Good old interference. If you listen to shortwave, you can hear a lot more of it. Baby monitors are often in the 50MHz range, which can travel a long way. If the signal is just slightly out of tune or has gone through a lot of solid objects, you get all kinds of fun frequency distortions (like when you play a tape back too slowly). What happens is that some frequencies move faster than others through a given material, so as the radio waves travel, the fast frequencies move toward the front and the slow ones fall behind. The process is called dispersion. You can do it with ordinary light too, which is how a prism splits white light into a rainbow (colors = light frequencies, remember).
If you want some radio phenomena that's a bit more fun, you should listen to shortwave and find a numbers station (like they have on Lost). They're regarded as almost certainly espionage-related. More here:
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
branchandroot
no subject
Date: 2009-02-22 07:26 pm (UTC)If you want some radio phenomena that's a bit more fun, you should listen to shortwave and find a numbers station (like they have on Lost). They're regarded as almost certainly espionage-related. More here:
http://www.dxing.com/numbers.htm