Belgrade PTT(former) YUGOSLAVIA1973 Recording
The 20th-century history of the region formerly known as Yugoslavia is both rich and complex. Back in 2009, my wife and I travelled through some of the republics that once formed Yugoslavia. Today, each country is a fascinating journey through history, culture and politics against a backdrop of ethnic tensions and wars. If you get the chance to visit Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Kosovo, Montenegro, Serbia and Slovenia and Northern Macedonia, I am sure you will love it. Such beautiful countries, rich cultures and lovely people.
This recording of the Belgrade (Beograd) Postal, Telegraph and Telephone communications service was one of the hardest to salvage from my original reel-to-reel tape media. I spent around three hours on this 15-second voice mirror! Cleaning up involved the removal of multiple heterodynes at different frequencies while trying to avoid altering or damaging the intelligibility of the content. The upper sideband (USB) pitch was high and sounded quite squeaky, so the pitch was lowered by several tones to make it more intelligible. In fact, the new pitch of the female voice is probably too low, but lowering the voice seemed to increase intelligibility significantly (probably a function of the narrow bandwidth and missing LSB and carrier).
In addition, a bag of noise reduction was employed to make the content more readable. And, to cap things off, the old magnetic reel tape had evidence of "tape print-through", which attempts to eliminate were simply maddening! In the end, the resulting recording was still far from acceptable, but it was the best I could do and still ensured that my sanity was left intact! All the "re-engineering" was done on the free Audacity app.
In the video below, I have included the text of the voice mirror, plus the friendly verification letter received from one of the station's engineers:
Other Utility stations in this series of blog posts:
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© Rob Wagner, Mount Evelyn DX Report, and contributors 2012-2023
Congratulations on the excellent blog. I was an SWL from 1969 to 1999 (amateur radio op since 1974) and have some old recordings from that period that have been made digital and uploaded to my page on the Internet Archive. Voice mirrors like these bring back many memories from years long ago. Some of them were saved and can be found on my page. You do a great job presenting your material and I will continue to check back often. It's fascinating to look at your perspective from the other side of the world (literally!).
ReplyDeleteThank you for your generous comments, Dan. Much appreciated. Yes, I wish I had recorded many more of those 70s and 80s SWBC and utility stations. I guess I thought that they would always be there for me. How wrong I was! Oh well.... Cheers, mate. Rob VK3BVW
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