Radio people, opinions on a strange phenomena

[hyphenate]

We've all heard of people getting radio stations in fillings in their teeth, but has anyone ever heard of getting "reception" coming in on the noise of a fan? I know, sounds crazy, and one I thought was just my vivid imagination, but I had the heating fan on, and I fell asleep, and this time, I "heard" call letters! When I turned off the fan, the music went away. I looked up the call letters, and bizarrely, they are those of a local radio station.

Is this something anyone has heard of? I can understand it in the summer when the windows would be open bringing in some sounds on the fan breeze, but mid-winter, with no windows open? Yeah, yeah, maybe I should be taking some medicine for it!


BTW, though, I just thought of something--maybe something like this could explain people starting to hum songs just out of the blue, thinking it's just an earworm, but could actually be receiving signals in some similar manner?

[Biker13]

1. Oh My God!

I'm so happy you posted this! When I lived in N.J. I had the same experience! I had my window fan on late at night, and picked up WABC, a "monster 50 megawatt station" in the area. I posted all over about it, and did a million Google searches, and found nothing! I thought I was going insane!

Thank you hyphenate!!!!

I'll be watching this thread!

Biker's Old Lady

edit: because I'm so excited, I can't spell!

[rcrush]

2. I'm intrigued.

Please tell me more.

[HopeHoops]

3. I've got a weird one - phone line upstairs picks up radio.

I can hear it faintly on my end. The person on the other end can't. It is some kind of talk radio program with a decidedly redneck flavor to it. It is always there in various volumes, but all faint. None of the other lines in the house suffer from this.

[MiddleFingerMom]

4. I believe you...

.
... and KNOW there is probably some sort of anomaly so rare that the
explanation has either never been sought or is so obscure that almost
no one has heard of it (even those in that field).
.
However... I can't pass up the opportunity to break in this DU smilie;
:tinfoilhat:
And this picture:
.

.
Poor kitty.
.

[Silver Swan]

5. I lived next door to Northwestern University for many years

We picked up the campus radio station on other electronic devices, such as tape players.

We were on the same electrical feed as the campus, so I blamed it on that. I know some college radio stations broadcast through electrical wiring, so that might have explained it.

[frogmarch]

6. I unplugged my clock radio

to pack it in a box during a move, and a second or two after I'd unplugged it from the wall, it said in a sorrowful man's voice, "I'm toast."

I was alone in the house at the time, and the clock radio was the last thing to be packed.

Weird. :-)

[hyphenate]

9. Send for the Ghost Hunters! eom

[hyphenate]

7. I checked with a friend who is into retro radio quite a bit

and has an engineering background. This seems to be more of a phenomenon than we think! His explanation thus:

Your heater's acting like a crystal radio set from the early days of radio. The wires from the elements are the antennas and they deliver radio signals to the electronics circuitry for detection and amplification. Usually this arrangement will "hear" any strong radio signal that happens to be in the neighborhood. If you live near an AM broadcast transmitter station you will hear that station. It can also be a signal that comes through as gibberish like a television signal (FM) or a CB single side band signal which often sounds like Donald Duck.

A possible solution coil up any of the unneeded cable including the power cable. If that doesn't work then wind the unused cable on a ferrite core available at Radio Shack. The concept is to make the "antenna" really short so it picks up less signal. It will pick up some signal but you want it to be as small as possible.

My sister lived a few blocks away from a radio station and the station was so far our of bandwidth you could pick them up over their television when it was turned off. They moved the set around the room until they got it out of 'reach' of the station.

Pretty cool, eh? We learn something new every day!!

[RagAss]

8. Mid 80's...There was this bar in Cincy.....downtown somewhere....part of of a hotel...

If you stood in the doorway and held a transistor radio in the air tuned to a certain AM frequency....you could pick up the Dodger games from local LA radio.......Vin Scully's voice in Cincinatti, Ohio...in a hallway!!! between the bar and the street....I have no idea how someone would discover this originally....but I was there when the bartender took us all out to the hallway one night and held up the small transistor radio...and heard it with my own ears....local LA commercials had me convinced it was the real thing as this was the mid-80's.