Shortwave Radio Oddity Roundup

Signalis fans will hear this and say “ayo this a bop, turn that shit up”

Whenever you think you have it rough, just remember- somewhere, somebody's job is to listen to the Chinese robot all day.

the guy who made "high-pitched polytone" was tired of waiting on his sound cloud

High pitch polytone is pretty banging tbh

Something about this REALLY creeps me out.

UPDATES: “High-Pitched Polytone” and “Backwards Radio Station” are now inactive. Also, “drums and trumpets” is was still around until 2010, but on a private radio wave channel broadcast from MoD Aird Uig, Scotland, UK from 1993. The station it’s self is actually Scottish. I went to the abandoned site at Aird Uig (On the Outer Hebrides). It is Abestos contaminated, but one building the locals want to convert to a museum with a history exhibit, restaurant and whale listening post. Hope you found this useful.

As somebody that had SW on his boombox in the 80s I loved listening to these creepy-ass stations and falling asleep to them. Screw aliens & ghosts - this stuff is far creepier! All of these were created for a reason

i love how the most upbeat ones are usually the creepiest. "Drums and Trumpets" for example. it sounds triumphant, but deeply sinister all at the same time.

I'm an experimental musician who's been doing industrial music and noise music since the 80's and I've found that some of the best strange sounds to record and mess with come from shortwave radio. It's an amazing resource for a musician to get interesting stuff to play with. You can always find strange sounds, number stations, conversations that are just.. out of tune.. All fantastic to toss into an audio editor and work into a tune somehow.

Part 1: Extinct stations  Three note oddity (0:34) Drums and trumpet (1:13) 8 note rising scale (2:07) Gongs and Chimes (3:07) Faders (3:55) Part 2 : Rare stations Backwards Music Station (4:45) The Crackle (5:30) Yosemite Sam (6:06) The Workshop (6:26) 3 day mystery (7:06) Wop wop (7:45) Part 3: Active/Regular stations  High pitch Polytone (8:22) Grasshopper (9:38) Pip (10:16) Squeeky Wheel (10:59) The Buzzer (11:48) Slot Machine (12:32) The Chinese Robot (13:03)

I remember coming across a particularly chilling Chinese broadcast once. It would play segments of Chinese pop music from 90's/2000's in various warped states, sort of like a sound collage. And it repeated nonstop. But then on occasion, there would be an interruption. I only ever heard two kinds. One is a quote from the Tao Te Ching being spoken in what sounded like Cantonese by an elderly woman. This would repeat around 6 times before the music would come back. The only other interruption, which I had only heard once and scared the shit out of me, was what sounded like a small child sobbing and an angry man shouting numbers in Mandarin. A sharp tone would hold out for a while, then a quote from the Buddha would be recited in what I think was Tibetan, but might have been Nuosu, I'm not exactly sure, but then weird sound collage would play again.

It's creepy because there's a reason these were broadcast on shortwave. Shortwave isn't nearly as popular, can be picked up all around the world, and there's plenty of frequencies to choose from.

Used to stay up all night listening to STASI numbers stations as a kid. Went to the STASI museum in Berlin. If anyone is interested,ask the museum guards and they have a tone of info on East German numbers stations, including a photo of the woman who actually is used for the voice. Shit isn’t so creepy when you actually see the room it was all recorded in and the people who used it.

Turns out High-Pitch Polytone isn't actually a numbers station, it's just some guy playing on his Commodore 64.

This is one of my all-time favorite videos on the entire internet. There's something uniquely fascinating about this kind of stuff that has kept me coming to this exact video for years and years.

If you wonder why some of these sound so "creepy", it's because they were on tape recordings, and as the tape keeps playing over the years it starts to corrupt, making the sounds off tone and "eerie"

“FOR THE LAST TIME MASON, WHERE. IS. THE NUMBER STATION!!”

east Germany, Russia, USA: numbers, noises, film lines France: quack quack quack quack sounds of ducks making out

Little bit of engineering info on XPH/Polytone (don't know if this is known already): 1. The slow tones at the beginning are sent at a rate of one tone per second and repeat very slowly - probably there as a station ID or to help operatives tune their receiving equipment. 2. The repetitive high pitched tones (which I swear sound like Fur Elise) are alternating between two frequencies at a rate of 8 tones per second. They alternate 10 times. This is probably to get the receiver synchronized with the tone timings. 3. After that, the lowest tone (which I guess is a sort of "marker tone") plays 10 times in a row, also 8 per second. Probably more time synchronization. 4. The station then plays groups of 5 tones with that same "marker tone" in between each group. The tones are still sent at a rate of 8 per second. I saw about 9 different tones (not including the marker tone) used in the groups, with a frequency separation of 50 Hz. No tone ever repeats twice (except in step #3). 5. The second transmission (the higher pitched one) follows the same scheme, but this time the marker tone is the highest. My guess is there was no pitch difference, but rather the folks who made the recordings had their radios set to different SSB modes. So, we can conclude: a) Whoever designed the XPH transmitter REALLY likes multiples of 5 and 10. b) This is pretty clearly some kind of slow MFSK and not actually intended to be heard as audio. c) The system transmits 3 bits per tone, 15 bits per group, at a rate of 3/4 groups per second, or about 11.25 bits per second. (And you thought your WiFi was slow...)

some poor government worker in 2002: let's call this one "wop wop" (everyone else in the room nods solemnly)