Sunday brain tickler

It seems unlikely that a simple system would resort to something like frequency analysis of characters when encoding filenames, though, particularly given the size of the data (the overhead would probably not make it worthwhile) - so I'm guessing we should be looking at "plain text", just with some unusual character size or distribution. I did hack some quick code to alter the character size (6, 7 and 8 bits), spacing between characters (0, 1 and 2 bits) and offset from the start of the stream, then 'slide' the resulting data through the ASCII table and search for the "LTER" name that you mentioned previously, but without any luck. That does make the assumption that values for A-Z are contiguous, which seems likely but not certain.