numbers stations are passé
- November 10th, 2014
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Check this out: listening to dead satellites. Or at least semi-dead satellites. These are satellites with dead batteries but with transmitters which turn on whenever the solar panels are in the right direction anyway. Some of the noises they make are weird and interesting.
I particularly like Transit 5B-5, launched 1964, for military navigation purposes. But recordings of many different satellites can be found at the link. Echos of the cold war – fitting, don’t you think, for the days surrounding the anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall?
I used to listen to the numbers stations on my shortwave! Also used to listen to the SKYKING broadcasts, which were broadcasts via shortwave to the missle silos with codes. You never knew if you were listening to a test or the real thing. I’ll have to check out the dead satalites 🙂 thanks for this!
Tasha: Awesome 😀 My thing was always to set up stupidly giant antennas and see how far away an AM station I could pick up at night.
AM DXing! been there and done that-in 1976, I had a quarter-mile long antenna (quarter mile-ish..about half of a half-mile spool of 18 guage aluminum electric cattle fence wire, old-school glass no-deposit Coke bottles as insulators, a spark plug gapped at .010 as a lightning arrestor, a NE-2 bulb used for static discharge). Inductively coupled to a bedside clock radio (coil wrapped around an old cigar box that the clock radio sat on).
Oscar-7 ( I think) is a zombie sattelite. Apparently, the batteries shorted out, opened up years later, and the thing started transmitting again after many years “dead”. The tumble rate of the sattelite could be determined by how it transmitted. I gotta go check that out..
Does anyone remember ratatatski? Weird noises on shortwave frequencies that sounded like World War 2 aircraft, or a cartoon machine gun.
Scott: I never had do that inductive coupling trick, I had the good luck to have an external antenna connector.
The gutters on my dorm were copper, because old, and didn’t run underground, also because old I guess? Anyway, I could connect to them out my window. 😀