What on Earth happened to me?
Ok... it was somewhere around 5 MHz AM, doing a little manual-dial SWL scanning on a little analog radio with no digital readout and a badly calibrated decal. I came across a beeping, about one beep per 3/4 second. No big deal, some beacon, right? But what caught my attention was the inordinate bandwidth of the thing. It took up more dial than any other signal. That's when things got Weird.
As I decided to see how much bandwidth this beeping took up by scanning up and down to either side of its audible limits on the dial I noticed -- as I turned the tuning knob one way, the beeping increased in frequency (not the pitch of the tone like SSB, but rather the speed of the beeps increased), but only while in the act of turning the dial! As soon as I stopped turning the knob the beeps would stabilize at just under 1 per second. Conversely, turn the knob the other way, and the beeps would temporarily slow down until I let go of the knob.
What on Earth?!
Before I could get a better rig going to better document frequency (or in this case relatively wide frequency range, much more so than a normal station) it faded like conditions changed.
I'm wracking my electronically under-educated brain. I do a little homebrew but I'm drawing a blank on what could cause this.
Thanks in advance.
I'm also trying to predict what comment this will glean from Druid Hills. I'm just over here by Starkey Park; maybe he can pick it up next time, too.
You may have seen the ufo if you had looked at the sky!!
Mark
Could be a processor of sorts bleeding into your radio. I have a TS100 AM transmitter that will make a pop/tick sound everysecond my RadioShack Scanner is plugged into it.
OR, it could be you were picking up that ionospheric prediction station that just reactivated in Alaska.
could it have Ben front end overload?