Monthly Archives: March 2013

Bill helps with low-power, license-free broadcasting

In reference to our post, Dave’s FM Station Empire, SWLing Post reader Bill writes:

Nice article on the use of low power broadcasting. For the last 5 years my site, HobbyBroadcaster.net, has been helping radio enthusiasts along with schools and businesses learn how to use legal, low power, license-free Part 15 radio for a variety of uses. I created the site due to my involvement with starting a campus-limited high school station and discovering the lack of quality resources available for school-based broadcasters unable to obtain an FCC allocation. With many hobbyists also using this same technology on AM to serve their neighbors with micro radio it only seemed natural to expand the interest to hobbyists, too.

Also, Part 15 regulations allow for some use of the shortwave bands for experimental broadcasting with the most common frequency used by hobbyists being 13.56 MHz.

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Bermuda…Missing?

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“Uh, Charlie, where did Bermuda go?”

My good buddy, David Goren, directed me to the VOLMET frequency for New York Sunday afternoon on 3,485 kHz.

VOMET, for those of you not familiar, is a worldwide network of radio stations that broadcast TAF, SIGMET and METAR aviation weather reports on shortwave radio, and in some countries on VHF, too. All of the reports are broadcast in upper sideband, using automated voice transmissions.

At any rate, they must have experienced a glitch which resulted in the loss of meteorological data for most of the United States. The broadcast preamble is as usual, but as soon as specific airport regions (mostly major US cities and some islands) are mentioned, the report takes a disturbing turn. It’s fodder for science fiction–one is not sure whether to be alarmed or amused by this eyebrow-raising data (or, lack thereof).

The end result becomes almost like a numbers station, sans numbers, of course. Take a listen for yourself by clicking here to download the recording, or listen via the embedded player below:

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Even numbers stations make mistakes

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On February 5th, 2013, the Cuban numbers station widely known as HM01 struggled to maintain its composure following an awkward studio error.

In this particular case, I started recording a few seconds prior to the carrier, at which point you’ll hear a couple of minutes of “dead air” (silence). The broadcast starts around 2:25, cutting into the middle of a data burst; the station then goes silent before it comes back on at 5:15 with numbers, then abruptly stops. At 6:15 the station restarts the numbers broadcast in earnest.

Download the MP3 of the full recording by clicking here, or listen via the embedded player below:

Click here to view the Archive.org with original audio files.

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