[Lowfer] An interesting signal on 1610 KHz A.M. last night

[craig wasson]

The fact that it seems to be sending CQ and AR makes me think it's a
subharmonic of a ham.  But the fact that it is so consistently on sort
of rules that out.  It could be a ship-to-shore station calling for
traffic.  The warbling tone would indicate it may be a harmonic or
mixing product .

The brain has a tendency to find order out of chaos - being a ham you
might be hearing CQ and AR when it's really something else.  The
frequency would be consistent with a MW NDB on 1600 with 1khz tone
modulated CW.  In central and south america there are some NDBs in the
broadcast band.  Some of those have poor quality transmitters so that
could explain the warbling tone.  I ran across an international NDB
list on the internet somewhere a while back - I'll have to try and
find it again.

This may take more brute force listening.

And I love the movie reference.  Wasn't that a movie about the HAARP
transmitter setting the ozone layer on fire?   :)

Craig - N6IO


On Fri, Oct 28, 2011 at 9:43 AM, Andy - KU4XR <ku4xr at yahoo.com> wrote:
> Hi all: Hoping not to bore you, here's more now on the mystery CW signal I'm hearing on 1610 KHz...
> As I posted on Thurs. night; I have determined the carrier frequency to very close to 1611.07 KHz...
> I was able to switch from USB to CW and found the signal, and kept narrowing the BW, and looking
> for it again, moving the VFO to center the signal in my BFO passband... With the signal running about
> 15 wpm; a 100 Hz audio BW gave the best copy for me here... It's kinda hard to tell though when I'm
> able to hear the signal for only 10 to 20 seconds at a time, fading in and out over about a 1 minute
> period..... Wow !!! This is the old fashioned way... sit, and listen for hours...
> I have 9 audio clips I recorded of the signal, so I'll be editing them for clarity, and trying to see if I can
> glean any useful info from them... observations from a 2 hour listening period Thurs. night; at different
> times the signal woud peak above the band clutter, and I could hear it at slower speeds, and changing
> speeds during the transmission... I heard the letter " O " , and the letters " E P " sent in repetition a
> few times, and one transmisson had the " AR " - End of message sign.. A couple of times I heard the
> number " 7 " being sent, and most of this I should be able to go to my recordings and listen over and over
> to hear what was being sent...
> The 4th harmonic would be coming from 402.767 KHz, or 401.767 if 1 KHz tone modulated.. There are a
> bunch of NDB possibilities there, but this appears to be sending some random stuff..
> I listened for the hour drive to work this morning, and even left home about 45 minutes before dawn
> but didn't hear a single peep from it... I'll listen to the audio clips, but I'm not gonna loose any sleep
> over it... hi - hi
>
> 73 for now:
>
> Andy - KU4XR - Friendsville, TN.
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