The time period in question is from about 5:30 AM to 7:03 AM this Monday morning, August 27, Central Time.
The time period in question is from about 5:30 AM to 7:03 AM this Monday morning, August 27, Central Time.
I was still asleep when I began to hear very unusual sound coming from another room. Slowly awakening, it sounded the way music would sound being played by a station covered by a live carrier, so I thought perhaps I’d left my 1550kHz transmitter turned on, and that I was covering a station trying to come in during the critical hours. But I definitely turned the transmitter off last night.
When I went into the radio room and listed, I heard what seemed like the strangest electronic music I’d ever heard, as if picked out on a musical keyboard, a regular rhythm, then unusual skips and pauses. The tonality seemed like square-waves, an edgy sound, with some of the peaks seeming to contain human vocal traces, like single-sideband or some shortwave effect.
As daylight increased, the sound began fading away, then fading back, and just past 6:30 AM I was able to record enough of it to share on an upcoming Low Power Hour.
It’s 6:56 AM now, 1550 has two voice stations way in the distance, but for a few seconds, the strange signal came back just slightly.
Cant wait for this one Carl .
Cant wait for this one Carl . It’s been a strange night around here also.
Venus is high in the sky , ain’t never seen it there before . Not sure but it might be that Beetleguiese star getting ready to blow.
Then I our temps out here in Santa Cruz were in the 80’s and then they dropped into the low 50’s .. very strange stuff.
More
By 8 AM local I had our transmitter on, but suddenly I could hear the mysterious “music” behind it, so I killed the carrier and got another brief recording of the sound fading in and out of other signals.
1550 is a very interesting frequency from here…
There are a batch of 5,000 Watt stations in a circle all around, maybe 300 miles in all directions.
The odd music signal never gave an ID nor had any announcement at all.
That strange music put me in a mood, though, and I started downloading electronic music from archive.org for our Saturday night show “Bamboo Thoughts”.
Could an AM signal get here from Venus?
Really Peculiar
I would love to hear a recording!
Bruce, GNAT 90.9
Not Heard Some More
That same evening, Monday, during the critical hours from 7 to 9 PM, 1550 kHz was closely monitored, but only the usual talky stations were heard. No more of the dance music from Jupiter.
Same holds true Tuesday morning with the radio continuously monitoring 1550 throughout the nighttime on into the morning, latest check at 6:48 AM CENTRAL.
Suspect: The 1550 Broadcast from Jupiter was a one-time staged event.
Lesson: You never know when something will happen where it never happened before.
The Analyzer
I had commented in your LPH 44 release blog about this strange DX report, and that it has the sound of a very noisy and spur emitting digital synthesizer.
Applying that audio signal into an audio spectrum analyzer and standard O-Scope, those waveforms sure do have the structure as being digitally created. But they are not complete waveforms.
They are parts of the combinations of waveforms produced by the synthesizer and these certain parts being generated are splattering the EM band with spur emissions. Naturally at the normal output of that synthesizer, everything being generated is well filtered and then combined and fed through a D/A converter.
If such a synthesizer were to develop problems with its compliance with Part 15 rules, such a device as a musical synthesizer can produce these artifacts that can be picked up on a radio.
Anyone else have ideas?
RFB
Venus again
The evil people from Venus were sending World Round Radio the final warning to us.
They will be attacking The Northern America’s to get Cheese Burgers for free . We will loose all Burgers unless we fight back gang..
I’ve got my bight green ray gun ready.
OK. I’m On The Right Thread Now.
Carl, I wondered if that weird signal
was coming from your spectrum analyzer.
Had you left it running during the night?
But then, I thought:
No, that can’t be right – because the signal
was FADING!
This is a complete mystery to me.
Bruce, GNAT 90.9, SLUG 88.3
Only Once
That Monday morning was the only time I have heard that signal.
And going back to the beginning of the experience, it started very early in the morning.
My Zenith Transoceanic is always on, around the corner in another room, tuned to 1550kHz.
I was already aware of the strange music before I started investigating, when I awoke at pre-sunrise it was going strong and I started paying attention to it.
When I comprehended how unusual it was, finally, is when I kicked into an active mode and turned on the recorder.
Got It
Carl, what kind of Zenith
Transoceanic do you have and
what vintage is it?
They are all a sight to behold.
Bruce, GNAT 90.9, SLUG 88.3
The Zenith
This is one of the final Zenith’s in the series, Model D7000Y.
It is solid state, and includes FM and Weatherband.
My disappointment is that it skips over 13.560 mHz, the shortwave frequency of our Big Talker transmitter.
But otherwise it has been loyal, proud, and gallant.
Deja Vu Again
That DX “music” reminds me of a noise I heard on radio back in the ’60s while babysitting a mainframe computer. An AM radio placed on the console and tuned to an unused frequency at the low end of the dial would pick up RF from the signals flying around on the internal wiring. After a bit of experience a calibrated ear could tell what, in general, the system was doing such as disk transfers, tape I/O, calculating, etc.
This did have a serious purpose however. At times the computer would halt, either on error or because the batch tasks were finished and the radio audio would change alerting the operator of the event. At the time, IBM charged $40 per month for a wired in monitor to do this and we did it with a $5 Flavoradio from you know who.
Neil
We had 3 red Flavoradios All are gone now.
Bruce, 90.9
Strange DX
Carl,
After listening to it on LPH #44, I’m thinking it may be an “Interval Signal” from a commercial or pirate station outside the US. Since it’s on 1550 kHz, it likely is in the western hemisphere. It could be from elsewhere if it’s actually on 1503 kHz.
From the latest issue of Popular Communications magazine: “An interval signal typically consists of a unique musical signature sometimes accompanied by an announcement. The signal is repeated at intervals prior to sign-on and on the hour to aid listeners with tuning in a station before programming begins”.
I only have partial musical sense, but it does sound like a deliberate attempt at electronic music. It has rhythm, harmony, and all the notes seem to be on scale. That leads me to believe its not some accidental output from a digital device.
Thinking Pirate
I’m thinking it was a pirate station, because it never made spoken identifications.
If it had been a licensed station, perhaps doing a stunt or a promotion, it most likely would have made legal IDs at the appropriate time.
If it was a pirate, it has not been evident on that frequency since that morning, and so it may have been a “one time” exercise by the people doing it.
The music appealed to me in a peculiar way because it truly was unusual, as music goes, and I took a renewed interest in the electronic music genre.
Interval signals, described above by PhilB, are an interesting fixture from the shortwave age. At one time it was very common to hear interval signals, short musical identifiers, from many nations.
I built an interval signal based on a few notes from a Bruckner symphony, for which I actually bought a copy of the complete score so I could accurately pick out the notes.
A little segment on interval signals is about to be featured on the LPH, I can see it coming.
After the Afterthought
If the mystery signal had been on 1503kHz, would it not have been causing a beat frequency with the stations at 1550?
One or more talk stations mixed in with the signal, and all the stations seemed to be perfectly “on channel”, as there wasn’t the slightest hint of being “out of tune”.
Oops
I should have said 1548 kHz instead of 1503 kHz. I intended to pick the closest 9kHz channel to 1550 kHz. Being only 2 kHz off would not be particularly noticeable, so the possibility exists that it could have been from outside the Americas.
I lean toward pirate too.
Night Signal
As said earlier, the odd music heard on this mystery DX at 1550 kHz put us in an electronic mood.
On a recent edition of LPH the “Bamboo Thoughts” program was mentioned, featuring electronic and ambient music on Saturday night.
This new impetus to consider electronic music has fed two possible program changes now under consideration.
First, the “Bamboo Thoughts” name may be dropped for its resemblance to a New Age or Buddhist concept, not a flavor suited to our station. From here the so-called “new age” is a euphemism for “imaginary magic”. Imaginary magic is short of being real magic. And Buddhism happens to be the world’s 4th largest religion, but we are a secular station, no cults.
So, there’s our reason for dropping “Bamboo Thoughts”. The new name of our electronic music program might be “Night Signal”, giving the music a more “radio” flavor.
But that’s only one thought arising from the weird DX experience.
We happen to believe that morning is a very important time in human daily life, and that traditional radio programming runs counter to mental health. Coal chutes of non-stop information overload the senses at a time when people need their mind-space to face their own day’s schedule without burning up their energy in a flash.
Music in the morning is ill-advised because music meddles with emotion and the entire benefit of a night’s rest, which smooths the mood, is blown away by exposure to music. The worst is classical music, which is tantamount to wine, in its strong depletion of energy by emotional overload.
To date we have been silent in the morning, as a genuine public service.
But electronic music might be a means of establishing a station’s presence without penetrating the mental balance of listeners. Electronic music contains little intellectual content because it’s an attempt by uneducated musicians to re-invent a musical language, starting with the basic fundamentals. It fades into the background of awareness because there is nothing about it that holds the attention.
So we have been experimenting with electronic mornings, and its very much like not being there.
Haunted By
The unusual DX described at the outset of this post has remained in my thoughts, and I have been atuned for any recurrence that could occur, but so far it’s a one-of-a-kind experience.
The odd electronic music persisted for at least the 3-hours that I heard it, but could have been on for much longer without my being aware. Like I said, there were never any announcements.
One conclusion that can probably be drawn from the experience is that somebody, somewhere, has an AM transmitting system capable of broadcasting at 1550kHz. Like PhilB surmised, it was probably a pirate.
Assuming piracy I deduce that this particular pirate is not someone who wants to get a message out, or there would have been voices. It may not be someone who likes electronic music in particular, as the music might have been used for its unmistakable distinction to stand out among the other signals.
But then, what was the music? Was it made by the pirate or simply a commercial recording from amidst the vast genre of electronic music performances.
During spare time I sort through the license free electronic music available at archive.org, hoping that dumb luck magically turns up the music in question, but luck has been smart enough not to be that dumb.
In terms of looking for clues in world hay stacks, that Monday morning event of 3-weeks ago remains pointlessly haunting.