25 replies to this topic

[pinupgirl]

Sakari...So it could have been interferance than

[scowl]

As Sakari said radio stations do air "old time radio" shows. One nearly defunct station here has to turn their transmitter on for a week or two at the end of every year to keep their FCC license. During this time they air classic radio shows pulled from archive.org (things that are now in the public domain). This is a common practice when stations aren't making enough money to stay on the air but don't want to lose their valuable license.

Some of these shows were originally broadcast on the Yankee Network and the announcer will say that's what you're listening to during every commercial break, often mentioning the "crystal clear high fidelity sound" (they were the first FM network).

[Sakari]

pinupgirl, on 28 June 2012 - 05:33 PM, said:

Sakari...So it could have been interferance than

Just picked up a radio signal is all.....

Electronics and Reliable do not belong in the same sentence......

[Timonthy]

Or it could have been in your head...

[WhyDontYouBeliEveMe]

most of the phone i know.. that exist 2 day...  you really need to turn on the radio to actually listen to it... most nokia. phones. you need to plug in your headphones to let the radio work.....  so my first qeustion is, what brand ,kind of phone do you use?
it could be a bug in your phone.. ( most touch screen phones. are full with bugs.. ) that could turn on the radio itself..  but if it is a nokia phone than that is impossible..
so i hope you  have a nokia....  .. messages from the afterlife mwuahaahha

[WhyDontYouBeliEveMe]

o wait.. you got a blackberry phone sorry .. i missed that part ahahahah ....   yeah it must be a bug

[AngelsShadow]

Alienated Being, on 27 June 2012 - 10:21 PM, said:

It could have been a random, stray radio signal that has been floating around since the 1960s. Very strange, but I do believe that a very mundane, practical and logical explanation exists, even if my postulation is incorrect.

It's very unlikely that it's a stray radio wave. Radio waves behave a lot like light, in the sense that they keep going until they hit something, bounce off and do the same thing, slowly diminishing until they're gone for good. New York has a looooot of buildings, so the radio waves would have been absorbed, fully, a really long time ago. Plus he had no apps running, and in order for a phone (well smartphones anyway) to receive a radio signal, you have to go into the radio app and plug in headphones to be used as an antanae, so I'm pretty sure that's not it.

However, it could shead some light on what it is, it could be that you received a faulty radio antanae in your phone and someone decided to be nostalgic and turned on an old broadcast they had recorded back then and play it over a shortwave radio transmitter, lots of people have those, they're not real expensive and they're free to use.

[EnglishStudent526]

This was on a cell phone?.... without recieving calls or any radio station apps...? i have never heard of anything being able to play onto a phone without being called or something...

[scowl]

EnglishStudent526, on 29 June 2012 - 11:17 PM, said:

This was on a cell phone?.... without recieving calls or any radio station apps...? i have never heard of anything being able to play onto a phone without being called or something...

Most cell phones receive FM radio these days, but I agree that the phone suddenly receiving a radio broadcast is stranger than the broadcast it received.

[csspwns]

stray radio signal

[Chrlzs]

Some, but not all phones need headphones plugged in to get FM.  I have an old LG, like this one, that will happily start playing the radio on its speaker just by tapping the little button on the front marked FM....

[Carrie22]

When I had my Blackberry Curve it played random music a few times too, always Latino music. Never had any other cellphone do it though, just the Blackberry. My father's guitar amp will sometimes randomly pick up radio stations from Cuba (we live in Florida).