It really does sound like a washing machine that has a bad bearing that is making a grinding noise when the washer is in spin mode. This was a easy fix for the older washing machines because you could change them, not like the sealed ones they use today.
Encripted continuous coms for submarines that need to use a buoy antenna. The signal will change when nuclear threat status occurs. The launch codes will be sent on these channels if normal coms links are jammed/compromised. If the repeaters are silent it tells the subs that c&c is compromised and predetermined action is in effect. (Whatever that may be).
In the 1970's we always called trawler traffic on top band "fish phone". I've not been a SWL for many years but your channel has rekindled my interest, and I'm looking to treat myself to a new transceiver with all band receive. Something like a IC 7300 or FT-710/991. It is over sixty years since I tuned into the Short Wave band on the family radio, and after spending all my adult life working in radio of one form or another, I still feel the magic of using a bit of wire to capture signals that have travelled thousands of miles and been bounced of the edge space. Thank you for such a stimulating and well presented channel.
Look into a software defined receiver, like the RSP1a if you have a computer. You hook it to a USB port and an antenna and it covers all modes and frequencies from below AM broadcast up past 1 Ghz, shows waterfall on computer. About $110. 😊
My guess for this 'washing machine' is that it's very likely an encrypted digital transmission with redundant DSSS (Digital Sequence Spread Spectrum) modulation across multiple SW carrier frequencies, which makes it very hard or almost impossible to decode.
yours is closest to my thinking.back in 80s usn had a type of encryption for flash msgs known as rainform.i never heard it on air but hard copy looked like slant line or rain.
In Denmark we had "fisker-bølger", fishermens (radio-)waves, and it was transmissions between ships, often fishing boats, and shore radio stations. There were a lot of stations (well more than 5). Often the shore station connected to the telephone so that fishermen could talk to their families. I think AM was normal but that it moved into SSB later. They were also called "kutter-bølger" (a cutter is a smal fishing boat). Some of the shore stations probably exist today but I recall that they were remotely controlled from Lyngby. Maybe most traffic has moved to VHF. The weird USN signal to me sounds somewhat like an image telegraph, an early fax machine on radio. Not quite the right sound though, but it has that "rotary sound".
Machine learning could probably identify and differentiate minute variations in the rotational sound to transmit data, not accessible to a human listener, as well as harder to record in writing if someone is taking notes (such as we are lol)
It sounded strangely familiar as soon as i heard it. Then I realised (like many other commenters) that it reminded me of feedback over a delayed digital channel, like two mobile phones side by side when you dial one from the other and put them on speaker.
The "Washing Machine" sounds to me like nothing so much as a 1970's tape loop echo machine set for a high feedback level being fed random noises. (Digital delay is used for this effect these days). It may in fact not be carrying information at all, but is being used to keep the channels clear of QRM in the event they are used.
I'm not into this scene, but, I was going to comment the same thing. To me it sounds like it certainly has reverb/resonance. _edit: more specifically, it sounds like someone who is listening to the radio and then calls the station, is live on the air, and it's within earshot of said radio, then audible chaos ensues!_ 😅
@@jameshaynes4698 Reverb is essentially the same thing, on a shorter delay timebase. Reverb becomes echo when the delay is long enough. The classic tape delay was called Echoplex, tape speed was constant and the payback head was movable to change the delay. Early Pink Floyd and Steve Miller Blues Band used it a lot. The cheaper substitute was from Univox, their EC-80A varied the tape speed in a cartridge.
Fish Phine is a system discontinued in 1977 in USA. It was 25 watts of AM radio for standard boat use. It was replaced by the 160ish MHZ FM band. The radios were excellent, and often used a tightly wound helical shortened quarter wave.
Sounds like feedback. Like a slight delay between two sound sources feeding back into each other. Like when you’d call your buddy sitting next to you and it’d cause a feedback loop into a squeal. Maybe it’s just noise to hold down the frequency and keep it clear until it’s needed.
Being an audio guy it sounds like audio feedback through a delay effect. You can get the same sound using a mixing desk with an delay fx box then sending an output back to one of the channel inputs. It might be a crude hamas jamming tool if it's sitting on a known US Navy frequency
The "washing machine" sounds like it has some sort of controlled feedback of itself transmitted along the signal, like an echo. the same effect of holding a microphone to a speaker, just without the horrible screeching noises .
First thing that came to mind here as well. I hear jammers do that on our 2m repeater using two radios so the speaker of one goes into the microphone of the other. The delay through the repeater is what gives it that sound.
Fish phones were ship to shore semi duplex phone calls on AM in the clear unencrypted below, in and above top band. Used to listen to the guys on the oil rigs phoning their girlfriends on my shortwave radio as a lad up and around 160m AM. Made your hair curl!! Calls used to cost a fortune but the guys offshore were loaded. Cruise ships as well - GPO used to make a killing on calls too and fro when close to shore
Fish-phone? Never heard that one before. Those frequencies used to be rather busy, though. In the American Southeast and Midwest, it was easy to listen in on river traffic in that frequency range. Not only did you have some ship-shore activity, the ship-ship channels were big on ragchew content between barge tugs on the Mississippi, Ohio, and other major barge waterways until maritime traffic moved to other channels and modes. The other very cool thing about that is that the mode in use was good ol' AM. So you could kick back and, on any decent receiver that had "marine band" coverage, tag along with a tug crew somewhere in the very busy Mississippi basin. Fine stuff!
Sound's more like a pirate station with an echo processor connected to a microphone picking up feedback from transmitter. Obnoxious noise making was common on CB radio
The trawler men used HF for comms back to the coast guard and for radio-telephone patches. But in the evenings they would tune to some common channel and chat with other trawlers, CB style. As far as I recall, these were not legal transmissions. Certainly, once you managed to penetrate the strong scottish accents, the conversation sounded more like those in some rough bar, than any RT procedure. (One word, beginning with an 'F' was usually your way in to tune your ear to the accents. They certainly used it a lot.) It was these drunken evening free-for-all's, that we used to call 'Fish Phone'.
I live near the oil port of Milford Haven in West Wales where there are some fishing boats that put to sea. I can sometimes pick up (mainly Irish) fishing boats chatting to each other using frequencies in the 3-5 mhz range. One day I even heard a couple of boats chatting on 5680 mhz and were told to move by the authorities because it is a spot emergency frequency. The language is full of swearing as you might imagine. It’s known locally as Fish-Phone to local amateurs but it’s use has declined over the years but it’s still there.
The list showed signals as being USB. I don't think we can say that for sure. I will engage in some pure conjecture and suggest a modulation mode based on what it sounds like to me. Imagine you have a carrier that is slowly sweeping upwards and then has the modulation imposed on it. That would sound a fair bit like the sound when you beat it against a local oscillator. If I was designing a system to work in a cluttered radio environment, I might do that to the carrier so that fixed frequency interference would appear as dropouts that error correction can easily fix. When I finish the project I am working on, I intend to get my SDR going again just to try to tune in some of these things.
Talking TOTALLY out of my back-side here.. But with you I agree. This sounds like what some of us called ASAS message sync (All Ships At Sea - in Defense Messaging Contractor slang) We likened it to trying to sync to a 110 baud modem and up (Different speeds) while trying to defeat noise. A type of thing we would "see" now and again to verify connectivity for communication. but that was years in the past. Usually happened when the Pentagon got a wild hair up it's backside and wanted to send a test message to ASAS, and then complain because the submarines did NOT get it in time allowed. "Unless they are running a towed array all you can do is sit and pray"
The first couple of samples reminded me of recordings of aurora emissions from Jupiter, Saturn, and Earth. The third sounded like off-frequency SITOR with a slew of long path interference, phase shifting, etc.
Another great informative video Lewis. I just picked up a receive loop antenna and I’m going to see if I can pickup any of the stations you talked about….
That washingmachine sound reminds me of Vietnam War era jamming techniques. Interesting to note that the US has had E-4s "doomsday planes" flying every few days starting around the same time. If it is jamming, maybe the E4s are a backup communications plan.
Or just maybe the E-4 was doing what E-4's do, which is fly regularly to support the nation's NUCLEAR DETERENCE MISSION. They are ready 24/7/365 to protect the nation from attack and have been for over 40 years. There are no conclusions to be drawn from their flights on flight aware or whatever app you have. We put up aircraft ALL THE TIME. The pilots and crews HAVE to have tons of flight hours to keep certified. Seriously, exercises happen all the time for weeks at a time. It has nothing to do with anything going on around the globe. You can get excited about it if or when we open up a can of sunshine on the enemy.
E4s are on alert 24 hours a day/7 days a week/365 days a year. Late in the year is cycle training for new crews, so there have been a ton of training flights lately. You'll usually see an E-4 in the air at least some point in a 24 hour period.
If it is an information-carrying signal, it's not very efficient because the power and modulation level seem to vary a lot. The most efficient digital modes for strong signal-to-noise ratio situations tend to sound like noise and the most efficient for poor conditions tend to sound like tones changing more slowly, but they are still continuous and without gaps like this washing machine sound. I would lean towards it being some kind of either jamming or a malfunction.
Fish phone was indeed a term used by amateurs to describe ship to shore frequencies in the 160m band. Possible origin was that ships could request of the coast station a 'link call' by which a person could make a phone call via radio to the coast station and into the GPO phone network. The coast stations were operated by the GPO - and indeed was where Amateurs had to go to do the then mandatory morse tests. The frequencies used by the shore stations were listed as to be avoided in the amateur licence as 160m was allocated on a secondary non interference basis. When the GPO - by then BT closed the stations ca.1997 or so some were passed to HM Coastguard and are still in use from time to time e.g. 1883 kHz from Tiree used by Belfast Coastguard for Safety broadcasts.
Four what it's worth, the washing machine sounds to me like the 1940's era tube facsimile machines. The ones where you put the paper on a large metallic drum which rotated, and a photo sensor was slowly moved from the left to right as the drum rotated under it, on the receiving an electrical arc that was modulated by the signal then burned the image back into paper.
my dad bought one of them home, I half wish we had kept it. He tried repairing it and it worked for a while then gave up. (prob capacitors in power and signal lines)
Ill give my contacts in Amman(IDF military intelligence) a ring and see if they know anything.They used to operate numbers stations out of Haifa and broadcasted VHF and UHF from beechcraft King Air aircraft military signals. Thanks for the video!
Umm... I've started watching your videos, Mr. Lewis, for about 5/6? years now, and I'm usually a 'silent watcher'. But this video has prompted me to 'write', that there's a bit of a similar number station, also 'run' by the U.S. Navy, called 'The Backwards Music Station'. From what I've heard/read about it, the transmission sounds a bit like whale sounds, but this is the actual information they send to their recievers, and there's a bit of speculation as to what that information might be. I hope this information is useful, and I look forward to watching your videos, especially any videos to do with number stations, pirate radio stations, clandestine transmissions etc,. 👍🎧👍🎤🎚️👍🎛️👍🎙️👍📻👍🏴☠️👍☠️👍🕴️👍👽👍🛸👍🤖👍
It sounds like audio feedback with delay. I have made exactly this sound. It could, in theory be a complex continuous waveform radar which as it reflects from targets varies the waveform. A formant type waveform. Fractal.
It sounds like an effect used by Pink Floyd in the song "Echoes" on their 1972 "Meddle" album. "Echoes" is the entire side two of the album. If I remember correctly, Roger Waters (bass guitar) and David Gilmour (lead guitar) would swirl a guitar slide (a bottle or brass tube) over the instrument strings while feeding the result through an echo effect with about a .5 second delay which was fed into another echo effect and a chorus effect then into their amplifiers. They may have also used a 'Phase 90' effect in the effects loop as well.
syncronize the signal with whatever background noise is on the same frequency in the vicinity of kansas city.. background noise as a filter with a 59 - 61 second oscillating offset at 2 factors below the lsb in kansas as the oscillation frequency.. just speculatin'
The US is clearly adapting old communications methods to the meet the needs of future major combat for anyone curious the current war in Ukraine has made it clear that the US needs to adjust to a whole new generation and bringing things like shortwave back into use but with a modern update to it.
I heard that signal in the UK and it was there only a few days ago. The best thing to do is to use the TDoA plugin on the Kiwi online receivers, but I've not seen this signal during the daytime. TDoA doesn't work so well at night. I'll see what I can find out if it does pop up again.
Worked in the fishing industry in South Africa in the 60’s and 70’s. Those frequencies were legal for ship to ship and ship to shore. Post Office had some dedicated to radio telephone calls for maritimers.
I heard this when I was on vacation a few months ago in the Canadian Prairies. My SW radio is not capable of tuning in sideband or going down to 1khz increments, so I was left to think this was digi of sorts or possibly a signal just out of tune enough to be intelligible, so I just kept scanning.
Could it be a frequency-flex or freq hopping signal that is moving back and forth across that little area of the band, causing the sound heard, when only listening to that single freq?
Though I am a ham, I've never really been very keen on RTTY and stuff, especially not listening to signals, but audio wise this signal has some properties that makes it sound like it's run through an effect pedal. Like the Caline Mariana modulated reverb. And an echo pedal, most noticeably. Because that is obviously a signal and at least one (weaker) echo. I'm not sure what would cause this. The easiest way to do this would be to just put a small echo on the recording. Like, free software, a couple of seconds of processing easy. The hard way would be having a signal strong enough to bounce once or even two times around the whole world with ionosphere propagation. And I'm not sure that's useful in any way. The weird way would be two transmitters broadcasting with a delay on one. But that would surely be as useful as a hammer made from cordial. And it would have to be their own transmitters as well. Thank you for yet an interesting vid! This channel is rapidly becoming one of my absolute favourites!
Sure is a wide data mode , looks to be a dual or triple frequency throb type of AFSK transmission , probably heavily encrypted . It might be orders, telemetry . Really complex signals. Washing machine is definitely a great name for it!
Love the channel. What are some good online groups for discussion of Shortwave monitoring? I've not done much outside of the ham bands. (Licensed 26 years)
I think it's actually a synthetic noise all together. It sounds a lot like a Carmen vortex Street or distantly similar to the Shepard tone. It's probably like this because both tones are known to make the listener uneasy over time. I've shown a Carmen vortex street sound to people and had them immediately demand i turn off.
could it be a loop of neglected repeaters that are just looping interference and making feedback sounds? It sounds like a couple of seconds worth of delay overlapped so it has volume peaks a couple of times a second but changes slowly over a few seconds
This sound like a feedback ecko-signal, as somebody sends and recieve in the same room. I have maked this sound when I am listening to my signal thrue a SDR-radio on the internet, and it will be a feedback. It's very simular to that Lewis. But I don't know why anyone would do that on so many freuenses. The best from LB1NH. 🙂
Sounds like Dr. Who’s tarsus in transit! I would look a bit closer into the signal, thinking along spread spectrum lines. You can hear that there is something there, but you can’t actually get the transmitted message. No encryption required. That being said… Spread spectrum with encryption would be very hard to unencrypt, unless you could possibly find the rest of the broadcast bands.
I believe the predecessor of the VHF Marine band used in the US/North America was between the 160 and 80 meter ham bands. I saw some equipment for it for sale once at an estate sale with the suggestion of converting it to 80 meters, but spent my money on a pile of Heathkit HW-2036 radios instead... I don't know if fish phone was a slang term, brand name, or other reference to it, though.
I do remember hearing a noise similar to that here in the UK but it would of been 20 to 25 years ago, so im not sure as technical advances may of altered it to whats available today. I would of just passed by it as there was much more interesting voice traffic on the HF bands to listen to at that time. I also remember the Fish Phone conversations on the lower HF bands but have no recordings of them.
Further to this, i think it was around the time of the Kosovo situation as there was great diplomatic involvement, i do still have tape recordings somewhere of a conversation (phone patch) between Madeline Albright and Dick Cheney that i overheard one Saturday morning on the US HF GCS discussing the then President of Serbia Slobodan Milosevic and others. Unreal !
Pirate is a pretty harsh word for ship to ground and ship to ship communications. A ship will not use a ham radio name as label. The label of the Ship is the name of the ship. When I was on a fishing boat they did short signals about technical stuff to the "control tower". And everything was fine.
I can't imagine being on the receiving end of a ROK numbers station 😬😬😬 That swirling component reminds me of a signal assumed to be USN about ten years ago. Speculation at the time was heavy encryption, and it rose and fell slowly in pitch. There seemed to be some kind of encrypted signal in the noise, but it wasn't anything could verify at the time. Wish I could remember where I'd seen it, might have been on an archive site covering numbers stations.
Hi guys, I am quite the newbie when it comes to SDR, can you recommend me some forums where I could ask some questions about a strange signal I am seeing?
@RingwayManchester >>> I just thought of this question while listening to the beginning of this video: How difficult and/or expensive is it for an amateur radio enthusiast or HAM to have the capability to _"DF"_ {Direction-Find} radio signals? Does frequency band have a significant influence on this, or are all freq. bands the same in this regard?
@Allan_aka_RocKITEman it depends primarily on how badly the transmitter wants to stay hidden and how much money they have to make that happen. An AM/FM commercial broadcast station is very easy to find. A CIA covert station in a hostile foreign country - not so much. There are plenty of sources on the internet about Ham radio direction finding (also called "Fox hunting"). Sorry that I didn't have room here to give you a better answer.
The sound reminds me of an old Boss "Flanger" guitar peddle. It would echo and tone shift in a way that closely matches that sound. If it's being used for jamming, it's a pretty wimpy jammer. Most likely scenario... some nitwit about to get a visit from a Federal van.
Everybody gangsta until you get serenaded by 2 US carrier groups being ordered to deploy somewhere. In this case, possibly an encoded fax of station keeping positions in the Mediterranean, or otherwise, transmission of radar data to keep carrier groups safe.
