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Right, by technical question, I mean "possibly insane".

Can anyone who is a bit savvy with electronics tell me, is it possible to pick up radio frequencies on a guitar amp? I've found that leaving my amp on, with the cable plugged into my guitar, but the guitar is not being played at all, I'm getting quiet garbled voices coming in through the amp.

Now, a guy down the road is big into his amateur radio stuff. He's got a big, BIG ariel on top of his house.

Is it possible that the amp/metal strings on the guitar are acting as a very basic radio reciever or something?

If not, lets have some alternatives. Am I

a)Recieving secret codes of Russian spies (hopefully that very attractive one from the papers)

B)Getting messages from outer space

or

C)Going batty.

Oh! Or

D) My amp is haunted my a totally unrelated amateur radio enthusiast.

I suggest chatting nicely to your local amateur - it might not be his fault, but if he's a good bloke he'll be able to do some tests to see if it is

And if it is, he's duty bound to sort the problem out if it's a problem with his equipment. If it isn't and if he's a nice bloke and knows lots about electronics (which he probably does), he might be able to help you out anyway

yeah - i used to get that radio thing happen to my amps...but dont rule out insanity just yet, there may be happening independantly of one another...

What they said, but you may also need to get the amp's earthing checked out.

I reckon it's E) Jimmi Hendrix trying to tell you how he played guitar....

Mandrake wrote:I reckon it's E) Jimmi Hendrix trying to tell you how he played guitar....

God I hope so.

I took advice of going to ask my neighbour, but he doesn't seem to be in now. I'll drop a letter through and see what's what.

Funnily enough, since he seems to have gone out, no voices through the amp.

For some reason mine only ever picked up French.
Any ideas?

My amp used to pick up some awful screeching sounds. No idea how that happened, but since I've stopped playing my guitar the awful noise has gone away too.

Lawrence wrote:For some reason mine only ever picked up French.
Any ideas?

After three years of learning vocab, neither did I!

Quite a long time ago now, the family lived across the road from a MASSIVE fan of ham radio. (Sound familiar so far?) He had a stonking great broadcast aerial in the garden, and his system was boosted way beyond legal limits.

We could pick him up on any electrical device in the house. Not just TVs, radios, and other things with speakers, but anything at all that was plugged in -- and, on one memorable occasion, a light bulb.

A quiet word with him stopped the interference for a while, but the power slowly crept up again. A quiet word with the police stopped it permanently.

Lawrence wrote:For some reason mine only ever picked up French.
Any ideas?

At a guess, it can either be one of two things:
- Some frequencies bounce nicely off the atmosphere, I'm not aware of any frequency bands which go to France (to me antenna science is black magic) - the ones I know of normally go to eastern europe (or germany, if you're lucky)

- You could be picking up a french AM/LW radio station. Again, my maths is a bit rusty and my knowledge of such things is pretty weak, so I might be way off here

I'm sure someone here can correct me if I'm wrong :p

Robbie wrote:A quiet word with him stopped the interference for a while, but the power slowly crept up again. A quiet word with the police stopped it permanently.

For what it's worth, it's also illegal to knowingly transmit when you're causing interference to somebody else. It's a good way to say byebye to your licence

I know this won't help you in the slightest, (but I am bored) the FCC (and no they won't let me be) does a fly over every 6 months (or close to that) and they look for signal loss. If he is broadcasting over your amp, he would be shut down in a heartbeat even though he probably is not even aware of the fact.

The thing is, we don't actually know what the amp is picking up. If it's ham traffic (a single voice - very clear like a taxi radio) then the neighbour's in the frame, but "quiet garbled voices" is more likely to be general radio transmissions being picked up from anywhere.