Field Recording - Intercepting transmissions from radio/tv antenna

So I've recently been recording from the top of a castle ruins in a rural setting. It's at a quite high elevation and is in direct line of sight/hearing of what I assume to be a TV/Radio antenna station. I almost feel as though if I stand in certain places I'm actually the same height as the top of the antenna. 

I might be totally wrong here and imagining things but the other day I was sure I was picking up signals emitted from the station. By moving my mic by tiny amounts in different directions relative to the antenna I was sure I was picking up audio signals including voices and what sounded like tv/radio. Is this possible? It was very strange but also exciting.

Either way, it was very cool as I was kind of phasing in and out of multiple audio signals and they were all merging into this cool glitched out drone thing.

a friend of mine had a radio scanner back in the day and you could here phone conversations. really neat, but i thought it was morally wrong even though i didn't know the people, so i didn't continue doing it.

Hmmm not totally sure that's what I was experiencing. ..really cool whatever happened.

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There are a lot of people in the HAM community (an old friend of mine is a licensed operator and turned me on to this) who run sites that let you tune their recievers remotely through a web interface and record the results as a downloadable CD audio WAV, which can be a pretty cool source of samples.

I used to have some especially active ones bookmarked but I seem to have deleted the,.  Here's a random one I just found on Google:

http://www.livehams.com/

It doesn't have the "record and download" feature some do, but you could always record it with an audio loopback driver or from your interface's output or whatever.

Around 2010 I lived down the street from falafel delivery place and if I listened to records between 3 and 5 PM their CB chatter would get picked up by something in my system (unshielded Grado cartridge, probably) and come out of the speakers with the music, so I have no doubt you're picking up stuff from that antenna with a dynamic mic, which is basically a big phono cartridge, electronically speaking.

Police scanners can be entertaining as well. My grandfather used to sit and smoke his pipe listening to his scanner for hours.

OK so it is possible that my Zoom condenser mics are picking stuff up. I'll go up there again later to see what I get.

  On 8/29/2016 at 11:20 PM, yek said:

a friend of mine had a radio scanner back in the day and you could here phone conversations. really neat, but i thought it was morally wrong even though i didn't know the people, so i didn't continue doing it.

heh i've felt the same way... i remember that i've only listened to those that i couldn't fully understand what they're talking about; kind of a compromise. 

  On 8/29/2016 at 9:19 PM, Polytrix said:

I might be totally wrong here and imagining things but the other day I was sure I was picking up signals emitted from the station. By moving my mic by tiny amounts in different directions relative to the antenna I was sure I was picking up audio signals including voices and what sounded like tv/radio. Is this possible? It was very strange but also exciting.

 

You might message Deion Sanders, he does field recordings a lot and perhaps could fill you in on if that's possible. I remember recently had a scanner / ham radio (I don't know much about these things) and mentioned he heard muffled voices on some frequencies. He's up in the Seattle area and there's a lot of Naval and other military bases in the area so it could of been from those.

Very cool. Yeah, I mean if you can live EQ monitor condenser mic input then you can amplify certain frequencies right? Perhaps that was I was doing.

I have a ghost box being brought back from the US, can those pick up errant radio waves as well? I live up on a high floor with very clear weather, so just wondering.

What's a ghost box???!

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  On 9/1/2016 at 10:29 PM, Polytrix said:

What's a ghost box???!

 

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It's a radio receiver with an AM/FM band sweep function to try to "contact the dead" ooooooh spoooky.  so yeah, I answered my own question.

So it's a paranormal oriented shortwave radio?

This shit looks like a lot of fun. I can see why old retirees still mess with ham radios, can easily see myself spending my spare time in the future messing around with this stuff.