[SW] 12624 kHz cf. - XSQ Guangzhou Radio - SITOR-B broadcast in English & NUMBERS 🕵️, Nov 21 2025

Описание: Chinese maritime radio stations are among the last such stations still active on international shortwave bands. Most of the time, they are heard with channel markers consisting of 3 or 4 data bursts (apparently AMTOR-ARQ) followed by CW ID. Catching anything else seems to be a matter of luck.

And on Friday, November 21st, 2025, I did have luck.

At 13:25 UTC that day, I spotted SITOR-B traffic on 12624 kHz (I was tuned 1 kHz below, in USB). I immediately opened OBS as well as Fldigi to decode it - and there it was, clear text in English, printing out navigational warnings for some coastal areas in/around China, including Zhongshan.

But in a mindboggling development, a few minutes later, the text switched to 4-figure groups of numbers.

Is it a digital number station, you may ask? No.

A minute of Googling brought me into finding out about Chinese telegraph code. Basically, Chinese characters are assigned numbers from 0000 to 9999, and there's a codebook that you have to use to decode them. You can read more about it at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese...

I left a sample of the encoded Chinese text in the video, so you may try to write them down & attempt a decode - and possibly translate to English later?

BTW, I've observed that Chinese coastal stations tend to pop up all over the place across the portions of 4, 8, 12 & 16 MHz bands allocated to narrow-band digital, maritime traffic. Every time I check these bands, the frequency lineup is different! 😂 It might be possible this affects SITOR broadcasts too, so this broadcast would also appear on a slightly different frequency next time I check it 😆

Received at 13:25 UTC Nov 21st, 2025 in NE Poland using Airspy HF+ Discovery & 246cm square terminated loop antenna oriented @ ~290deg.

#shortwave #ShortwaveRadio #HFRadio #HF #marine #maritime #coastalradio #XSQ #GuangzhouRadio #GuangzhouCoastRadioStation #utility #utilityDXing #DXing