I ain't gonna lie. My dad would have loved this channel. He passed away 3 and a half years ago from cancer. Everytime I watch ur videos I feel like he is watching over my shoulder. Man I miss him. Thanks for the great video man. From Minnesota usa here
I wonder what my Grandfather would have thought of all this streaming video stuff you can just pull up these days...so much detailed engineering stuff out there!
Maybe the strangest thing i personally ever encountered on shortwave was when i was a kid in the 80's, during the solar peak, a couple of times calling CQ, unkeying the mike and hearing my CQ at a much lower level in the background! I thought I entered the Twilight Zone! I found out later it's called "Long delayed echos" It's your signal traveling all the way around the Earth and returning. 8-)
I love his spy stuff .. the radio stuff is way beyond my knowledge but I watch every video .. slowly learning, anything I don't full know fascinates me
You are very mistaken - the biggest mystery in Short Wave radio is how I feel compelled to keep spending money on stuff on the off chance I just might need it for my next project (that never materialises !). Come armageddon I might just have the vital bits needed to get in contact with everyone - oh err I think I have just found the flaw in this plan.
The last one you covered, the Irregular Dash, sounds like someone learning morse code to me. Perhaps someone accidentally had their "transmit" switch turned "on" when practicing. A simple case of the one thing nobody on this planet or off of it is immune to: "Oops!"
We used to pick up a skip signal on CB at work. A hispanic sounding man in English would do some sort of sound check saying: " aaaaaaudio, aaaaudiooo, audio, aaaaaaudio. Audio. Heard the guy all the time it seemed .
I remember hearing a constant transmission around that time (can't remember the HF frequency) that sounded exactly like the sound effect of the ray guns on the Martian ships in the film War of the Worlds (1953). Never heard it again.
Great episode, Lewis! I do remember the Faders back in the 70s. In fact, there was a period from about 1977-80 when I'd hear them in pretty much every HF band. A blast from the past indeed, cheers!
The Irregular Dashes remind me of the signal in the film "On the Beach", received by a submarine after a nuclear war. They hear a signal near San Francisco, but can't read the code, as it sounds random, so they send a party ashore to investigate and search for survivors.
Great information lewis.... a good listen on the bands in the 80s and 90s had most of us wondering and logging just what some of these transmissions really were ....some solved ...some still a mystery...but always good to discuss.
This is fascinating stuff! I got my first HF receiver, and old Helicrafters SX-42, in the late 80s and had a ball listening to everything on the bands.
The crackle was around in the early 1980s I heard it between the broadcast bands often with good strength I can't remember the frequency was a long time ago
The "crackle" sounds more like a coffee percolator to me rather than tin cans being dragged across the ground. I hear that sound and I think 'Oh, coffee's ready'.
@@3rdalbum Nope. Pirates are usually apolitical. Clandestines are anything but! Past clandestines I've heard include Radio Truth, Radio Sandino, Radio Free Dixie (Likely Cuba), Radio Espana Independente (Allegedly DDR origin), Radio Euzkadi, La Voz de Cuba Independente y Democratica, and Radio Caiman, among others over the years.
I'm pretty sure the "crackle" is just a broken Morse transmitter, the Buzzer's Morse counterpart does crackle all the time while idle, but I observed the same behaviour with other Russian mil. CW counterparts, too.
Irregular Dash: This is silly, but upon hearing it, my mind immediately went way back to the original movie On the Beach (1959), that dystopian post-nuclear war tale starring Gregory Peck and Ava Gardner and Tony Perkins. In the story, Australia hears a persistent signal from the USA and sends the sole surviving US Navy nuke sub back to North America to investigate. When they track down the signal, it is at a deserted radio transmitter with a Morse code key tied to an empty Coke bottle that was randomly activated whenever the wind blew the shade in front of the window. One if the lines has a sailor monitoring the signal saying that he heard a [nonsense] sentence transmitted only yesterday... Reminded me of the broken clock that was right twice a day.
I scan the spectrum constantly and rarely hear anything anomalous. I wish I would. I just sometimes wonder if theses unknown signals were automatic direction finding signals or bacons of some sort - just noise to provide a bearing, maybe even a constant triangulation bearing of some sort. Fascinating stuff. I hope to find something interesting to report. The many digital modes almost pollute the ham bands. The signals take all forms and would make finding an anomaly difficult in some portions of the band (which might be ideal if a signal was meant to be hidden). Interesting stuff. Thanks Ringway.
Love the video and the footage. The "20-minute idler" sounds surprisingly similar to a RTTY transmission idling, at least to me. I haven't heard the original one, but similar signals do still appear on HF, usually followed shortly by real RTTY but everytime it leaves me without decoding, as my OpenWebRX+ knows only a few of them and I can't dial them in (either the two signals are too far apart or too close to each other to acquire anything other than garbage). The only thing I've ever managed to decode is the German weather service at Pinneberg.
I did some monitoring of the 20 Minute Idler, on some occasions the carrier would not switch off after 20 minutes and then continue on until the next hour and then switch off 20 minutes past the next hour. I never caught anything that was regarded as an actual message from this station though. I think the signal came from the Russian Navy and was a RTTY type signal.
I've searched around for quite a while now to find out what the strange Trumpet tune was that i recieved on MW at various frequencies in the 1970's.!! Ive searched so many channels on y.t. but to no avail.
Interesting signals. We would need some receiving stations able to take bearings of those mystery signals... One question to the video pictures. That antenne to be seen i.e. at 6:00, that mast wit 3 rods on top. Is that be a NDB antenna (top loaded) or what is it?
Ah yes, big woodpeckers. Reminds me of a story. A US intelligence officers sends some foot long condoms to Russia hoping to me them feel inferior. They write medium on them and send them back.
I heard something like the idler on channel 24 on the German CB Channel about 25 years ago. I could hear it with S7 - S9+ for around four weeks, then it disappeared and never came back.
i remember in the very late 80s early 90s a wide band siren on cb. it would take up several cb channels in the usa. heard it for about a month then it just disappeared never heard again.
Some of these signals could be for propagation testing or over the horizon radar or could be industrial EMC emissions before CE and FEC regulation of emissions
I remember Echo's, I thought that it was an analog telephone signal routed to a transmitter. But in the 70,80,90s I heard a lot of Italian users on SSB. I quit listening end of the 90s because I was working on those damn things. (damn things because of human error, when I asked the transmitters were off, and they didn't) And no need after a long day of work to open any channel on the bands.
Given that the XC “crackle” signal alternates with Morse code transmissions, I wonder if it could be some sort of digital signal propagation beacon. It could also have been an over the horizon radar being tested.
I do have a question for you, or a video idea, have you ever heard of secret listening posts outside the usual intelligence or frequency monitoring? For research or something else? fell down a rabbit hole and wanted to see if anyone knew more.
That sounds like a digital signal with some type of modulation. I am not sure on the modulation, but it sounds advanced. That's unusual for the 1970's and to the 2001's since digital was not that advanced in those days.
Good luck trying to find where that stuff is coming from. I was into short wave listening and ham radio in the 1960s and then radio in all forms when I was in the US Air Force. I can't even remember how many discussions there were as to where many of those transmissions were emanating from. It was everything from the Russians to the CIA to space aliens and beyond.
In 1992 I recall a strange signal adjacent to the then popular North America pirate radio frequency of 7415 kHz. It sounded a lot like a Star Wars Tie Fighter at roughly the same pitch. It was single sideband like STANAG signals was it Data of a signal Jammer? no sure. It was strong every night throughout the summer and fall of that year but gradually faded away. then many decades later in 2014 i found a very strong similar sounding Tie fighter noise on websdr forgot the frequency though but was present for many hours then disappeared and never heard again since.
It sounds like some kind of clock signal if it’s ticked right to the second. Sounds like it could be a time signal. The kind of data that is being used sounds very much like WWV uses on 60 kHz long wave.
Number stations aren't just mysterious, they can be down right annoying. In the 80s one occasionally set up somewhere near my house in Orlando, FL. I didn't have a radio and didn't need one as it was so strong it bled over into the TV bands and made them unusable. This could go on for many hours a day for several days at a time. I had no idea what a number station was then and was so pissed at the woman that kept saying groups of 5 numbers for no apparent reason.
Irregular dash and some others have unifying features: data pulse wave bursts, 2014 date, heard by US listeners and/or around US bases in the UK. This suggests usage in coordinating Victoria Nuland's CIA op in Ukraine in 2014.
Department of Trade and Industry - "These are what you suppose they are. People shouldn't be mystified by them. They are not for, shall we say, public consumption."
What do you guys think about this sounds on 10 meters? It's hard to explain, but it sounds like birds chirpping starting on a high note then gragually fades out on a low note. Sometimes, it does fade quickly and sometimes it sounds like laser guns in a scifi movie. It's on SSB by the way.
ET ships frequent our skies and seem to emit complex broad band EM. Look for a main tone around 5-20MHz with complex harmonics up and down for the smaller discus scout craft (10-15m diameter).
The signal from XE sounds very similar to the one used from HAARP when they were bouncing from the moon ... They were sending a two seconds bursts and then listening to the echo ... Could that be something with the same purpose ...
I find the choice of using weird irregular, analogue, sounds and usually really annoying sounds as a channel marker rather odd, especially for the number stations where numbers are occasionally read out loud without a fixed schedule. Imagine if you're a secret agent or whoever is supposed to listen for and decode these messages; and you have to listen to a horrible buzzer sound all the time just in case they some day will give an encrypted order. I can't imagine you could easily make an automated system to automatically trigger and start recording and/or turn up the volume on the system when the placeholder sound is an irregular fuzzy buzzing. Those that send a very regular square wave beep could easily be have an automated system to notice when the actual transmission starts; but even with modern signal processing the UVB-76 buzzer seems rather hard to program anything for, without a ton of false positives... And imagine having to listen through hours of recordings of that noise every day whenever the system has falsely detected a potential voice message.
These could be Russian over-the-horizon radar stations for early detection of nuclear missile launches. And also the "perimeter" ("dead hand") systems.
