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Paratus posted:Anyway, overall I'm very happy with both the scanner and the sw radio. Apparently there's some guys who put battery- and solar-powered transmitters out in the desert, I picked up a bunch of weird-rear end noises on certain freqs, and doing some quick Google searching for "arizona" and the frequency returned the info about the "desert transmitters". Got links? I gotta hear this poo poo, since I'm just a few miles away.
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Nov 5, 2007 05:06
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I'm only up to page 12 of this thread, so excuse me if this is some odd interruption. Anyway, add me to the damage tally. Thanks to this thread, I was reminded of the fun I used to have as a little kid tooling about with our AM/FM/SW portable radio, and promptly went and hunted down an SW radio. For any of you who happen to be in Taiwan - Taipei specifically - I found one place that sells a handful of SW radios. Just south of the corner of Xining and Zhongxiao W. roads is a ghetto electronics/audio mall. Straight up the entrance stairs and turn left, the first place on your right. I grabbed a Sangean ATS 505 for NT$2800 (about US$86), and am planning to head down that way again to see about antennae. If that fails, longwire here I come. So far I've nabbed a ton of stations in Russian, China Radio International in English, Voice of Russia in English, a bit of Radio Australia, occasional BBC World Service, and a metric shitton of stuff in Chinese (mostly from China), including a hilarious propaganda screed from the mainland which ran about 15 minutes, extolling the virtues of the One China Principle, how All Chinese Are Brothers, and how Hu Jintao really does have the best interests of all his Chinese compatriots at heart and isn't really planning to use all those hundreds of missiles to blow our poo poo up. I simultaneously love you and hate you, OP, for making me piss away money and enjoy doing it.
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Nov 5, 2007 10:15
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gently caress soldering. Really though, I just don't have anyone to teach me how to do it properly.  So I finally got that homebrew mag loop antenna built and whoa man is it ugly. But it works! It works very well I might add, but god drat is it ugly. I can now consistently listen to Alex Jones if I'm lucky enough to find him. I don't get that "wave" of static that I used to get and I'm pulling in a lot more frequencies than I used to. I'm still having zero luck finding HAM operators or numbers stations, but that's probably because I don't spend enough time playing with the radio. The only time I use mine is while going to sleep and I mainly just try a few of my known frequencies hoping for Alex or something else bizarre before settling on my local 980AM station for Coast To Coast AM. Every once in a while I'll spin the dial hoping to land on something, but it's always either a crazy preacher or something in a foreign language that I don't understand and neither of those interest me very much. The crazy preacher bit is fun for a while, but it gets old pretty quick.
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Nov 5, 2007 14:43
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nmfree posted:54-~88 -> TV channels 2-6 nmfree posted:Yeah, cops don't appreciate people listening to them on scanners, so they'll be pretty much the last people to give you any information. nmfree posted:Hams call it "foxhunting"; if you ever watched Dave Attell's show Insomniac he actually tagged along with some guys (in Phoenix, I believe)- they ended up "finding" the "fox" in a stripper's cooch at a titty bar. AstroZamboni posted:Got links? I gotta hear this poo poo, since I'm just a few miles away.
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Nov 5, 2007 23:12
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and local enthusiasts will be able to give you more detail.
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Well, there's one mystery solved: The source of the bird calls has been uncovered, and it belongs to Northwoods Radio, a pirate station. http://www.hfunderground.com/wiki/Northwoods_Radio That's the end of that chapter.
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Nov 6, 2007 02:39
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TetsuoTW posted:For any of you who happen to be in Taiwan - Taipei specifically - I found one place that sells a handful of SW radios. Just south of the corner of Xining and Zhongxiao W. roads is a ghetto electronics/audio mall. Straight up the entrance stairs and turn left, the first place on your right. I grabbed a Sangean ATS 505 for NT$2800 (about US$86), and am planning to head down that way again to see about antennae. If that fails, longwire here I come. Added to the financial drain, and a fresh OP update. I added a little tidbit on pirate radio, and a new link to a slinky antenna company.
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Nov 7, 2007 02:22
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I'm going to be in San Francisco next week. I plan on taking my E5 (because it is portable), I'll be at a hotel on Fishermans Wharf, is there anything particular I should look at trying to hear (that I can't hear in the Kansas City?).
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Nov 7, 2007 16:06
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porktree posted:I'm going to be in San Francisco next week. I plan on taking my E5 (because it is portable), I'll be at a hotel on Fishermans Wharf, is there anything particular I should look at trying to hear (that I can't hear in the Kansas City?). Scan the aeronautical bands in SSB mode for control tower communications at San Francisco International Airport. I've picked them up loud and clear from Phoenix AZ, so in Frisco it should be booming out of your speaker. Also, check Simon Mason's page for current schedules for Cherry Ripe, the Guam-based sister station of The Lincolnshire Poacher. The west coast will be a good spot for trying to DX that, just make sure you have a longwire with you. AstroZamboni fucked around with this message at 17:47 on Nov 7, 2007 |
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Nov 7, 2007 17:43
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AstroZamboni posted:Got links? I gotta hear this poo poo, since I'm just a few miles away. It's on the Spy Numbers site, on this page at the bottom (last entry) is a message from the group that set them out there. Weird stuff. http://www.spynumbers.com/USSWbeacon.html
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Nov 7, 2007 18:32
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I'll try hunting those down later this afternoon, and post my results.
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Nov 7, 2007 18:38
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AstroZamboni posted:I'll try hunting those down later this afternoon, and post my results. Oh, we can post what we find? Well, aside from the southern "fire and brimstone" preachers, I found an Oriental-sounding broadcast last night. I had the fiance record it in notepad, I'll update when I get home with the freq and time.
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Nov 7, 2007 19:29
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Paratus posted:Oh, we can post what we find? Was this ever in question? Half the fun of Shortwave is sharing the weird and wacky crazy poo poo that spews forth on the airwaves.
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Nov 7, 2007 20:56
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Paratus posted:Oh, we can post what we find? By "record it in notepad", I mean I had her put in the freq and time. here it is. 5948khz - 2257mst and after the turn of the hour (about 3min later), it sounded like mexican music. not too surprising, considering where I'm located. or it might just be a "play random ethnic-sounding music" station.
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Nov 7, 2007 23:03
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nmfree posted:Yes, there is; as analog service gets cut back, the spectrum has been either sold or reallocated for public safety. There is a small block of Nextel spectrum in the lower 800s that nextel is giving back beacause it interfered with some public safety frequencies, but the majority of the traffic in the 800 band isnt going anywhere. You just can't listen to it because its CDMA or GSM digital. Scanners that can scan the cellular bands are pretty useless as there so little analog traffic on the air at all anymore. Verizon and Cingular are both pulling the plug on thier analog systems as soon as the FCC will allow them, in Feburary of 08, so there will be even less. I used to use a modded Motorola bag phone a few years back and had a lot of fun screwing with people, but that was 15 some off years ago when digital was just on the drawing boards.
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Nov 7, 2007 23:27
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Well fuckety-doo-dah, I wasn't able to scan for pirate beacon desert transmitters today. Just way too much crap to do. I plan to devote a couple of hours to it this weekend and maybe try and catch recordings of some of these beacons.
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Nov 8, 2007 06:17
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Mighty Horse posted:I used to use a modded Motorola bag phone a few years back and had a lot of fun screwing with people, but that was 15 some off years ago when digital was just on the drawing boards. Man I remember those good old days. I used to work a a cell phone repair shop...needless to say we had the ability to clone pagers, and modify analoge cell phones in fun ways.
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Nov 8, 2007 07:13
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blugu64 posted:Man I remember those good old days. I used to work a a cell phone repair shop...needless to say we had the ability to clone pagers, and modify analoge cell phones in fun ways. Care to share an amusing anecdote?
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Nov 8, 2007 15:24
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AstroZamboni posted:Care to share an amusing anecdote? Yeah, this is a forum that seems to be centered around stories and mutual interests, so share!
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Nov 9, 2007 00:32
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Managed to pick up three desert transmitter pirate beacons. 4095U, slow repeating "beep" tone 4077L, Some sort of repeating morse. I don't know morse code, so I don't know what the letter(s) was/were. 4102L, repeating morse, seperated by three "dits."
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Nov 9, 2007 01:37
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AstroZamboni posted:Managed to pick up three desert transmitter pirate beacons.
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Nov 9, 2007 02:59
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nmfree posted:CW Get can decode from .wav files, if that helps. As soon as I get protools working again, I'll try and record them.
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Nov 9, 2007 03:20
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AnimalChin posted:gently caress soldering. Really though, I just don't have anyone to teach me how to do it properly. Speaking of soldering, I stumbled onto this today (via StumbleUpon): It's an Intro to Soldering, from Hack-a-Day http://www.hackaday.com/2007/10/26/how-to-introduction-to-soldering/
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Nov 9, 2007 06:35
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Despite my best efforts, I'm still a little unclear on this whole longwire antenna thing. How do you figure how long it should be? Is it just "the longer the better" or what? Does the thickness of the wire make any difference? Do you just strip one end of the wire and slap it onto your whip, or should you attach it via some coax first, and if so how? And finally, is it just a matter of hooking it to your receiver and heaving a roll of wire out the window (oversimplification, but you get the idea), or am I missing something? At the moment, all I've got is a couple of dozen feet of fairly thin, insulated wire running around my sliding door frame and clipped on to the frame at one end and the whip at the other. It's made a pretty noticeable improvement, but I can't help thinking I'm doing it wrong.
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Nov 9, 2007 09:50
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TetsuoTW posted:Despite my best efforts, I'm still a little unclear on this whole longwire antenna thing. How do you figure how long it should be? Is it just "the longer the better" or what? Does the thickness of the wire make any difference? Do you just strip one end of the wire and slap it onto your whip, or should you attach it via some coax first, and if so how? And finally, is it just a matter of hooking it to your receiver and heaving a roll of wire out the window (oversimplification, but you get the idea), or am I missing something? You're pretty much using the same setup as one of my longwires. If it is only aound 2 dozen feet, you might want to lengthen it a bit. Typically a good longwire will be between 40 and 70 feet. Anything above 80 feet will be a bit too long and overload you with interference. If you want to get fancy, you can wire up the end to a plug to input into your receiver, but I usually have pretty good luck just with alligator clipping an exposed end onto the whip antenna. Longwires my be ghetto, but they do work.
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Nov 9, 2007 15:25
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Awesome, thanks for that. I'll head down the store tomorrow and grab a longer roll of wire, see how that goes.
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Nov 9, 2007 19:38
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TetsuoTW posted:Awesome, thanks for that. I'll head down the store tomorrow and grab a longer roll of wire, see how that goes. In other news, I finally figured out one of the signals I've been getting on 4125U. It sounds like a burst of data - good old dial-up modem style - followed by some CW. Turns out it's the Shanghai SITOR transmission: the CW is "XSG", the identifier for Shanghai. It's not exactly a huge discovery (especially since I'm in the neighborhood) or nearly as cool numbers stations, but it's nice to finally be able to figure this sort of thing out.
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Nov 10, 2007 13:53
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TetsuoTW posted:In other news, I finally figured out one of the signals I've been getting on 4125U. It sounds like a burst of data - good old dial-up modem style - followed by some CW. Turns out it's the Shanghai SITOR transmission: the CW is "XSG", the identifier for Shanghai. It's not exactly a huge discovery (especially since I'm in the neighborhood) or nearly as cool numbers stations, but it's nice to finally be able to figure this sort of thing out. Definitely. Knowing what all those weird noises are actually being used for is a lot of fun. I love DXing for utility stations.
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Nov 10, 2007 18:00
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Fellow Hams, I'd like to purchase a portable HF radio for my Jeep. Currently I have an old Uniden CB in there, and I used to rock a Lincoln 10/11/12m modded unit when I was a kid. What's good today?
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Nov 12, 2007 03:38
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grellgraxer posted:Fellow Hams, I'd like to purchase a portable HF radio for my Jeep. Currently I have an old Uniden CB in there, and I used to rock a Lincoln 10/11/12m modded unit when I was a kid. What's good today? For a jeep? Nothing. Engines cause MASSIVE interference on HF. You just can't listen to SW in a car, and believe me, I've tried. Also considering fine antenna positioning is so critical in DXing, constant movement (and interference from all sorts of crazy poo poo on the road, like RF transmitter iPod adapters in other cars, and large power lines along highways, you just aint' gonna hear poo poo.
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Nov 12, 2007 05:08
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AstroZamboni posted:Managed to pick up three desert transmitter pirate beacons. I got the first two of these faintly here in Kansas City. Not sure if I actually heard anything on the 4102 freq or just imagined I did. I did however pickup Enigma V2a (the Attencion Lady) on 4035 and on 6768 finally at 3:15ish UTC. Lots of static and interference, but I'm just using the E5 antennae next to my laptop on the couch.
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Nov 12, 2007 05:26
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mas posted:I got the first two of these faintly here in Kansas City. Not sure if I actually heard anything on the 4102 freq or just imagined I did. A long time ago I completely stopped trying to use my radio and my computer at the same time. Totally futile, because the computer throws off all sorts of weird RF noise.
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Nov 12, 2007 05:33
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"Mailbag" show on Radio Habana main frequency right now. I'm listening on one of these:  Wait, holy poo poo, they just said someone with the name "Vorhees" sent a tape from the US... Edit: A Grundig G5 and Shortwave Passport book went on my Christmas "wish list" because of this thread. I have LOTS of old (working) tube radios with shortwave, but the analog tuning, lack of SSB capability, and poor selectivity make me want to get a more modern rig. I may also try to build a magnetic induction loop antenna sometime. san_dingo fucked around with this message at 06:46 on Nov 12, 2007 |
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Nov 12, 2007 06:40
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AstroZamboni posted:For a jeep? Nothing. Engines cause MASSIVE interference on HF. You just can't listen to SW in a car, and believe me, I've tried. Also considering fine antenna positioning is so critical in DXing, constant movement (and interference from all sorts of crazy poo poo on the road, like RF transmitter iPod adapters in other cars, and large power lines along highways, you just aint' gonna hear poo poo. I donno man. I've had decent luck listening to shortwave in my car while driving. Everything you mention rings true; but I've got it hard wired into my radio. Usually the signal is better while driving thought the country, and such, but I've had reasonable luck. Also a honest to god antenna designed for the specific band you're listening to is a boon. I'd check out anything from Yaesu, Icom, or Kenwood for any/all HF ham transceiver needs. I've got radios from both Yaesu and Kenwood and been pretty happy with them. If you don't already have an antenna I can show you a few decent places to get one.
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Nov 12, 2007 07:05
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grellgraxer posted:Fellow Hams, I'd like to purchase a portable HF radio for my Jeep. Currently I have an old Uniden CB in there, and I used to rock a Lincoln 10/11/12m modded unit when I was a kid. What's good today? Many hams are relatively successful operating HF mobile; there are even a few crazies who operate mobile CW! Anyway, I'd look over at eHam in their product reviews and in their mobile ham forum to see what other people are doing.
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Nov 12, 2007 11:05
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nmfree posted:Many hams are relatively successful operating HF mobile; there are even a few crazies who operate mobile CW!  Jesus Haploid Christ! And I thought texting behind the wheel was a bad idea! Edit: misspelled "Christ" with a G. AstroZamboni fucked around with this message at 02:56 on Nov 13, 2007 |
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Nov 13, 2007 02:53
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AstroZamboni posted:
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Nov 13, 2007 06:30
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Holy Jesus, I just heard the funniest drat ham conversation on 3921L. It went something like this, and this is all I heard. Both had strong southern accents. = Ham 1 = Ham 2: So, did you try using that giggle-counter thing, Jimbo?: Well, I had me some work gloves, a radee-ay-shun proof vest, and some goggles. The gigger-counter was going pretty crazy, but I took them things out at night and they were glowin' in the dark purdy good. : Why didn't you just hire some messicuns to do it?: Well, we've been having some problems with Republicans and border patrol around hereabouts my neck of the woods. : Just ship the republicans across the border!: I tell you what, bahgawd, its been so bad I been having to cut my own grass the last couple of weeks...And then the battery died in my E5. Absolutely loving golden.
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Nov 15, 2007 04:04
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AstroZamboni posted:
I'm sold. I'll be buying an E5/G5 within the next month.
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Nov 15, 2007 04:26
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Phlegmbot posted:I'm sold. I'll be buying an E5/G5 within the next month. I can not make any guarantees that what you hear on your E5 will be anywhere near as :iamafag: as that was.
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Nov 15, 2007 04:29
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AstroZamboni posted:
It's honestly alot better then texting at the wheel. Keep in mind that these guys live and breath morse and that with a nice iambic key; it does alot of the work for you. Not that it's the smartest idea, or even a good idea; but it's easier then texting, and you don't have to take your eyes off the road to do it.
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Nov 15, 2007 07:14
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