Angry Woman On Shortwave Radio (Early 1980s)

[IamSundog]

I find it easier to get them from certain major U.S. media conglomerates.

 

[Dingo667]

I found this about radio Moskow, especially about the cold war years. They mention a question and answer program that was quite popular. Even though the clip of the OP is definetly not russian, it could have been broadcasted in any of the 70 languages they listed. Its a far throw but it could be possible. Mainly because RM was state owned and hence covered a lot of propaganda that could be listened to in most of europe.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radio_Moscow

 

[Xxeno]

Radio Voices

I am sure it is a man reciting verses from the Quran in Arabic. Even now they seem to go on forever and they do pause occasionally. They broadcast all over the HF bands but now seem to be more prevelent on the satellite radio channels. Also 5 times a day from a mosque near you!

 

[gman72]

Well i'm certain it's a human voice, probably female and probably arabic in origin, but whatever, it sounds fantastic and is just the kind of sound I was looking for in an atmospheric piece of music i'm writing for television. If i'm lucky you may hear that chatter on a TV commercial very soon.

Actually, having just had another listen, I think it sounds like internal comm chatter from a fighter pilot.

 

[Peripart]

Well i'm certain it's a human voice, probably female and probably arabic in origin, but whatever, it sounds fantastic and is just the kind of sound I was looking for in an atmospheric piece of music i'm writing for television. If i'm lucky you may hear that chatter on a TV commercial very soon.

Actually, having just had another listen, I think it sounds like internal comm chatter from a fighter pilot.

If it is Arabic, and the voice is quoting the Koran, and you set it to music in an advert, you may find yourself getting the kind of attention you don't want!

Some of these extreme religious types seem to lack a sense of humour, but then again, they say there's no such thing as bad publicity...

 

[gman72]

Well i'm certain it's a human voice, probably female and probably arabic in origin, but whatever, it sounds fantastic and is just the kind of sound I was looking for in an atmospheric piece of music i'm writing for television. If i'm lucky you may hear that chatter on a TV commercial very soon.

Actually, having just had another listen, I think it sounds like internal comm chatter from a fighter pilot.

If it is Arabic, and the voice is quoting the Koran, and you set it to music in an advert, you may find yourself getting the kind of attention you don't want!

Some of these extreme religious types seem to lack a sense of humour, but then again, they say there's no such thing as bad publicity...

Indeed. Thank you for the heads up, but I already have contingency plans for that eventuality... i'm gonna reverse it. I'm also gonna put some EVP samples in the piece.

 

[chromedog]

Just out of curiousity, on the Short wave band, what are the transmissions that sound like a generator running and been played through a phase? theyre really clear, even on the crappy little radio i got. No doubt satalites or something...or perhaps somebody out there actually mikes up a generator and broadcasts it for reasons only known to themselves.

This thread is cool, Short Wave is pretty spooky

 

[Ginando]

I was hooked on shortwave radio as a child, and used to use an amazing Grundig radio my father purchased. My favourite ploy was to go to bed, but make a tent under the blankets and scan the shortwave bands with headphones on. I definitely remember the station which the original poster mentioned, or one very like it. The woman, and it always seemed to be women, continually recited numbers in German, over and over and over. I can still hear her sieben, acht, neun, neun, svei etc etc, with a seemingly emphasis on the guterral sound when she said acht. It was fascinating if somewhat pointless.

I can also recall regular broadcasts by an Albanian station (well I think it was Albanian) where this newscaster/propagandist was telling the world about food riots in London, and crowds of criminals roaming the streets. I listened to him a few times and it was always the same ridiculous stories about how we in Britain were basically in a civil war and nobody was being fed or educated.

It's actually a shame thats stopped as it was quite amusing at the time. I keep expecting the North Koreans to still try that sort of thing even today.

 

[Dwain Pipe]

Back on the early 1980's I remember fiddling around with our family radio one Sunday evening. As I was going through the stations I picked up an American chap talking about how he'd just bought a ticket to see The Police at Shea Stadium! What made it even stranger was that it seemed like a one way telephone conversation complete with pauses where the other person spoke (though I couldn't hear them). I called my Dad to come and listen & we continued listening to this chap talking about how excited he was about seeing The Police! The piece then ended abruptly to be replaced by general radio static. Very odd.

 

[oldrover]

Back on the early 1980's I remember fiddling around with our family radio one Sunday evening. As I was going through the stations I picked up an American chap talking about how he'd just bought a ticket to see The Police at Shea Stadium! What made it even stranger was that it seemed like a one way telephone conversation complete with pauses where the other person spoke (though I couldn't hear them). I called my Dad to come and listen & we continued listening to this chap talking about how excited he was about seeing The Police! The piece then ended abruptly to be replaced by general radio static. Very odd.

Half of a conversation between two US servicemen?

 

[Vardoger]

Back on the early 1980's I remember fiddling around with our family radio one Sunday evening. As I was going through the stations I picked up an American chap talking about how he'd just bought a ticket to see The Police at Shea Stadium! What made it even stranger was that it seemed like a one way telephone conversation complete with pauses where the other person spoke (though I couldn't hear them). I called my Dad to come and listen & we continued listening to this chap talking about how excited he was about seeing The Police! The piece then ended abruptly to be replaced by general radio static. Very odd.

Possibly someone calling from a boat radio to a telephone station on land which transmits the conversation to a land phone.

 

[Ermintruder]

As @Vardoger says, if you were listening on 'shortwave' (ie High Frequency radio transmssions between 3 and 30MHz) you may have heard one half of a phone-patch call made using the legacy maritime or aeronautical channels that specifically are/were intended to convey this content. More rarely, this can be heard still via maritime VHF as well.

Alternatively, in the days before DECT (or similar) digital cordless telephones (most of which are now compliant with international standards) it was possible to buy completely-illegal (but effective) analogue cordless phones that ran at around 30-50MHz low VHF.

This would present lovely second/third harmonic transmissions within the FM broadcast band, which you could've easily heard in the 1980s on a domestic radio.

Similarly, early prehistoric carphones were analogue and much-lower frequencies than now (cf the 'Squidgygate' scandal) transmissions from many of which would happily-overpower a locally-adjacent analogue radio receiver's front end or intermediate frequency detector stages (ie involuntary reception by you of a close-by user).

The whole world could be an inadvertant snooper, as a result....all heard in the clear, not a shread of incryption.

The thread OP's first comments about the 'ranting radio' entity certainly sound familiar- I shall check-out the old YouTube link. Those of us that were radio-active, on the original "net"...we heard some very strange things. And sometimes still do.

 

[heisenbear]

When I was a kid, I clearly remember hearing police transmissions on a MW/FM radio cassette my parents bought as a Christmas present for me in the mid eighties. My Bearcat scanner recently picked up what I assumed to be either a baby monitor or a spy bug and overheard an absolutely blistering row between a couple in the middle of a messy divorce. It made a change from the usual taxi drivers, shop security, warehouse staff and foul-mouthed CB users I usually get.

 

[Ermintruder]

When I was a kid, I clearly remember hearing police transmissions on a MW/FM radio cassette my parents bought as a Christmas present for me in the mid eighties

This was when the UK Police and Fire Services were still transmitting AM on the 100MHz Band2 FM broadcast band, so yes, quite possibly. Utter insanity.

They moved firstly to 155MHz analogue FM, then to current digital TeTRa.

My Bearcat scanner recently picked up what I assumed to be either a baby monitor or a spy bug and overheard an absolutely blistering row between a couple in the middle of a messy divorce

No it didn't. You just think it did. In your imagination.

This was not an unauthorised interception of an electronic communication for whom you were not the intended recipient, and was not an intentional or incidental action in breach of the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act.

Make the most of your Bearcat. In less than a decade, the vast majority of business etc users will have gone dPMR/Mototrbo, digitally-dodging 80s-era scanner-hackers.

 

[smokehead]

One woman I was seeing surprised me one night by demonstrating her CB rig, absolutely out of character it seemed to me, but of course who knows?
One lad demonstrated his scanner at work, slightly sinister imho as he claimed he could pick up mobile phone conversations.
Sadly, my contribution concerns those suffering from schizophrenia, from a post on another forum saying that they talk to the voices on their mobile.
It was opportune, one lady at the bus stop and all through the bus journey constantly talked on her mobile.
The conversation didn't seem natural in the sense that there were no pauses to listen, just a constant monologue.
Just an idea.

 

[Ermintruder]

one lady at the bus stop and all through the bus journey constantly talked on her mobile.

Her phone may have been held upside-down, and be totally out-of-charge for battery.

I always marvel at the similarities between prophets that are in direct contact with God, crazy people who are guided by their table-lamp, and many insensitive mobile phone users on public transport.

They are broadcasting an echo-chambered narrative that is substantially just an internal babble.

 

[smokehead]

I can normally drift off and shut them out. Just coincidence that I read the post and then encountered the lady.
There was a story, possibly an urban myth, that someone in the early days was nattering away on a mobile on the tube.
Another passenger fell ill and when urged to ring an ambulance they admitted it was a fake.
Might be true, I distinctly remember before their ubiquity a guy getting on the bus and making quite a show of fumbling for change while holding a mobile.
He showed it to the driver and said "nuisance these mobile phones aren't they?"

 

[Ghost In The Machine]

Our nuts neighbour is - or was, cos he took the aerial thing down recently - a radio ham, and for the past few months, we started hearing his scintillating broadcasts when we were trying to hear Radio 4, in the kitchen. It made my husband livid but I enjoyed it. Told my other neighbour and she says she wants to buy a radio, now, so she can hear it, too.

My mate has dabbled in this and he tells me they have thrilling conversations about what they ate for tea. I didn't quite believe him til we started getting the broadcasts from next door.

Nuts neighbour seems to be talking to Americans (Lots of Chucks and Randys). Although we can never hear their voices, just him, but he drops in their names a lot, is how we think they're yanks. And it's absolutely riveting because the whole narrative, whoever he talked to, was this fictional life. He literally broke off mid-screaming abuse at the wife and kids to talk on the radio, building this elaborate fiction about his lovely wife and 'beautiful' kids, the labrador, the garden and his life as "a stay at home dad"... After we've heard him calling the kids little c words, etc and threatening to 'belt' them minutes before.

We had his entire life story. He just seems to love the sound of his own voice and weaving these fantasies. The conversations are 100% lies but also inane. I don't get why anyone would bother in the age of the internet. Then one day a few weeks back, the aerial came down and there are no longer wires everywhere.

I was enjoying hearing his fictional life story told and re-told to endless American strangers. Although I guess he must have been crap at his hobby if it was coming over on the neighbour's radio.

 

[AgProv]

Back in the 80's I used to copy vinyl LP's to tape using a scart lead connecting stereo and tape recorder. It was amazing how often taxi control would break into the recordings as if the DIN-lead (or whatever: it had a plug with five pins at each end) was acting as a receiver. It appeared to be an inexorable law of nature: the quiet bits in the tape would have a drawling Manchester voice confirming he was ten minutes away from a pick-up at Alma Road, Worsely for Hope Hospital, or something...

 

[Ghost In The Machine]

Maybe because I read this earlier today, but this evening whilst waiting for husband to come out of supermarket, I idly switched on the car radio and I dunno why but he must have had it on AM - it's usually DAB or FM. Didn't even realise the car radio had AM. And it was on this channel, or between channels I dunno, and this woman was talking but very hard to hear - I had to listen closely to tell if she was even speaking in English. She was, and it sounded rational and normal but because of the crackling and interference/bad reception - I realised it still sounded somehow weird and sinister. Maybe only because I'd followed the link earlier on this thread to YouTube and heard the angry voice...

But it made me think, if we hear a voice that is slightly distant sounding and distorted by interference, it does somehow seem automatically scary and sinister - even when it really isn't.