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Angry Woman On Shortwave Radio (Early 1980s)

Itsmeee

Gone But Not Forgotten
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During the early 1980's I used to borrow my mum's Philips radio. It was the only radio in our house to have the Shortwave band on it, and I enjoyed very slowly scanning the airwaves from left to right of the dial.
EVERY time no matter what time of day or which day, along towards the extreme right of the dial I would pick up the voice of a fast talking woman. She always sounded agitated/angry/ as if she was arguing with someone and determined to put her point accross. You could never hear the response from the other person (mind you, they'd barely manage to get a word in edgeways :), so it may well have been a radio ham?
She'd speak endlessly and went on and on and on and on and on. As I say, always gauranteed to be heard at any time, and from memory, I listened to her over a period of I'd say, 3-4 years. Luckily I have found a recording I made of this, though it is only a short segment (I'm sure I have more, as I used to make tapes off the radio and have literally hundreds from the early 80's, I've been going through these recently) Hopefully one day I will find a longer recording.
Anyway, part of the reason for posting this, is that I seem to recall reading a letter in FT from a reader maybe 5 years ago concerning this voice. Can anyone else recall this, or know where I can read the article?
I intend to upload the forementioned segment to Youtube soon.
I haven't listened to shortwave for many years, so perhaps this woman's voice can still be heard now?!
 
I don't recall the FT letter, but this reminds me of the Shortwave Number Stations we have a thread on. Could it be possible she was reading out numbers? Or some kind of security message? Or did it sound more conversational?

Any memories at all of any words you could make out? I used to go around the shortwave dial myself as a youngster, but the most exciting thing I found was DJs on Radio Moscow making jokes about the salt mines.
 
I presume she wasn't speaking in English, or was she and it was just not intelligable? If not, any guess as to what language she was talking in?
 
Thanks for the response. No she definately wasn't reading out numbers, her sentences could be quite long in fact. I checked out the Shortwave Number Stations recordings and this is quite different. Don't sound like security messages either, but I might be wrong.

I'll let you know when I've posted the segment onto Youtube.
 
No definately not English. Unsure of the language, but the reception wasn't always clear either so might be hard to tell.
 
I'm tempted to say it was a local ham, but they must have been seriously dedicated! Looking forward to that YouTube clip...
 
Some languages have a way of sounding rapid and annoyed whatever the subject - Spanish perhaps? Despite its harsh reputation, German on the air-waves at least is often soporific - maybe a reaction to all that dictator stuff.

It is often an anti-climax to find that six minutes of earnest yattering is a DJ's intro. to some stinky piece of Euro-Pop! Not annexing the Sudatenland again then?

I used to love aimless browsing on the radio. Even the MW would be invaded by odd remote channels after darkness fell. Like a seance really! :)
 
It wasn't 'Radio Tirana', broadcasting from the Socialist Republic of Albania, was it? The female presenters on that used to shout at the listeners, like the balloon sculpting entertainer at a Socialist Workers' children's party.
 
Perhaps this isn't as strange sounding as it sounded to me at the time. I'd be around 15 years old and this voice (FAIRLY sure it's female) would be heard EVERY time I scanned the Shortwave band between around 1981 and 1984. Can anyone make out the language?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lFe7zN4QJZQ
 
Maybe a woman, maybe a man, whatever. The whole point is trying to solve the mystery of why this human voice was heard so ofen on shortwave, and always speaking in this excited fashion.
 
Peripart said:
To me, it does sound human, but an excited man, not a woman.
Asian, Middle Eastern, or South East European, male, some kind of Soviet influenced propaganda rant?
 
It does sound like a voice, because you can hear them taking breaths between phrases. But even if it was in English, it's so distorted I'd be surprised if anyone could make out any words. Creepy, though!
 
I also had a love of trawling through the Am bandwiths for random stuff. These days you never get anything of interest, I wonder if that is something to do with the net letting people vent themselves better, or perhaps better regulation of transmission. These days I spend a lot of time sailing around Plymouth sound with a VHF radio listening to Naval and coastguard chatter....but enough of my penchants.


Thanks for posting the recording on you tube, it also sounds male to me. Perhaps speeded up? I really can't make out what language it is but the suggestion of it being a religous type rant does somehow fit.
 
linesmachine said:
These days you never get anything of interest, I wonder if that is something to do with the net letting people vent themselves better, or perhaps better regulation of transmission.
The radio spectrum has been increasingly regulated for many years now, to make better use of the available bandwidth. Just recently all the TV channels have 'gone digital', and the radio channels will shortly follow.
(An improvement on WT, which (initially) splattered itself across all frequencies!)

In the late 60s, the BBC World Service used to broadcast at night (on LW, I think) on the same frequency as Radio 4 (the old Home Service) used during most of the day. I was most disconcerted to wake early one day, switch on the radio, and find it talking in Russian! I thought we'd been invaded! :shock:
 
This is a great threat.
The voice in my opinion is probably shouting some propaganda stuff. I am ususally very good at guessing languages but this one had me buffled. By the way the person is talking, I would put it somewhere like russia, china or korea but I don't think it is actually russian as I know some and it is not harsh enough. It is also not chinese and definetly not korean. Maybe it is some other old soviet state propaganda, definetly east I'd say. Not arabic, definetly not.
Brilliant.
 
itsmee? What area was this in? Could it have been the news for local Hindu/Bangladeshi/Sikh population? Was there ever such a broadcast in your area?

mooks out
 
But then, why was it always the same voice? If it was professional, didn't they have any other presenters? No music? Not even a jingle or sting?
 
Some sort of religious text read out during prayers by the same holy man? Was it heard in central England at certain times calling the faithful to prayer? Could it have been the Quoran?

mooks out
 
It sounds like Arabic to me, though the penultimate words sounds like "fantastic!" :?
 
Don't know why, but I've started to think that it's Albanian propaganda. I can picture the speaker as a small, bald man, sitting in a half-buried radio room, trying to spread the word of Hoxha to a world that, for some reason, won't listen.
 
What an interesting thread!

I've always thought there was something quite eerie about scanning through the "white noise" trying to pick up a station. I can remember hearing all sorts of strange things while searching for Radio Luxembourg back in the late seventies.

But I've just remembered something else. Is it possible to pick up radio signals from other electrical devices? When i was 17 I worked as a typist in an insurance investigators office. We used audio dictation machines and from time to time I could hear background noise that sounded like people talking, as if CB radio or something. It was just the odd short phrase or a couple of words and not very clear - and it was different from ordinary office background noise. I asked the girl I worked with if she could hear anything similar on hers but she couldn't. (She just moved her chair a bit further away from me instead)

This happened on quite a few occasions but I had completely forgotten about it until now. This would often happen as I loaded up the machine - before i had actually loaded the tape but had the earphones in ready to start. In the end we put it down to the tapes being old and having been used so many times there were bits of old recordings on there.

I know it happened quite a few times when the tape wasn't in the machine, but I stopped mentioning it in the end
 
Yes it definitely sounded like a radio broadcast - our office was next to a busy road so my conclusion was that the dictation machine was picking up transmissions from lorry drivers cb radios.

(And so I decided not to include any of it in the correspondence I was typing :))
 
I know it sounds like someone preaching, however I need to point out that from memory, this broadcast always sounded like a 2-way exchange. There would be a few seconds of silence where the other communicator would respond (though you couldn't hear their response on the radio) and often there would be shorter responses from the agitated voice to aknowledge what the other communicator was saying. Also the quaility of the sound suggests someone speaking closely into a microphone (such as a radio ham/ police/fire service/Nasa etc would use i.e 2 way communication broadcast) rather than a more 'proffessional' radio broadcast.
I hope to find more tapes of this voice, and if so, will upload onto Youtube.
It's unfortuante that this tape is a little distorted - typical of a SW broadcast at that time - but I certainly remember hearing clearer broadcasts, which might make it easier to identify the language, if indeed it IS human ;)
 
I can tell by the distorted sound that it was being broadcast on SSB (single side band) and either the radio you were using did not have this feature or you were not aware of it.
Had you used the SSB feature to fine tune , it would have come in clearly and distortion free.
It sounds like one of radio Havana's interviews or straght out propaganda rants to me.
I still listen to shortwave and never tire of the lies and fanatical rants that get broadcast.
 
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