She had your dark suit in greasy wash water all year

ALE
iPhone/iPad/iPod app to decode ALE Automatic Link Establishment

An unidentified station was first noted at around 0330 UTC May 17, 2012, on 6990 kHz, sending three phrases over and over:

“She had your dark suit in greasy wash water all year. Don’t ask me to carry an oily rag like that. They used an aggressive policeman to flag thoughtless motorists”

I made this recording on 6990 kHz USB at 0041 UTC on May 17, 2012:

As of 2315 UTC on May 17, 2012, the station has moved to 6950 kHz USB, with the same repeated phrases.

Andrew Yoder reports hearing this same station on November 5, 2011 on 21450.7 kHz.

Some quick searches of the internet came up with something called the TIMIT Sentence Prompts.

According to Wikipedia:

TIMIT was designed to further acoustic-phonetic knowledge and automatic speech recognition systems. It was commissioned by DARPA and worked on by many sites, including Texas Instruments (TI) and Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), hence the corpus’ name.

TIMIT consists of phrases of 630 speakers of of different sexes and eight major dialects of American English. The database is designed to assist in the development and testing of Automatic Speech Recognition systems.

There is an online listing of the phrases. According to that list, phrases 1, 2, and 437 are being sent.

Presumably someone is testing a system to perform automatic speech recognition on HF transmissions, and is conducting some real world test.

There is a thread of loggings of this station over at the HFUnderground Message Board.

I can only hope they don’t accidentally start transcribing 6925 kHz while Toynbee Radio is on the air. That could cause their computer to blow up, a la Kirk’s ability to make computers self destruct by confounding them with illogic on Star Trek.