On Sunday, February 10, 2002 11:01:26 PM UTC-5, Kevin Tekel wrote:
For years I have been noticing what I call "the party on WWV". Every
night, underneath the signal of time station WWV on 10 MHz, I hear many
people talking nonsense in Spanish. The most common phrase is "hola,
hola, hola" (pronounced "ola", meaning "hello" in Spanish). And there
is various other jabbering, yelling, whistling, even playing sound
effects and music. This sounds a bit like a Spanish version of CB
radio, except on top of WWV's signal.

This is definitely happening right on 10.000 MHz as I have heard it for
years on various different receviers in various different locations with
all sorts of antennas. Many times the "party" is strong enough to be
heard over WWV's signal even on a cheap pocket-size shortwave receiver
using only the attached whip antenna. I have also noticed that I never
heard this on 5 or 15 MHz; it is only on 10 MHz.

Looking through the Deja archives, I see two previous discussions about
this in this newsgroup, but nothing conclusive was found about the
origins of these Spanish language transmissions occuring on 10 MHz.

So.... is anybody else hearing this? And does anyone have any idea
where it might be coming from (specific countries)? And what is the
point of all this? There are no real conversations (QSO's) going on,
per se, just a lot of jabbering and nonsense.

One possible explanation I have heard is that this is from airplane
pilots doing a radio check. They turn on their radio, tune in WWV to
make sure the receiver part is working, and then without changing the
frequency, they key up the transmitter and say "hola, hola, hola" into
the microphone. OK, I can understand this happening maybe once in a
while. But the stuff I hear on WWV is *way* too frequent to be this.
People are saying "hola, hola, hola" like 10 times in a row, and there
is all that other nonsense going on like whistling and yelling. I don't
think there are this many Spanish-speaking airplane pilots in the whole
world!

If you have an MP3 player on your computer, you can download and listen
to a recording of this "party on WWV" that I made tonight, from this web
site:

http://www.geocities.com/dieselweb/wwvparty.htm

It often gets even worse than it is in the recording. Sometimes the
Spanish voices are so strong they sound like they are coming from right
in the USA.

Spanish is the second most popular language in the world,according to Wikipedia. Over 400 Million native speakers .