Every now and then I want to remap the presets I have for the JVC car hd radio I have...anyway I was going towards the left end of the dial towards more of the college stuff. Since the search function often skips over weaker channels I decided to take some time....

I found something odd. I found a station that was in all Arabic (88.5FM) now at first I thought maybe it was someone listening to some mp3's say of a ipod...but I can get it at home as well (15 mile difference from work) I cannot pick this station up in my degen 1103 or my Grundig S350 (If anything this shows the JVC is pretty sharp in picking up signal) I listened here and there and could neither hear a station ID or a commerical.

I assumed this was low power but searching some of the FCC's lists I can't come up with anything.

To note I've checked WRTH and there is a channel on that frequency but it's far west and is NPR! Also there is a AM station that plays more ethnic things but that content is on Sunday afternoons and probably only for a half hour.

I'm stumped on this one...any ideas how to find it? :confused:

First thing is to see where the signal gets loudest using a portable or the car radio, the closer you are, the louder it will be. If you have a rotatable directional antenna at home, you can try peaking it and find what direction it is from. You can triangulate if another friend has a directional antenna.

The ARRL (Amateur Radio Relay League) handbook has a good section on direction finding and shows various methods.

It might also be that your radio has poor IF rejection. My old FM tuner from the 50s used to pick up short wave broadcasts directly from the antenna through the RF/Mixer stage to the IF amplifier. The ratio detector it had was poor for AM rejection, so I used to get short wave broadcasts around 10.7 MHz at different times of the year depending upon atmospherics. I finally fixed it by putting an inductor across the 300 Ohm line and grounding the center tap to the chassis to shunt the common mode signal coming in on the twin lead to ground.

Bob Smith

It's probably a bootleg station in someones basement. In the 1970's lots of kids built stations, but back then the FCC had enough manpower to hunt them down. To find an FM station, a directional antenna is the way to go. (using a tuner with a signal strength meter)

Bet you'd get a response if you reported it to Homeland Security!

Ya' know Bob, that's an excellent idea. ("EXCELLLLLLENT" to quote Montgomery Burns!) Sounds like it's almost certainly a pirate. And if it's in Arabic, reporting it to Homeland Security might be fun. Hell...an Arabic pirate MIGHT be subversive in some way. Who knows? (Someone who speaks Arabic, perhaps) :)

Lots of these pirates out there. Most are harmless, but it's fun to track them down anyway.

Did you just hear a continuous "prayer".....like a musical chant? If so, it's probably someone relaying programming from Mecca. It's that time of year when most Muslims celebrate their faith, and many make a pilgrimmage.

Ya' know Bob, that's an excellent idea. ("EXCELLLLLLENT" to quote Montgomery Burns!) Sounds like it's almost certainly a pirate. And if it's in Arabic, reporting it to Homeland Security might be fun. Hell...an Arabic pirate MIGHT be subversive in some way. Who knows? (Someone who speaks Arabic, perhaps) :)


I doubt it would be picking up shortwave even by accident as this sounds quite a bit different than arabic that I'm used to on shortwave. Just to note however around 1740am (on a different radio) more than a few times I received radio netherlands some something broadcasting dr. gene scott (university network?) so this isn't totally new to me....

Basically what it's playing is all pop music...I don't know the language but I can tell it isn't advocating thing. I heard it again today and listened for awhile...again no station id, no english, no commericals etc. The only type of psuedo arabic pop I know of would be radio jordan but that actually plays some top 40 ! So I know this wasn't it.

Oddly enough I think I might have found another station this time on the other end of the spectrum. 107.9fm is a HD station (hiphop rap etc) if the hd doesn't kick on at work I got something else totally different. It's too bad I can't exactly turn the hd off manually but it was interesting none the less.

So I think we have some pirates....I think it's got to be at least 1,200 watts or more....just based on the distance to and from work...I just wish they'd say something...the ones on the shortwave at least sometimes give a email address or po box (Paul starr show comes to mind)

This station sounds just like my favorite low power college station before they started making the students follow a few basic FCC regulations like announcing who they are once an hour. They couldn't do that for a month or two because their only microphone was broken. Some of their DJ's will play strange stuff like Arabic pop music which sounds creepy and dissonant with cheap synthesizers and drum machines and what sounds like chanting vocals. In fact they had an hour show of this stuff called "Muslim Gauze" which I guess was named after a Brit who did a lot of music like this. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muslimgauze)

But even this station is licensed and was easy enough to identify at fcc.gov.

Uh oh - maybe there's subliminal anti-American messages in the pop songs.