"Operator please..." Telephone service on shortwave

I've been listening to this one for a while now - thought I'd take a recording to see what people think.

In this example you can distinctly hear a busy tone, like you'd hear over a landline phone.

The transmission was in upper side band mode, and the SSB dial was dead center - no fiddly tuning required.

Category:

Science & Technology

Tags:

• shortwave
• radio
• telephone
• service
• 13149kHz
• 13.149MHz
• upper
• side
• band
• communications
• interception
• spy
• spooks
• sea
• phone
• high
• frequency
• dxing
• ham

[MrVinegarstroke]

is that a Sangean ATS 505 radio??

[MattExzy]

@MrVinegarstroke Yup, surely is lol

[dotshell6]

Can you make any concrete recordings of these? Your camera's mic is really killing the listenability. I speak Chinese, but I can barely decipher this because half the words are inaudible.

[MattExzy]

I think I made this one with the camera on my phone! I've gotten a new cam since then, I'll see if I can get it again some time :)

[dotshell6]

You can't really use a camera to record audio, though. You should really set up a line-in feed to the sound card on your computer to get a good recording.

[MattExzy]

Actually, the reason I use an camera is because plugging a shortwave radio into a computer introduces way too much interference. I record them now by attaching a headphone bud over the mic on the camera, it turns a lot better than these older recordings.

[lostbuffer]

They are discussing money. It is mandarin chinese.

[shortwavesam]

i heard this last night on the central coast

[UpcomingJedi]

Are they haggling over the price of rice in China?

[KB4QAA]

You need to add a 1:1 isolation transformer to the line between your computer and the radio. Radio shack has them for about $4, about the size of a sugar cube. It breaks ground loops and keeps computer hash out of the radio. Line in from the computer connects to one side of transformer, and speaker/line out from radio connects to other side of transformer.

[G0IFI]

Ship/shore radio. Back in the 70s and 80s, there was unencrypted voice telephony from oil rigs to the folks back home which could be heard each evening. An inshore operator patches the signal from the ship or oil platform to the phone lines. I bet that used to cost, anyway, probably HF radio phone patching is still used in China. It works, so why not?

[Rcrby525]

@davidrodgersNJ they moved to satcoms which is a sattelite dish more or-less hooked to a deskphone

basicly, the defense and military are clients of Irridium Inc.

[Yoshimitsu483]

Lol this sounds funny

[superarticulation]

I don't know why 13149 is so popular... Actually 13107 17398 22735(more expensive) are more clear than 13149.

[N0rthwestRadio]

You get interference by connecting an audio cable between the receiver and computer? That should not happen. What is your antenna and grounding system?