"JFC-FAX" Global Chart

 

JFC is Misaki Fishery Radio, at the prefectural fishery technical college in Japan. These charts show two of JFC's more distinctive characteristics. First is that everything always looks kind of ragged around the edges, like a pirate treasure map. Second is that they are nearly always headed "JFC-FAX," presumably an international station ID. The similar border around this ID suggests that the same worn strip is applied, often crookedly, to each day's chart.

This first small chart was received on the Hong Kong GlobalTuner radio and copied over the Internet, at 0030 on December 10, 2010 UTC:

JFC-FAX 1

It appears to be some sort of fish market report. The rightward-reading Japanese Katakana (syllabic) characters in the leftmost vertical column all end in "Maru," most likely indicating that they are the names of fishing boats.

The second chart was received here in California on March 2, 2010 (UTC date). We kind of lucked out with this one. Not only is it clearer than usual, due to improved band conditions, but it is also much larger. It depicts a map of the world gridded into coordinates, where some grid squares are filled in with numbers. These might relate to catches in that area.

JFC-FAX 2

 

All fax signals are tuned 1.9 kHz lower than their listed frequencies.