"Jack" wrote in message
...

Gawd... I recall back in the 60's when I was just beginning. It was
a very human woman's voice in Spanish speaking endless 5 number cipher
groups. I recall the first time I heard her. Mid-afternoon one summer
in 1967 on something close to 8 Mhz. My receiver was a 1937 A****er
Kent console my father recapped and gave me.

The one that intrigued me the most was a signal that sounded like a
inebriated bagpiper playing the same weird series of notes over and
over, broken by infrequent short bursts of what sounded like scrambled
speech (inverted sideband?). It would show up at a wide assortment of
HF frwquencies, most often around 10-10.5, 11-12, 14-15, and 17 Mhz. I
don't know if it was riding propagation or what; seemed to be random.
Sometimes several different bagpipes were playing at once on different
freqs. Sometimes it appeared broken, with tones missing or slight
variations of the sequence. This occurred more frequently as the
years went on. I first heard it around 1965, but it was still around,
in one variation or another, until at least 1978, when I was forced to
"get a life" and stop SWL'ing.

Anybody think they know the one I'm referring to? (I wish I still had
the tapes I made of it).

I think I recognize it, or something like it. There's some recorded sounds,
and links to other sites with recorded sounds, he

http://www.wunclub.com/



On a slightly different note, there was what appeared to be a PTP
relay for a paging service that was heard on oddball HF freqs between
14 and 18 MHz at different times of day, ca.late 60's, early 70's.
"Rochester Tel-Page, KEC519. We have no messages for our subscribers
at this time. KEC519." It had a sister station, KEC518, uttering the
same repetitive message. No records in the FCC archive, but KEC518
belonged to an Arlington, VA based paging (Type CD) service (canceled
in 1999).

I used to drive my parents nuts listening to these weird
utility/spy(?) stations for the rare message traffic between the
repetition..

Yeah, I'm kinda strange. g

73

Jack

--


14 to 18 MHz sounds low for a pager system. The old Aircall system was in
the low VHF band. Do you think your radio was tuning in low VHF with an
oscillator harmonic?

The old pager system was still in use at a hospital about a mile away from
me, back in the 70s. I guessed what it was from the selective tones and
messages. It was operating somewhere around 40 to 45 MHz. Sure sounded
primative!

Here's a link:

http://www.smecc.org/richard_florac_..._fm_radios.htm

Frank Dresser