Shortwave nostalgia (original) (raw)

Delayed crosspost from my personal journal.

I picked up an Icom R-20 handheld wide coverage receiver a couple months ago, and have been re-living some of my childhood playing around with that (and with software-defined radio, another post).

While trying to figure out digital modes I'm hearing on the receiver, I came across this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WbhCeWtX9sg

Much to my amazement, I heard several of these when I was a kid on ham radio -- especially things like the piano scales and gongs which are pretty unforgettable. There were a couple others that had children's voices speaking numbers which didn't appear on that recording. At the time I just wrote it off as someone playing with the radio, but... interesting.

It's kind of strange to think that I accidentally witnessed a portion of history in an era that will never really return, now that we have all the Internet stuff and satellites and all... kind of like finding wild feeds on analog satellites... these days it's just too easy to scramble.

Anyway, figured it'd be neat to see if anyone here remembers anything like those... plus I so rarely hear any activity here any more!