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Comment by culopatin | Hacker News Reader

I don’t know how to express the level of “I don’t know anything” I feel when I read posts like these and the writer seems to just pull knowledge from their pores. “I looked at the wave and I knew exactly what it was and what to do”. I find myself more interested in how long it took them to figure that out and how they got to it than the content itself.

Same for any topic in HN that people manage to have very intense and niche knowledge for. Maybe I have the same odd knowledge about some other thing, but I don’t find fancy lock washers as brain teasing as figuring out a helicopter route from a YouTube video’a left audio channel.

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I don't have the skills of the person who decoded the signal... however, if you get your ham radio license and start playing with the various digital modes, you'll start to recognize the various sounds of different modes. An APRS data packet [1] has a very unique sound. Same with with RTTY [2]. Our brains are really good at pattern matching if they're exposed to a pattern enough times. Obviously, you'd still need a computer to decode those signals, but the "sound" of the signals can give you a very good headstart.

[1]: https://youtu.be/XEbjNDEnjMc

[2]: https://youtu.be/wzkAeopX7P0

In the TV series "Burn Notice" there are APRS packets used as "walkie talkie sound effects" while they're doing some sort of heist.

I've forgotten now which ep it was but I always fancied trying to pick them off the audio and decode them to see if there are any clues in it.

SSTV is another distinctive one, and the Aphex Twin track "Bonus High Frequency Sounds" is a pic of Richard James in his studio. Often wondered about the SSTV-like feedback in that Radiohead track, too...

The 90’s movie Sneakers with Robert Redford comes to mind. It’s a heist movie set in the California Bay Area and without revealing spoilers there’s a fantastic whodunnit involving the decoding of audio signals.

It's funny, heist movies are basically public relations for thieves.

"Burn Notice" had an Irish character in it who dropped the accent after a couple of episodes, but her back story was that she was and explosives expert and a "former IRA operative, but not a terrorist".

Uh-huh.

That did not play particularly well in the UK, to put it mildly. Not sure if it was meant to be public relations for terrorist bombers...

Indeed some are very recognisable once you start to hear them often. I can recommend [1] if you want to explore more.

[1] https://www.sigidwiki.com/wiki/Signal_Identification_Guide

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