarine. The reason this is critical is that I’ll bet the class Hollywood image of a steely-eyed sonar operator being able to detect a Russian sailor breaking wind on a submarine 5 miles away is a bit of a fallacy. What is more likely is that they have a computer listening to the sonar at all times running some pattern-matching software. Now, that’s all good and well if they encounter the sound of submarines that the computer has patterns for but if the computer doesn’t have a pattern for a Chinese Sub, perhaps it can’t interpret it’s presence at all.

I wonder if the solution really could be as simple as giving a new pattern to the sonar computer?