Your off-air tone is NHK Radio 2. Depends when you're hearing it, but almost surely in the 5am (local) hour -- 2000 UTC hour -- before they come on the air for the day. I seem to have forgotten to mention that detail in my guide, annoyingly. I can forgive myself given the billions of details to juggle, but I believe, off the top of my head, their off-air tone comes on at 2025 UTC until about 2050 before the music box starts at 2053 to 2059 before sign-on. Same off-air tone as everyone else in the world, like Pyongyang, KBS, Echo of Unification, and whoever else is behind the local stations doing that late at night. I had a tone on 1440 forever that I never IDed. A handful of NHK 2 stations have off-air tones going at other hours between their sign-off and sign-on, but usually only 873. Their tone serves as a jammer to 873's North Korean signal at night, likely unofficially, but I have a feeling it's the reason only that 500kw signal often keeps its tone on [sometimes] whereas everyone else goes silent.
Too bad you lack recordings of the Chinese ones. As Paul knows, I can ID 10-second clips effortlessly just by the programming or sound of them sometimes. Only so many stations get out well, and sometimes it's the 5 or 10kw ones that can be heard at 1000km regularly.
-Chris Kadlec Seoul AM Radio Listening Guide http://www.beaglebass.com/dx/seoul/
Date: Mon, 9 Jan 2017 12:19:40 -0800 From: Walter Salmaniw <canswl@xxxxxxxxx> Subject: [IRCA] TP for 9 Jan2017 from MassetA very interesting morning to say the least. Another snowfall began late inthe night causing a continuation of our winter wonderland. Monitoring from 14:15 to, well, the Asians are still with me at noon local/20:00 UTC. Conditions were very much enhanced to China all morning with many 2nd and 3rd tiers present. Australia also made a modest presence with 1548 verystrong at times. 1566 was interesting as for a while around 16:30 or 17:00,a Chinese station cochanneled and sometimes replaced HLAZ. Another mystery for me is 1 kHz steady tone heard for hours on multiple frequencies including 1296, 1368,1584 and others. Clearly an idle transmitter but not sure what or who. I suspect Japan as it's still there at 19:45. 1575 AFN was very strong with local base information and numbers so should be easyto positively ID. The phone numbers were 226-4128 and 226-7273. No internetso could not immediately verify. A "best" morning so far. 73, Walt
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