"Enigma" in Amateur Radio

Autor: Henryk SP9JPA

"Enigma" Activities

This Blog is dedicated to the past, present, and future special-event stations, Awards, and other amateur radio activities related to the German "Enigma" encryption machine. The secret codes had been deciphered by 1934 by three Polish mathematicians:

Marian Adam Rejewski, Jerzy Różycki, and Henryk Zygalski,

who later reconstructed a working replica of the machine. Copies of the "Enigma" were secretly produced by the "AVA" Radio Engineering Plant in Warsaw, headed by Leonard and Ludomir Danielewicz, as well as Edward Fokczyński and Antoni Palluth (amateur radio enthusiasts). In July 1939, the Polish, British, and French Intelligence officers met at Pyry, outside of Warsaw. At that meeting, the secrets of Enigma were handed over to the Allies by the Poles.

Enigma Museum

Dr. Thomas Perera W1TP
https://enigmamuseum.com/about-us/

INTRODUCTION TO THE ENIGMA:

The Enigma cipher machine was first patented by Scherbius in 1918. It was initially designed to be used by commercial companies to keep their communications secret. When Germany began rebuilding its military in the 1930s, the government took over the Enigmas and began using them for all of their secret communications.

(Note: the word cipher is also spelled cypher which is a primarily British variant.)

Poland was aware that Germany would probably invade them first and built a cipher bureau to try to read enciphered German messages. The Poles were the first to determine how the Enigma machine worked and how to go about decoding its messages. When Poland was invaded, the Polish mathematicians were already helping the Allied forces develop strategies and machines which allowed them to read many important German messages during the war.

A team of codebreakers working at Bletchley Park in England and initially using the wiring data and a replica Enigma machine supplied by the Poles was able to decode most of the enigma-coded messages used by the German military even though the Germans changed the settings of the machine.

The code name for the deciphering operation and the intelligence derived from it was "Ultra". [...]

British Young Ladies Amateur Radio Association

https://bylara.org.uk/thoughtful-reading/bletchley-park-enigma/

Bletchley Park – Enigma – In Remembrance

Prior to WWII, Germans improved upon a machine that became known as “Enigma” built in the 1920’s enabling a message to be encrypted before it was sent and then the process reversed to decipher it upon receipt. Easily carried in ships, submarines, air-planes and to army field stations. It used a series of rotating four inch wheels that scrambled plain text messages into unreadable gibberish. Since the wheels could be set into billions of positions, an unlimited number of combinations provided the German high command with the ability to transmit and receive Morse code messages without concern that the Allies would intercept and know their plans. During the early years of the War, Hitler’s armies enjoyed a tremendous advantage using this method.

In 1929, Polish mathematician Marian Rejewski attended a secret cryptology course conducted by the Polish General Staff’s Cipher Bureau, which he joined in September 1932. Rejewski deduced the coding machine’s (Enigma) secret internal wiring and with his two colleagues developed successive techniques for the regular decryption of Enigma messages. Five weeks before the German invasion of Poland in 1939, Rejewski and his colleagues presented their achievements to French and British intelligence representatives in Warsaw. Shortly after the outbreak of war, the Polish cryptologists were evacuated to France.

Dilly Knox (1884-1943) a leading cryptologist, who cracked the code of the commercial Enigma machines used in the Spanish Civil War, was one of the British participants at the conference in which the Poles disclosed their achievements in Enigma decryption. Knox broke non-steckered Enigma machines (those without a plugboard) and developed a linguistic, as opposed to mathematical, way of breaking codes. This technique worked on the Enigma used by the Italian Navy and the German Abwehr. Knox worked next to Bletchley Park as head of a research section, which contributed significantly to cryptanalysis of the Enigma.

Bletchley Park, north-west of London (between Oxford and Cambridge), is one of the best known British sites from WW2. Its fame goes back to the code-breaking of the legendary Enigma cipher machine and its successor, the Lorenz cipher machine. In order to perform this work, the development of early computers took place here. The mechanical Bombe for breaking the Enigma, and the valve-based Colossus for breaking the Lorenz. Colossus was the world’s first electronic digital programmable computer. Two Englishmen, Alan Turing (after whose name the coveted prize for artificial intelligence is named) and Gordon Welchman developed “The Bombe” using the fact that common words and phrases, such as names and weather were coded into most messages.

The brilliant mathematician Alan Turing cracked the Nazi’s Enigma code and because his individual achievements were so momentous, it’s sometimes forgotten that more than 10,000 other people worked at the Government Code and Cypher School, of whom more than two-thirds were female. These service-women played a pivotal role in an operation that decrypted millions of German messages and which is credited with significantly shortening the war.

After the War, a great shield of secrecy kept information about the Allied deciphering efforts from the public eye for more than fifty years. In 2009 Prime Minister Gordon Brown of the UK broke the silence to honour one of the last surviving code-breaking operatives, Margaret Fick […]

A Lost Cryptologists' Report

SP, Poland

2020

01.11-31.12.2020 SP0AVA

The 120th Birthday of Antoni Palluth (11.05.1900-18.04.1944), one of the first Polish radio amateurs (callsign: TPVA) involved in building a replica of the "Enigma" Encryption Machine. Co-founder of the AVA Radio Company.

The SP3YOR Radio Club members also wish to promote a new book about Antoni Palluth: "Więcej niż Enigma. Historia Antoniego Pallutha" (More than Enigma. A History of Antoni Palluth).
About Antoni Palluth: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antoni_Palluth

2017

01.09-06.10.2017 SN0ENI

Handing over of the "Enigma" secrets to the Intelligence Service officers of France and England by the Poles

"Military Communications Equipment" Award Activity managed by the SP Old Timers' Club
This special-event station was operated by the members of the SP2PUT Club

2015

01.06-31.07.2015 SN0MR

14.08-30.08.2015 SN0CIPHER SN0LEAK SN1ENIGMA SN2ENIGMA SN3ENIGMA

06.11-31.11.2015 HF110MR

This activity was managed by Krzysztof SQ2KLU and Daniel SQ2JK,

representing the Enigma Amateur Radio Club SP2PBM in Bydgoszcz

http://enigmaaward.eu/regulamin/

2015

01.06-19.06.2015 SN0ENIGMA 70th Anniversary of the End of World War II

This activity was managed by the members of the School Amateur Radio Club SP3PGR (QRZ.com),

with the participation of the SP9KJU, SP3POZ, and SP3ZAT Clubs, as well as these operators:

SP3DDP SP3HUO SP3OL SP3WXI SP9MDY SQ3OPM

2002 2003

15.12.2002-15.03.2003 HF70E HF70N HF70I HF70G HF70M HF70A

15.12.2002-15.03.2003 SN70E SN70N SN70I SN70G SN70M SN70A

1999

July 1999 3Z0ENI HF60ENI

F, France

2014 2015

12.12-14.12.2014 19.12-21.12.2014

24.12-01.01.2015 TM60AT En hommage à Alan Turing

G, United Kingdom

2019

15.07-11.08.2019 GB2ENI

29.07-18.08.2019 GB4ENI
01.07-28.08.2019 GB80ENI

This activity was manged by Wojtek G0IDA, Karol G0UNU, and Krzysztof M0AXH

2015

16.06-17.06.2015 Enigma and Alan Turing Event. 100th Birthday of Alan Turing
Managed by the Milton Keynes Amateur Radio Society (MKARS)
GB2AMT GB5AMT (Alan Mathison Turing)
GB5AMT Sending authorised encrypted messages only to GB2BP and GB5CSF (Cheltenham Science Festival)
23.06-24.06.2015 GB2AMT
30.06-01.07.2015 GB2BP

2014

12.04.2014 GB3RS N7E

The 74th anniversary of the first decryption of a wartime German Enigma message

N7E West Point, UT. Enigma World Code Group. This event was managed by Bruce N7CLH

2009

19.07.2009 GB2BP GX0ZHP

70th Anniversary of delivering the "Enigma" secrets to the Allies by the Poles

This activity was manged by Wojtek G0IDA, Simon GW0NVN, and Krzysztof M0AXH

2009

27.06- 24.07.2009 GB70VI

Radio Amateurs as Voluntary Interceptors passing Enigma messages to the Code Breakers

2009

July 2009 GB60ENI

60th Anniversary of delivering the "Enigma" secrets to the Allies by the Poles

2007

16.11.2007 DL0HNF GB2BP

Authorised Exchange of Encrypted Messages between Two Club Stations

In addition to:
DL0HNF Heinz Nixdorf Museum,
the following Clubs partiticipated in this event:
DL0DM Deutsche Museum in München, and
DF0AFM DL0AFM Förderverein Amateurfunkmuseum e.V.

2005

07.05-08.05.2005 GB2HQ

GB2HQ Sending authorised encrypted messages to G0OOO

LA1D Received the messages and was granted an Award for that achievement

I, Italy

2019 2018 2017 2016 2015 2014 Enigma Reloaded

http://www.enigma-reloaded.it/index_eng.html

My Awards 2014 2015 2016 2017

(The Enigma Reloaded Award Rules were revised in 2018 and 2019. It became physically impossible to earn these Awards. Besides, mostly the Italian Award stations hardly or never appeared on the bands (except for IQ1SM). I won the basic Award in 2019, but I never received it. The organisers never explained why they neglected somebody elses's hard work.)

2019
27.09-12.10.2019 GB3RS HF80ENI OZ7SKB PI4ADH PI4MRC VE3RCS W8BI
27.09-12.10.2019 II0ENG II1MTN II4GRM (Sept) II4MNU (Oct)
27.09-12.10.2019 IQ1SM IQ3TN IQ3VE IQ9MQ

2018
28.09-06.10.2018 II4LNZ (Sept) II4OER (Oct)
28.09-06.10.2018 IQ0RM IQ1SL IQ9MQ IQ3MP IQ3TN IQ3VE IQ3VO IQ8PQ
28.09-06.10.2018 K3CWO K3NEM W3ADO W8BI
28.09-06.10.2018 DL0DM GB3RS OZ7SKB PI4ADH PI4MRC

2017
22.09-30.09.2017 II0ENG II1ENG II2ENG II3ENG II4ENG II9ENG
22.09-30.09.2017 II1MTN II3ENI
22.09-30.09.2017 IO3ENG IO3ENI
22.09-30.09.2017 IQ8XS IQ9PA
22.09-30.09.2017 LX9LARU