Nellie the ham..

A big stink is growing up around the fact that one of the perps in FISA MemoGate is Nellie Ohr is the wife of DOJ employee Bruce Ohr and she is also an employee of Fusion GPS. Among the stink that surrounds her is the fact that she obtained an FCC amateur radio license back in May 2016. This is woven into a conspiracy theory that supposedly points to the fact that she used her radio privileges to transmit clandestine, encrypted data to the CIA or something.

Well, I am not one to defend any of these slime bags, but, as an amateur radio operator myself, I can tell you that this is wandering into "tinfoil hat" territory big time. She may very well have gotten her amateur radio license but it would be absolutely foolish to assume that she did so for the purpose of communicating with the CIA or other agencies. Why create a traceable item with the FCC when it is just as easy to "bootleg" frequencies for clandestine transmissions? Besides, Part 97 of the FCC regs forbid transmission of encrypted data by amateur radio ops.

Anyway, just to satisfy my curiosity, I looked up her address using QRZ.com and the address of the CIA, converted both to LAT LON and calc'ed the line-of-site distance between those two points. Amazingly, it turns out as shown below!

Holy shit! That's just 7 miles! Certainly close enough to make a SIMPLEX link between those to points with as little as 50 watts or less power -- VHF or UHF. But that said, I am puzzled why she would want to create a data point with a federal agency when she could have just gotten a couple of business band radios and bootlegged a piece of spectrum to do the deed.

..oh wait! I hear some black helicopters overhead!