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New Stay At Home Hobby: obsessing over a crazy radio station that plays the same 20 song loop over and over and over and over. No breaks, commercials or call signs. Nothing. Just The 20. Forever. Oh, you want to know which songs? Sure. But this dance is just beginning...
The station is 98.5 FM. For the Seattle area, 98.5 FM is supposed to be the FM frequency for KARR 1460 AM. But this ain't it. Digitally KARR 1460 is currently pumping out some sweet Christian something or other. Plus The 20 starts to fade out when I go a few miles, which...
doesn't line up with what the FM translator is supposedly doing. And before you clowns do a 2 second Google search and post the first thing you find at me, rest assured I've seen it. That's talk re: KARR 98.5 switching to oldies last year, like a regular station might do, but...
This is just 20 songs. PURPOSEFUL songs, I have to believe. Is it a small powered rouge FM transmission? Is someone trying to say something? Is it bizarre radio stunting to herald a format change from Oldies to slightly less Oldies but without a call sign, which makes NO sense...
The loop is almost exactly an hour, but just a few minutes off, so the same song is never on at precisely the same time for too long. The 20 glide through the day like a constellation, A Hard Days Night chasing Time in a Bottle in an endless dance. Yes, yes I have listen to...
The 20 over and over and over for days now. And it's starting to feel normal. This is what radio is in the now-times. There was music before, just like there were parties and shows and human interaction that wasn't a half-step away from dogs growling at every new dog they meet...
But what? Who? Why? This jumble of songs makes absolutely no sense, why, why, why blast them anonymously over and over and over again? And why can't I stop listening to it? I am so out of ideas that I'm starting to think @claaaams has pulled off an amazing practical joke. Fin.
UPDATE: KARR 98.5, a Christian station, takes overpowers The 20 a half-mile west of my position. The FM translator for KARR is on the top of Capitol Hill to the east, which means whoever is broadcasting The 20 is somewhere in between!
UPDATE: Thanks to @OLCV_Doug for the idea to look up complication albums that The 20 could come from. There are a surprising number of robust world wide databases that will let you search for such things. No dice. The 20 was carefully curated by someone.
UPDATE: Thanks to @emrldctygrrl for doing some recon! The signal fades out at the south end of Eastlake neighborhood, making coverage a little over 7 miles wide north to south. Next up: find eastern boundary.
UPDATE: The loop is roughly 59 minutes long. At midnight Time in a Bottle started exactly at midnight, which might be poetic bit should not happen every 24 hours. Will update if happens at midnight again!
REVISION: confirmation that The 20 signal picked up just north of 50th in U District, thanks @DevNullSA.
UPDATE: signal confirmed as far east as 23rd near Judkins park. Weak but there, thanks for the recon @Flash_of_Green.
UPDATE: Clocked The 20 at 58:55 after @gfish pointed out it should be longer. Adding up the official track times (I know. I KNOW) I get 61:40. Which means someone very likely picked radio tracks or otherwise trimmed these songs to get as close to an hour as possible. Why? WHY?!
UPDATE: Reports of The 20 as far north as Greenwood and as far east as Bellevue Swedish. Thanks for the info. @paulpalinkas and @apardoe. Sounds like you can get it faintly in Belltown if you're high enough or have @ilianathewitch's magic.
UPDATE: After some sleuthing by @Lynnbee01 and @ilianathewitch I did some driving and found the Christian format station I was picking up was KLOVE broadcasting from somewhere around Olympia. Who knew there were so many of these things?! Still cannot get KARR 1460 to...
...come in. KARR's FM translators can't (shouldn't?) broadcast anything. The AM broadcast stations are between Kirkland and Redmond. Can anyone pick it up? Also reached out to KARR's owner to see if he can tell us anything. More soon.
UPDATE: A glitch? A? What? Just a CDC announcement to get a flu shot at 11:26pm. Not COVID-19 references. No mention of pandemic. Nope. Just "get a flu shot and maybe wash your hands." WHAT IS THIS.
UPDATE: WHAT IS HAPPENING. The 20 interrupted with a seatbelt PSA at 11:46pm from the highway safety board. It's impossible that Time in a Bottle is gonna play at midnight sans something else weird.
UPDATE: Midnight hit and it was the tail end of Kicks, because the curator of The 20 is not into poetry. And Time in a Bottle will get the midnight slot on what? 12 hours? Something?
UPDATE: After over a week of The 20 has changed!! Don't Go Breakin' My Heart is currently playing. Was The 20 a stunt? Did we accidentally shut down a pirate The 20 and this was always underneath? Or did we just let KARR know something was wrong? Ah! Gotta know.
UPDATE: Station ID at top of the hour - KARR 1460 AM, 98.5 FM Kirkland. There is no way that we didn't make this change happen... Will get the answer.
FINAL UPDATE: The end. The answer to The 20. @not_ky0ko got ahold of the owner of KARR 1460 AM before I could. The station runs on an automated system that glitched and got caught looping The 20. No magic, no message. Not the answer we deserve, but an answer...
...and with that perhaps The 20 drifts on to some new town, some new aggressively bored folks in need of mystery. Thanks for the ride, The 20. Now I need a new hobby.
