NOAA WX RADIO off frequency

[Radar412]

anybody in the Baltimore-Washington area want to try to confirm a catch I've made this afternoon, the Noaa transmitter in Baltimore kec 83 sounds like it's transmitting off frequency, confirmed it by listening to multiple receivers. It appears like it's transmitting on 162 .375.

 

[Radar412]

disregard, they fixed it as of a couple minutes ago

 

[a417]

Well, that's a nice catch! It's also nice to see that it was fixed quickly (or may have been byproduct of them working on it)

 

[Radar412]

no, I called them by phone to let them know since I'm a Skywarn Observer also. It didn't sound like it was something they were expecting. I kept monitoring it while it was on the wrong frequency and also learned that they seem to control the on-off function with a two-tone sequence & then can shift the frequency and bring it back up by the same process.

 

[a417]

gotta love remote control.

 

[techman210]

Reason #675 why you shouldn't use NOAA transmitters as a frequency reference for your RTL-SDR receiver.

 

[a417]

not as your SOLE reference, but I usually use the local one to me after i do a calibration (via kalibrate-rtl) just to make sure it's accurate. I see there are a number of videos on the youtubes of people who prefer tuning an RTL-SDR against any old VHF frequency by just "clicking on the offset ppm until it sounds better", so the people who are willing to do that are the same who will probably use a NOAA Tx site as a reference. Hey, it's always on (so the transmitter is always at temp), it tells you the frequency it SHOULD be on, and they're all over the country...that's good enough for the girls that some people go out with.

Each of the 6 that I can hear from my house are quite close to their home frequency, close enough for the youtubers method for accuracy. The 3 or 4 that I used in other states during moves were also rather close, but I would NEVER just tune against one of them as my only means of accuracy.