longgone Posted November 4, 2020 Report Share Posted November 4, 2020 Back in the 80s we had a world band radio National panasonic that had loads of funky bands on it, picked up police a lot, among other things. Did you ever scan for the numbers stations ? https://youtu.be/u0F984w4vLQ Quote Link to post Share on other sites
longgone Posted November 4, 2020 Author Report Share Posted November 4, 2020 Quote Link to post Share on other sites
sexton Posted November 5, 2020 Report Share Posted November 5, 2020 With an AR88 in the 50's Quote Link to post Share on other sites
Mikhail Liebenstein Posted November 5, 2020 Report Share Posted November 5, 2020 (edited) Back in the 80s we had a world band radio National panasonic that had loads of funky bands on it, picked up police a lot, among other things. Did you ever scan for the numbers stations ? https://youtu.be/u0F984w4vLQ Yep, I did, and remember the East German number stations. That said, I always wondered why they didn't use a scrambler - but I guess shortwave radio was a bit flakey. Edited November 5, 2020 by Mikhail Liebenstein Quote Link to post Share on other sites
longgone Posted November 5, 2020 Author Report Share Posted November 5, 2020 Yep, I did, and remember the East German number stations. That said, I always wondered why they didn't use a scrambler - but I guess shortwave radio was a bit flakey. i always thought they used some kind of proprietary morse code special stasi spetznas language we had this beauty loved the light button the top 🤣 Quote Link to post Share on other sites
smash Posted November 8, 2020 Report Share Posted November 8, 2020 Somewhere at my parents house is one of these (video below). I remember messing about with it as a kid after my old man brought it back from a business trip to Japan, really cool piece of hardware; nice design, tuning meter and the side rotary dial feels very mechanical. I should of messed about with it more but can remember picking up aviation transmissions and wierd sh1t on SW, all in all though a real design classic I think. The coolest thing I ever did with radio though was when I worked in maritime Nav. and Coms. High frequency modem coupled to an SSB transceiver with RS232 connection to a laptop for emails via the SSB. Awesome! Digital gets turned into analogue tones that then bounce off the ionosphere to a base station thousands of miles away and then re-encoded into digital and injected into the net from the base station. I sent emails from a yacht in Wales to a base station on east coast US and back to me, great fun. When I was in Chile I stayed at a farm that was operating one of these base stations and it was amazing seeing the transceiver constantly shifting frequencies and feeding text into the internet. One of these is what me old man brought back Japan. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5W4qNUcdzBc Quote Link to post Share on other sites
longgone Posted November 10, 2020 Author Report Share Posted November 10, 2020 Somewhere at my parents house is one of these (video below). I remember messing about with it as a kid after my old man brought it back from a business trip to Japan, really cool piece of hardware; nice design, tuning meter and the side rotary dial feels very mechanical. I should of messed about with it more but can remember picking up aviation transmissions and wierd sh1t on SW, all in all though a real design classic I think. The coolest thing I ever did with radio though was when I worked in maritime Nav. and Coms. High frequency modem coupled to an SSB transceiver with RS232 connection to a laptop for emails via the SSB. Awesome! Digital gets turned into analogue tones that then bounce off the ionosphere to a base station thousands of miles away and then re-encoded into digital and injected into the net from the base station. I sent emails from a yacht in Wales to a base station on east coast US and back to me, great fun. When I was in Chile I stayed at a farm that was operating one of these base stations and it was amazing seeing the transceiver constantly shifting frequencies and feeding text into the internet. One of these is what me old man brought back Japan. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5W4qNUcdzBc essentially its just a load of protocols, not dissimilar to how old routers used x25 to tcpip or token ring to ethernet. my car has DAB and if you set the station logo to show song titles its actually downloads album covers and the radio station DJimage via the radio station to a jpg image. pretty cool first time a saw it. but then everything is data after all. Quote Link to post Share on other sites
MonsieurCopperCrutch Posted November 16, 2020 Report Share Posted November 16, 2020 80’s child so yes I was listening in to the police broadcasts. Quote Link to post Share on other sites
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