What have I got myself into?

[FTU Alumnus]

Wandered into the world of 22M beacons for the first time yesterday and am glad retirement allows me plenty of free time to kill. Wanted to post my initial loggings. Will have to work on documenting freqs. I'm in NC just south of Charlotte.

3/7 (yesterday)
1230 UTC PIE/B FL (picked a real brain twister for my first one until I remembered Morse did have punctuation - LOL)
1625 UTC RF
1650 UTC RVA
2203 UTC AMA

3/8 (today)
1245 UTC AMA
1253 UTC PIE/B FL
1452 UTC ODX
1637 UTC RF
1638 UTC RVA
1817 UTC WV

Then heard what I thought were Morse dashes in groups of 1,2,3,4 at a time. (e.g. - 4,4,1,1,2,1,1,3,2,4,4)

Later I spun the dial to what seemed like a promising freq and just listened. Swear I heard random dots and dashes (also beeps and boops) chirps, whistles, clucking chickens and mourning doves calling. (??)

So, just how weird does this get?

[Pigmeat]

Wait until the penguin migration gets into full swing in a couple of weeks.

[RVA]

Tnx for the report, that is an interesting report for us being so close.  It's a fun band to kill time and experiment. 

[Rob.]

Later I spun the dial to what seemed like a promising freq and just listened. Swear I heard random dots and dashes (also beeps and boops) chirps, whistles, clucking chickens and mourning doves calling. (??)

So, just how weird does this get?

Yes, it gets that weird. I often hear the mourning doves and chickens clucking among other seemingly random sounds. If you keep checking you will continue to hear a myriad of odd things besides the Morse beacons. It is a fun place for mystery signals.   

[Ed H]

Welcome to 22m. For such a tiny sliver of HF spectrum, it is rather an interesting place. With the improved propagation over the last couple of years, there's been a lot of activity. Some is sort of formalised, then as you have noted, there are other signals that defy explanation.

Ed (HiFER beacon PVC, 13,555.5xx kHz)