UNID 6950 AM 0834 UTC 20 Apr 2017

[RST111]

SINPO 45323

08:57 UTC now, and has been playing music since I tuned in.  I don't recognize any of the songs; they're in (I think) Spanish; some of them have a Latin dance beat.  Haven't heard an ID or anything except music so far.

Hmm, I'm not even sure it's a pirate, but I don't know of any scheduled broadcasts in this band at this time, and there's been no ID.  If I hear one, I'll update the post.

Edit:  09:34 UTC  faded out; still didn't get an ID

Took a quick video https://youtu.be/YphXCqkHnC0

[ChrisSmolinski]

This was with your RTL dongle and converter? Did you also hear this on your IC-R75?

I had a very weak station on 6950 AM earlier: https://www.hfunderground.com/board/index.php/topic,34301.0.html

Reception was quite weak, although it did not sound like the Latin dance music you reported.

Looking at your video, you had a very strong signal with an RTL dongle/converter, which leads me to suspect this was either a lost SWBC station transmitting accidentally on 6950, or some sort of image/mixing product.

Whether it was the same station I heard earlier is difficult to say.

[Pigmeat]

It could be that, Chris, or it could be someone up and bored. When I was active and couldn't sleep I'd throw on all sorts of stuff, from old shows to university lectures and garage sale answering machine tapes on in the middle of the night to see where it went and make people go "WTH?". If one guy has done it, I'm sure others have, too.

Where was SDR when it was needed to record those classic bits of radio history?

[ChrisSmolinski]

Oh certainly, we missed a lot of "bumps in the night" back in the pre-SDR days. I'm sure a lot of ops wondered if anyone ever heard their transmissions, when there weren't any logs.

[RST111]

This was with your RTL dongle and converter? Did you also hear this on your IC-R75?

Yeah, with the dongle.  I didn't think to try on the R75 - I'll do that next time

Looking at your video, you had a very strong signal with an RTL dongle/converter, which leads me to suspect this was either a lost SWBC station transmitting accidentally on 6950, or some sort of image/mixing product.

I'm not sure, either.  I had my pre-selector on and a choke which I've found removes most of the images the dongle creates.  The only thing that leads me to think it wasn't an image was there was no station ID or break of any kind for the whole hour, and a SWBC probably wouldn't go that long with non-stop music (but obviously it's not impossible).  Also, it couldn't be a MW image because we'd hear commercials every 10 minutes, lol.

Maybe my neighbor had music going over their baby monitor and it overloaded the front end.