The Mighty KBC will be testing Monday and Tuesday mornings (March 11th & 12th) from 09.00 -11.00 UTC.
They will be on the following frequencies (simultaneously):
The Mighty KBC asks that you kindly email your listener reports for both shows.
In response to Chris’ recording of The Voice of Mongolia from Truk Lagoon, Mark shared his video taken from a train as he passes the Voice of Mongolia’s antenna farm earlier this year. Note the large curtain antennas. The size of the antennas is most apparent near the end of the video when the train turns; you can see the Voice of Mongolia site at a distance:
Thanks for sharing your travels, Mark!
Nauen Transmitter Station (Photo: Wikimedia Commons)
The Mighty KBC will be broadcasting the Giant Jukebox this weekend, Sunday (00:00 to 02:00 UTC) on their new 7,375 kHz frequency.
For those of us in North America, this broadcast will be Saturday evening (tonight!) from 19:00-21:00 EST. Last Sunday, March 3rd, 2013, was the KBC’s first broadcast from Nauen, Germany, packing 125 kW.
More of Kim Elliott’s digital text in this broadcast, too–faster modes this time. At about 0130 UTC, MFSK64 will be centered on 1000 Hertz, and PSKR250 on 2000 hertz. At just before 0200 UTC, MFSK32 images will be centered on 800, 1500 and 2300 Hz.
Decode using Fldigi from www.w1hkj.com.
(Source: Australia News Network)
An international broadcast association has condemned the deliberate jamming of shortwave broadcasts, including those from the ABC’s Radio Australia service, into Asia.
The Association for International Broadcasting (AIB) says English-language broadcasts from Radio Australia, the BBC World Service and the Voice of America are being jammed.
Chief Executive Simon Spanswick has told Radio Australia’s Connect Asia program research has indicated the jamming signals appear to be coming from within China.
“It appears to be quite wide,” he said.
“We’ve been talking to some monitors who keep ears on the shortwave bands around Asia and they say that it’s certainly audible well outside China.
“So, one imagines, even with the geographic scale of China itself, that this is right across the region.” […]
“What the Chinese have done for a long time is actually broadcast Chinese folk music [see our previous posts on Firedrake]…what’s happening in this case is that they’re transmitting a different sort of noise.
“The aim is to simply make it so uncomfortable to listen to that people switch off and don’t bother trying to listen to the program that they wanted to get.”
The AIB has lodged protests over the jamming with the Chinese embassies in Washington, London and Canberra.
Jazz Notes presenter, Ivan Lloyd (Photo: Radio Australia)
For your listening pleasure: thirty minutes of Radio Australia’s Jazz Notes.
This broadcast was recorded yesterday at 1:30 UTC on 11,945 kHz. You will note a little noise that bleeds over from jamming of Radio Marti on an adjacent frequency.
You can download this recording of Jazz Notes by clicking here, or simply listen via the embedded player below:
“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:
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.