Tag Archives: Recordings

Using the Icom IC-705 to record a local AM broadcast station

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In my previous post, I mentioned how much I enjoy the built-in digital audio recorder in the new Icom IC-705. While I wouldn’t buy a QRP transceiver specifically for built-in audio recording–there are less expensive options out there–it is an incredibly useful feature in my world.

After publishing that post, I was reminded that Monday morning (October 12, 2020) I connected the IC-705 to my homebrew Noise-Cancelling Passive Loop antenna mounted indoors at my parents’ house.

My NCPL antenna

Their house is like so many others in that it is inundated with RFI (radio frequency interference). I find that the NCPL antenna does a fine job mitigating most of that noise on the mediumwave band when I position it so that the bulk of the interference is nulled.

Monday morning, I tuned the IC-705 to my favorite local AM station: WAIZ on 630 kHz.

Weekday mornings, Dave and his “Wacky Wake-Up Crew” always put me in the right mood. They’re incredibly goofy/corny and 100% original.

It’s extraordinarily rare these days to find a local radio station, with local talent, creating a local daily radio show. Almost all of their ads are local, too.

I made the following off-air recording for myself, but decided to upload it for others to enjoy. I’m not sure what the receiver audio EQ or bandwidth filter was set to when I recorded this. It’s not a demo of receiver performance, just a little radio fun.

Enjoy:

April’s collection of Japanese language WebSDR recordings for September 2020

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Many thanks to SWLing Post contributor, April TimeLady, who writes:

As I believe this may be of interest to you and your readers here is a link to a collection of recordings I have uploaded to archive.org of Japanese SDR recordings I made over the course of September 2020. I uploaded them as .wav files and archive converts it to .flac and .mp3.

Click here to listen to April’s recordings on the Internet Archive.

April’s collection of Japanese language WebSDR recordings for July and August 2020

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Many thanks to SWLing Post contributor, April TimeLady, who writes:

Please find in this email links to two months of Japanese SDR recordings I have made. One is for July and the other is for August. I have uploaded them to archive.org.  I send you these links because I think it may interest your audience to listen to Japanese language SDR recordings. Nearly all of the domestic broadcast recordings are NHK, specifically the late night program since I like it. Enjoy!

July 2020 recordings

August 2020 recordings

Thank you for sharing your off-air recordings with us, April!

Richard shares recordings of The Buzzer

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Many thanks to SWLing Post contributor, Richard Lacroix,

I was intrigued by your post, “The ghostly radio station that no one claims to run (BBC Future)”. I attempted to listening to the station on 4625 kHz from my home location here in Toronto, Ontario Canada but unfortunately could not receive the signal. WebSDR to the rescue. I managed to locate a couple of KiwiSDRs in Russia which yielded great reception of “The Buzzer”.

I figured that some readers may be interested in knowing what the buzzer sounds like. I have therefore included 2 recordings of the broadcast; the first in AM and the second in USB mode with a 3.2 kHz wide filter setting. I am also sharing a screen shot of the waterfall which clearly depicts the signal [see at top of post].

Recordings

The Buzzer recorded July 18, 2020 at 01:07 UTC  on 4625 kHz in AM mode:

The Buzzer recorded July 18, 2020 at 08:26 UTC  on 4625 kHz in upper sideband mode:

Thank you for sharing this, Richard!

Like you, I have difficult receiving The Buzzer from North America (especially in summer conditions with QRN). That’s where KiwiSDRs really come to the rescue. Thanks again for sharing your recordings.

Can you help Carlos identify this 1982 polytone broadcast?

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Many thanks to SWLing Post contributor, Carlos Latuff, who writes:

I have a tape with a recording I made in 1982 while listening to shortwave.

I’m not really sure if I caught some kind of polytone numbers station. Could you or your readers be able to identify it?

Post readers: If you can help Carlos identify this transmission, please comment!

April’s collection of Japanese language WebSDR recordings for June 2020

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Many thanks to SWLing Post contributor, April TimeLady, who writes:

This is a collection of SDR recordings made of Japanese language radio stations for June 2020.” It may be useful to note that I had encoded them at .ogg from .wav, and archive.org automatically converts audio to .mp3 format. The great majority of the recordings are from NHK JOAK Tokyo; I have reason to believe that it broadcasts in AM Stereo. Those recordings with “sas” in the filename are in stereophonic sound, or supposed to be at least. I am unsure if what I hear are artefacts of skywave or AM interference or actually stereo, but it seems to be so when I listen to the playback of such files. The English language Wikipedia article on AM stereo is definitely not complete when it comes to Japanese radio stations, and there does not seem to be a corresponding article on the Japanese Wikipedia..

Click here to listen on the Internet Archive.

April’s collection of Japanese language WebSDR recordings for May 2020

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Many thanks to SWLing Post contributor, April TimeLady, who writes:

This is a collection of Japanese SDR recordings I made over the month of May. Labelling may be “off” and I can’t find sources for some of the call letters of the stations I’ve heard; WRTH is only so useful, but it is still very useful anyway. The recordings are also biased towards what I’m interested in, which means mostly music programs, NHK programs, shortwave programs. Available in .wav, .mp3 and .flac.

Click here to listen on the Internet Archive.

April also asks:

“Does anyone know the call letters of the NHK shortwave transmitters located in Japan itself. Or the call letters for the Issoudun and Nauen shortwave complexes?

I’ve tried googling the answers for the first question in Japanese and the answers have been less than useful, most likely due to the kanji barrier.”

If you can help April, please comment!