Tag Archives: DDOT

Transmitters stuck in time

Sometimes we radio enthusiasts discover odd things on the air.

We’re listeners and we notice things.

A few days ago our friendy, Matt Blaze, tweeted this:

Yep, for eight years a DDOT TIS (Traffic Information System) transmitter has been broadcasting the same repeating message and few have noticed.

You can read Matt’s whole Twitter chain here.

Matt has also kindly shared an audio recording of this transmitter. He notes that the reception “was weak but readable” from his home:

What’s more, Matt’s tweet was picked up by The Drive and turned into a post, thus exposing our radio geekery to the populos at large. Many thanks to the numerous SWLing Post readers who shared a link to the article.

I have to assume someone from the DDOT was paying attention too because Matt posted that as of March 3rd, it appears the transmitter has been taken off the air:

This reminded me of another transmitter stuck in time that I thought David Goren once mentioned. I checked with him and he confirmed:

Yes, there’s a transmitter somewhere on MW in NYC that has been broadcasting: “this is a functional test of the text-to-speech capability of the [VR or BR 2000] software package”. They’ve probably been on at least 10 years.

Many thanks to David for sharing the following recording:

Have you ever heard a forgotten transmitter? Please comment with details!

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