A few readers some time back mentioned that they had been hearing voices. Not some kind of disembodied far away stuff, either. These were ‘just like were standing there’ voices. This morning, a follow-on piece to noodle:
“Hello George,
I’ve been reading your site for a while now and I remember seeing a few entries about people hearing voices. My husband and I didn’t think too much about the voices as we live in a house that, let’s just say has a lot of otherworld activity so hearing voices is nothing new to us. For the past two weeks I have been hearing something in our house that I hadn’t mentioned to my husband before until 4 days ago when I realized what the sound was.
I have a separate computer on my desk that I use to connect to work and every so many minutes the speakers will start squawking and that squawk sounds like Morse code. I really need to redo this machine and replace the speakers but I just haven’t gotten around to it yet. I’m sure that most everyone in the world knows what Morse code is and some may even have played around with it in the past. I know as a child of about 8 or 9 years old, my uncle gave me a book and a device to learn Morse code but that was the only time in my life that I had ever used or even gave a second thought to this very old technology.
Bear with me as I am setting the scene for what happened next. While we were sitting on the sofa, the familiar tones started resounding. I looked over at my husband and asked him if he heard the noise and his reply was yes. We both think that this unusual sound is from a bird. To rule out any other interference we made sure and closed the door to our computer room which sits way off of the living room. The sound the speakers make can only be heard if you are in the computer room. Ok, I’m not going crazy. Now at least what I heard was experienced by someone other than myself.
We are currently living in Madison, Alabama and have been here for almost 4 years now. We have lived in the same house since we got here so no change in local. We have a lot of animal and bird activity around our neighborhood but have never heard this strange sound before. This sound just started happening about 2 weeks ago. I have searched the internet for birds of this area that have calls that sound like Morse code but have come up empty handed. I did run across a frog that is from Alabama that makes sounds like Morse code but when it displayed the map of where the frogs are located, you got it, it’s not the area I am living in.
Now for the Woo Woo portion of the email. Being of Native American decent, animals and plant life have always held a special place in how I live my life day to day. I believe that if an animal shows up, that it also has special meaning about what is currently going on in your life or for what is to come. Each animal and insect have a meaning and if one shows up it could be that they are trying to tell you something. My husband suggested that I try and decipher the code and see if it says anything. My Morse code skills are surely lacking since it’s been years since I messed with Morse code. This weekend we are going to get a recording device and I will see what I can come up with. How weird would it be though if I decoded the sounds and it really contain a message. I find it quite odd that in the 4 years we have been here that this is the first time we have ever heard this sound before. I will have to let you know if I come up with anything other than gibberish if I can recall the Morse code.
If you have a cassette recorder and can send along a tape, I’d be glad to interpret it – since I’m a member of FISTS – the International Morse Code Preservation Society. Honestly, I expect that when you send the tape (or copy it yourself and play back what’s being sent), you’ll find that it’s a local longwave radio navigation system being picked up by your computer’s audio system or a ham radio operator working CW (continuous wave/Morse) nearby. A lot of ham radio types have had to become very stealthy in their antenna building due to community restrictions in some parts of the country so you wouldn’t necessarily notice a nearby ham.
However, hams don’t use modulated carriers to do CW – so if a ham was at fault you probably would NOT hear tones.
Since you are hearing tones, I dragged out the best woo-woo tools I own and put them to work on your problem: Microsoft Streets & Trips and www.airnav.com.
Knowing that both VOR and longwave radio beacons still use modulated CW, I clicked around Madison Alabama for about 1-second before discovering that you are probably within 4 miles of the Huntsville/Madison County International Airport.
Putting in Huntsville International we find one each Carl T. Jones Field (KHSV) 4.1 miles south of Madison so we look for nearby radio navigation aids. Our suspects are the VOR stations (lower probability due to higher frequency – and that’s a longer discussion of why best held for another day):
| VOR radial/distance | VOR name | Freq | Var | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| DCUr096/8.1 | DECATUR VOR/DME | 112.80 | 01W | |||
| RQZr214/11.9 | ROCKET VORTAC | 112.20 | 02E | |||
| MSLr096/35.6 | MUSCLE SHOALS VORTAC | 116.50 | 01E |
And my primary suspects would be the NDB (nondirectional beacons/longwave) at:
| NDB name | Hdg/Dist | Freq | Var | ID/ MORSE | |||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| REDSTONE | 229/5.7 | 287 | 00W | HUA | …. ..- .- | ||||
| CAPSHAW | 180/8.2 | 350 | 01W | CWH | -.-. .– …. | ||||
| COLE SPRING | 009/16.3 | 230 | 01W | CPP | -.-. .–. .–. | ||||
| KELSO | 202/31.9 | 358 | 01W | TNY | - -. -.– | ||||
| SARATOGA | 312/35.7 | 296 | 02W | ARF | .- .-. ..-. | ||||
So the first question is: Does there seem to be a repeating pattern? If the code is there most of the time and is repeating, then odds would favor the navigation beacon. If it is once per hour, or a few times an hour, then you may have a VHF or UHF repeater located on a nearby water tower (or other high place owned by local government or a ham club) that you’re picking up. I expect there would be few – if any – really high towers in Madison, since the city is 5-miles north of what looks like runways 36 (left traffic) at Huntsville Regional. Get a fair bit of jet noise out there?
That’s the most likely explanation. If it was clicking instead of Morse-sounding, then things would be interesting because clicking (the old Continental code) and such was a part of the bygone days when tones were not ‘copied” – it was the difference in clicks of a DC powered annunciator. Then we could have had time tunnels/time warps – magical vortex to another time – you know – the fun stuff.
Sorry, but my money’s on a new repeater going up nearby for government or ham use, or you’re near the Redstone beacon 5.7 miles west of the airport or up by Cole Spring NDB which would be just east 9º of due north 16.3 miles north of the airport, which would put your home 11-12 miles north of Madison?
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See how much fun this is? Ham radio has a whole subgroup within the ham radio culture that does hidden transmitter hunts. Back in the old days we called these ‘bunny hunts’.
Best-ever ‘bunny hunting” story? Back in the mid 1960′s up in the Seattle area we were having a ‘bunny hunt” one rainy Friday night and hams from all over the Seattle area were participating. Maybe 20 in all. The “bunny” station decided to pull one of the meanest, nastiest tricks ever. The ‘bunny’ hid next to the railroad tracks in Edmonds, Washington and used the rails as a ground!
Since radio waves tend to follow nearly perfect grounds (and the tracks next to the water along Puget Sound are nearly perfect), every time someone got near the tracks they would think “Aha! I’ve got you know you wraskly wabbit!”
In fact, along about midnight we finally had to tell the people who were walking up the tracks 15-miles south of the bunny that they were a little off in their calculations. Such being the joys of hiding a transmitter down on the low frequency bands. 2-meter & VHF bunny hunts? b-o-r-i-n-g….
Say, did this morning’s report just turn into a book on ham radio? Ooops….
The Real Deal on Web Hosting
Once a year I’m please to pass on this from my hosting provider EMWD:
“Dear EMWD Client:
Nov 15th will be my 42nd birthday. Now that I am over the hill, I realize life after 40 is not so bad. To celebrate my new outlook on life, I am offering a very generous 40% discount on all new domain and new web hosting packages. This discount is for the life of the package. This is an incredible deal and should be taken full advantage of.
The sale will be on Thursday, Nov 12th, and Friday, Nov 13th. Please mark your calendar.
We would like to request that you use all available means to promote our sale such as posting it on your web site, blog, etc. As an incentive, we will be giving a free month of web hosting for every 3 of your referrals that sign up during this sale. That means if you refer 9 new customers to us during our sale, you will receive 3 free months of web hosting. Please be sure to pass on to them the following coupon codes:
B-DAY01 – to receive 40% off a new domain name
B-DAY02 – to receive 40% off any of our hosting packages except our mailman service.
Please keep in mind that the above coupon codes will only be valid on Nov 12th and 13th. The discount is also good for domain name transfers.
I have appreciated all of your business and friendships through the years, and I look forward to serving you in the years to come.
Kind regards,
Brian Carpenter, Owner
EMWD.com”
Remember this is on Thursday and Friday only, but start looking at hosting plans and such now – Click here to check prices & sign up.
So far this year, UrbanSurvival has served up almost 15-million pages with almost no glitches – a few are going to happen no matter what – that’s just how the law of large numbers work. In October Urban passed 337 GB of bandwidth to just under a million visitors.
What I’m not sure of is whether those numbers should give me faith that America has that many reasonable, intelligent, and light hearted people who haven’t been dumbed down completely yet, or whether it’s evidence that we’re in a whole heap-o-trouble. Still pondering that one.
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Send your comments to george@ure.net
The UrbanSurvival Mall:
Peoplenomics This Week
The Single Person’s Marketing Plan
Common economic wisdom is that a home is the most important investment most folks make, but I respectfully disagree. I’d suggest it’s the partner you choose to put in the home that is really the biggest investment you make in Life since you can lose money faster than any market in history through the mechanism of divorce. Half to 65% net worth – or more- can disappear in an instant. And you thought stocks in the ‘pink sheets’ were risky? See this divorce rate chart. A number of subscribers who are single have asked for advice, so I thought it might be useful to apply some basic marketing principles to finding a significant other. This may seem a little irreverent here – and to be sure the line between sociopath and social butterfly is a thin one – but it won’t be the first time one of these in-depth reports has stepped over a line or two. Such is the danger of inquiry.
More For Subscribers Subscription Information
“Live on $10,000″ A Year
With another round of layoffs due to start later this month…a round which will start to axe many of the middle managers who have managed to avoid the HR grenades…might I suggest a preemptive tactical move? Voluntarily dropping your lifestyle back a bit, since we’re all being marched down that road by either circumstances or some out-of-control-PTB types who write checks to Washington lobby and to anti-reformers in California! A good starting point, at least if you’ve still got $10-bucks is my e-book “How to Live on #10,000 a Year…or less!”
It’s an automatic download. It’s written in an information dense style: The whole thing runs about 65 pages, but it gives you a vision of how to not only live on the cheap, but also how to migrate up the economic foodchain if you have a little hustle left… Click here for the index and details.
MyGroPonics
My commodity broker JB Slear and I have written a simple book to get you started on high density hydroponics. It’s an example of how someone with a little creativity, access to a few ‘dollar stores’ and willing to try out some new farming techniques can grow an amazing amount of produce sin a very small space – like even an apartment balcony (if it gets some sunlight). Sound interesting? It’s just $10 bucks here…
No, when you tell your browser to ‘empty your cookies’ of web sites you’ve visited, it probably won’t get them all. Why? Because there is a whole class of ‘browser-independent’ cookies that will gobble up space on your hard drive, but more important is they will sneak out information about you without you being aware of it. Ever week I get emails like this one:
“Thanks again for the Maxa Tools recommendation, I never knew how much additional garbage gets attached every time I browse. “
Test drive it free by downloading it. To upgrade to full functionality will be $35 bucks. Is your privacy worth it?
Once you try it out, click the upgrade button (!) on the upper right hand side for the $35 unlock to get it to remove even those nasty and highly intrusive ‘non-browser specific’ cookies. Bonus: You computer may run faster. I’ve taken 1,000 37,970 41,837 cookies off my machine now. It’s just amazing. (I might ask their CTO to add one more digit to the “Total deleted till now” window…)
Attn: Mac Drivers: MCM does support the Safari Browser, but that does not mean it is compatible with Mac OS. Maxa-Tools only support the Windows world….so far. Given Jens and the other engineers time…
Pass It On
The business model of this website is base Simply click here and send a link to this site to everyone on your distro list…Nothing more dangerous than sharp, clear-thinking upstarts who ask a lot of questions, eh? Unless you believe WTC-7 fell over on its own, of course….
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Last week’s report is here. For back issues of this site, click here. (Goes back to 1997!)