Montecarlo Radio - Dutch mediumwave muziekzender pirate QSOs 1630-1650 kHz 2022 Feb 27 ~2330-0045 UTC (0030-0145 CET) Enschede, Overijssel Province, Netherlands - Бесплатная аудиокнига

Here's some more from the Dutch free radio scene. This is a long, impromptu recording of a group of several "zender amateur" (short for "muziekzender" ("music station")) pirates communicating free-form amongst themselves in the Twente, Overijssel Province area. Recorded from the University of Twente SDR. These sporadic, round-robin transmissions, as far as I can tell, was a QSO and banter session probably following a broadcast of the "Montecarlo Radio" pirate, with each station transmitting on 1630, 1640, 1645 and 1650 kHz AM. As each station would sign off, the next one would sign on and begin transmitting for a few minutes, as people would do in two-way radio, but in this case spread out across several different frequencies. The two strongest stations were on 1640 and 1645. The "Music Box Dancer" zender (1630) appeared to be quite far away from his low signal level.

About a week before I recorded the "Radio Utopia" aircheck in 2020 ([https://archive.org/details/RadioUtopiaEnschede20200929](https://archive.org/details/RadioUtopiaEnschede20200929)) I found another similar zender group following "Radio Interpol", operating in a similar fashion of these guys but with different music.

The audio breaks up at several points because the SDR server had become overloaded. This was a few days into the Russian-Ukranian war so there were literally thousands of people on the SDR monitoring Eastern European military and ham comms, apparently directed there via a writeup on Reddit and social media websites. At one point there were about 2200 us e r s  s i m u lt a n e o usly  o n  t h ere so i t  g o t  p r e t t y  c hoppy in spots. (See what I did there? _g_) Around 33m in the CPU load had hit over 200‰ and you can certainly hear it. The audio quality also varies from segment to segment because I was manually following the transmissions on the waterfall display, in real time, and adjusting the tuning and bandwidth to minimise static and adjacent-channel interference from other distant stations.

Tacked onto the end is a few minutes of "United AM", a semi-local licenced classic hits station on 1008 kHz broadcasting from Neede, Gelderland. Its station ID appears around 1h 30m into this block. I think this is one of the stations that started out as an offshore pirate station then became a legit broadcaster later on.

I finally stopped recording around 0110 UTC because the server appeared to be threatening to crash. When I checked back about 20 minutes later the Radio Montecarlo QSOs appeared to still be going on and probably did for quite a while. Checking back again around 0230, after this upload had finished, they appeared to be done.

I don't speak Dutch so if somebody wants to write up a translation/transcript please do, and post it in a reply. It appears they were talking extensively about "O Superman"? I dunno.

Unedited, this entire block should just fill up a side (or single mono track) of an 1800-foot reel at 3 3/4 IPS.

Notes

DOWNLOADING

Two versions of this file are provided. The PCM file ("WAVE" option) is the direct output of the SDR's code generator and is the master that the MP3 version was encoded from. The MP3 file was upsampled to 32000 Hz from the original 14238 Hz (wtf?!?) PCM version to make it encodable (using the -q0 --resample 32000 options in LAME 3.99.5 Linux.) For optimal local listening, or if you are going to republish it, please download use the PCM file instead. The MP3 version is intended for previewing in Archive's Web player and is unsuitable for actual archiving uses, due to the "harsh" colouration introduced by the resampling process. The FLAC file is Archive's own automatic derivative of the PCM file and is not supported by me.

LICENCE

Do whatever you want with it; I don't care. Republish/remix freely but do not sell or monetise. If you enjoyed it and learned something from it, great. If we meet someday and you think it's worth it, you can buy me dinner in return.