Field Recording - Intercepting transmissions from radio/tv antenna

[Polytrix]

So I've recently been recording from the top of a castle ruins in a rural setting. It's at a quite high elevation and is in direct line of sight/hearing of what I assume to be a TV/Radio antenna station. I almost feel as though if I stand in certain places I'm actually the same height as the top of the antenna. 

 

I might be totally wrong here and imagining things but the other day I was sure I was picking up signals emitted from the station. By moving my mic by tiny amounts in different directions relative to the antenna I was sure I was picking up audio signals including voices and what sounded like tv/radio. Is this possible? It was very strange but also exciting.

 

Either way, it was very cool as I was kind of phasing in and out of multiple audio signals and they were all merging into this cool glitched out drone thing.

[YEK]

a friend of mine had a radio scanner back in the day and you could here phone conversations. really neat, but i thought it was morally wrong even though i didn't know the people, so i didn't continue doing it.

[Polytrix]

Hmmm not totally sure that's what I was experiencing. ..really cool whatever happened.

 

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[TubularCorporation]

There are a lot of people in the HAM community (an old friend of mine is a licensed operator and turned me on to this) who run sites that let you tune their recievers remotely through a web interface and record the results as a downloadable CD audio WAV, which can be a pretty cool source of samples.

 

I used to have some especially active ones bookmarked but I seem to have deleted the,.  Here's a random one I just found on Google:

http://www.livehams.com/

 

It doesn't have the "record and download" feature some do, but you could always record it with an audio loopback driver or from your interface's output or whatever.

 

 

Around 2010 I lived down the street from falafel delivery place and if I listened to records between 3 and 5 PM their CB chatter would get picked up by something in my system (unshielded Grado cartridge, probably) and come out of the speakers with the music, so I have no doubt you're picking up stuff from that antenna with a dynamic mic, which is basically a big phono cartridge, electronically speaking.

[Rubin Farr]

Police scanners can be entertaining as well. My grandfather used to sit and smoke his pipe listening to his scanner for hours.

[Polytrix]

OK so it is possible that my Zoom condenser mics are picking stuff up. I'll go up there again later to see what I get.

[xox]

a friend of mine had a radio scanner back in the day and you could here phone conversations. really neat, but i thought it was morally wrong even though i didn't know the people, so i didn't continue doing it.

 

heh i've felt the same way... i remember that i've only listened to those that i couldn't fully understand what they're talking about; kind of a compromise. 

[joshuatxuk]

I might be totally wrong here and imagining things but the other day I was sure I was picking up signals emitted from the station. By moving my mic by tiny amounts in different directions relative to the antenna I was sure I was picking up audio signals including voices and what sounded like tv/radio. Is this possible? It was very strange but also exciting.

 

 

You might message Deion Sanders, he does field recordings a lot and perhaps could fill you in on if that's possible. I remember recently had a scanner / ham radio (I don't know much about these things) and mentioned he heard muffled voices on some frequencies. He's up in the Seattle area and there's a lot of Naval and other military bases in the area so it could of been from those.

[Polytrix]

Very cool. Yeah, I mean if you can live EQ monitor condenser mic input then you can amplify certain frequencies right? Perhaps that was I was doing.

[Rubin Farr]

I have a ghost box being brought back from the US, can those pick up errant radio waves as well? I live up on a high floor with very clear weather, so just wondering.

[Polytrix]

What's a ghost box???!

 

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[Rubin Farr]

What's a ghost box???!

 

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It's a radio receiver with an AM/FM band sweep function to try to "contact the dead" ooooooh spoooky.  so yeah, I answered my own question.

 

[joshuatxuk]

So it's a paranormal oriented shortwave radio?

 

This shit looks like a lot of fun. I can see why old retirees still mess with ham radios, can easily see myself spending my spare time in the future messing around with this stuff.