Image?

[Spleen]

Fired up the Winradio.....I'm just scanning along, minding my own business, have it minimized...a signal pops up, I bring the display to the foreground, it reads 878.375 MHz. I'm thinking, okay, I'm now listening to the last guy in Baltimore City talking on a analog cell phone...but no, it's the feed for one of the DC TV network affiliates (this is all taking place during the 11:00 news time, and everyone is covering the execution)...okay, that's strange, considering the antenna I had hooked up to it at the time is damned near deaf at 800 MHz...then the "buzz-click", then about ten seconds of an actual phone call, then static...before the timer ran out, in pops the feed of yet another DC station; I think the first one was Channel 4, the other 7 or 9. The feed kept going until they shut it off, right before the sports, as usual. Then sure enough, before the timer ran out, I get the ring of an analog cell phone...

So...any explanation(s)? At first I was thinking images, but it seemed like those newsfeeds were pretty well integrated with the analog cell system; no difference in signal strength and they went in and out with the usual "buzz-click" signifying a channel change...I'm completely stumped on this one...

 

[TinEar]

Not too unusual. You could very well have been listening to an analog telephone signal. The actual freq was probably 878.370 (spacing in this range is 30 kHz and 878.370 would be an actual cell freq according to various charts on the internet.) You were probably hearing the called party who was rebroadcasting audio from various TV signals from D.C. Although there is still plenty of analog cell phone use, albeit a small fraction of the total, even stumbling upon cell phone calls in this freq range is against the law so I wouldn't be too public with your capabilities. I'm sure you weren't aware of that so just thought I'd mention it.

 

[Spleen]

If it happens again I'll have to be sure and verify whether it's the broadcasted audio or the director's feed that you usually find in the 450 MHz range...my next question would have been about the spacing...I prolly had mine set on 2.5 KHz or maybe 5 KHz, scanning down from 1 GHz, trying to figure out why my discone is deaf between there and 800Mhz...