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Wednesday, April 11th, 2012
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AM Esoterica

What you're looking at is a 100 Hz "slice" of the US AM radio band, centered on what is called a "graveyard frequency", 1340 kHz. The ominous name comes from the FCCs habit of assigning multitudes of low-power broadcast stations to the same channel in the optimistic (but completely incorrect) hope that they wouldn't interfere with each other. At night, these channels sound like many ghosts, all trying — and failing — to get your attention for more than a moment.

Each vertical line in the above graph is an AM station's carrier, received here in Montana in the early AM hours of April 11th, 2012.

These carriers are clustered within about +/- ten Hz (cycles) of where they are supposed to be. You can take the distance from the assigned frequency as a rather direct indication of just how poorly the station is maintaining its equipment.

Particularly notable is the station at the middle right, right by the 1340.01 legend, which shows marked instability, wandering around visibly in the short time (about 45 minutes) it took to generate the multi-million point spectrogram resolution required to discriminate the incoming RF signals this distinctly.

There are even a couple of stations almost 50 Hz off-frequency out at the edges... pretty sloppy stuff.

I used the beta version of SdrDx, my free software-defined radio application for OSX, to receive and analyze this information. Nerd heaven, lol.

#amradio #sdrdx

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