Even the Kitchen Sink Tunes in to the CBC
People living near Sackville, New Brunswick sometimes hear voices.
Little, faint whispers from the kitchen.
A bit of a hum from the office.
Sometimes the voices are in English, sometimes Asian or European tongues.
Yet they’re not crazy, and their houses aren’t haunted.
So what’s going on?
The residents of the area are the audience for an unusual phenomenon known as “external rectification,” where metal objects pick up radio frequencies and act as a speaker.
‘Here’, a local paper, recently wrote an article on the effect:
“The plumbing acts as an antenna,” area artist and burgeoning historian Amanda Christie said. “When two pipes cross, the appliance ends up acting as a gramophone speaker. All of a sudden, people will hear the radio coming from their sink, but this happens with other things, too, that have pieces of metal touching at the right point.”
The reason residents hear Chinese, Swedish or German voices is because the frequency is from the nearby CBC Radio Canada International transmitter, which is also used by a bunch of Asian broadcasters, Radio Sweden, the BBC World Service and Deutsche Welle as part of a transmitter time exchange agreement.
The transmittor is pretty powerful. It’s Canada’s only shortwave transmitter station, broadcasting to Europe and South America.
Christie is working on an art installation based on the effect:
“It’s a part of the history of the region that isn’t written anywhere. Seems that if you live here, you just know about it,” she said. “There’s mythology, too. Some say the radios affect their dreams. Others say they keep people in Sackville, while some say they force them away. Like a magnet – it attracts and repels.”
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and I’m working on trash bin that when you lift the lid it says “hi, I’m your boyfriend George Stroumboloupoulos” as you throw in the garbage and close it.
Now this effect is something I’d like to experience with my own ears in person!
Sackville, huh?
It drew me in the last 2 times I drove from Ottawa to Halifax…
http://tinyurl.com/275a3c
Is that even safe? These days people are moving to get out from under electric transmission lines or fretting over the radiation on a cell phone.
Here we have a shortwave transmitter pumping out so much power that makes kitchen sinks vibrate?
Allen: You’re gonna need to get Mr. Strombolopoulos’ permission for the voice recordings on that project. You know that, right? And don’t expect the royalty payments on the recordings you’re hoping to commission to be low-priced.
Allan, ROTFLMAO!!
Bill, be careful. If you get out of bed tomorrow, you’ll have a heart attack. On the other hand, if you stay in bed, you’ll die of cancer. All this scaremongering is killin’ ya.
Actually BBC and Deutsche Welle ceased to use the Sackville transmitters in recent years, because both broadcasters eliminated most of their shortwave services in the western hemisphere.
Also Europe is no longer targeted from Sackville, with the exception of a single hour for the Korean Broadcasting System per day. Instead there are still transmissions for North America and Africa.
Perhaps a current breakdown of broadcasters using Sackville, sorted by the amount of transmitter hours per day, is of interest:
RCI – 31 hours (including RCI plus for North America, same programming than on Sirius, just delayed by five minutes),
CBC North – 18 hours (that’s 9625 kHz, little publicized),
China Radio International – 18 hours,
NHK (Japan) – 7.5 hours,
Korean Broadcasting System – 4.5 hours,
Voice of Vietnam – 4.5 hours,
Radio Vatican – 3.5 hours,
Radio República (Cuban exile broadcasts from Florida) – 3 hours,
Sveriges Radio (Sweden) – 2 hours,
TRT (Turkey) – 1 hour.
The Sveriges Radio transmissions will go away at the end of October, when they close down their entire external service, keeping only some online services for audiences abroad.
In addition there are five hours for RCI and 45 minutes for Radio Vatican in digital mode, the Digital Radio Mondiale standard that did not achieve any market impact until today.
Voice of Vietnam and Radio República transmissions are not run within a transmitter hour exchange, instead they are brokered by the privatized operator of the former BBC World Service transmitters. In return some hours of RCI are still carried via shortwave transmitters in the UK.
CBC journalists may find the extensive transmissions of China Radio International especially interesting, considering the intermittent blocking of CBC websites in China.
Wow.
That’s a lot of paying customers there.
Good.