WHAT IS New Star Broadcasting station?
New Star Broadcasting Station, or Xin Xing Guangbo diantai in Mandarin Chinese, is a number station broadcasting from somewhere in east Asia, probably China or Taiwan. New Star is not your run-of-the mill number station. It features fancy presenters, hip music, and cool announcements like "We wish you health and happiness," to get you through the day. All this deserves a home-page on the Net, so....here it is.
Back to New Star's main page
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Each channel identifies itself at the beginning of the broadcasts as "the third" or "the fourth" program. For the five channels this would be respectively:Channel 1: di yi tai
Channel 2: di er tai
Channel 3: di san tai
Channel 4: di si tai
Channel 5: di wu tai[Please refer to the "Fun with Chinese" section for more explanation on the Chinese language]
Content is for each channel is different, but program format is the same. Broadcasts range from 5 to 40 minutes and start either on the hour or half hour, sometimes both.
Back to New Star's main pageListen to a Real Audio clip of a typical broadcast of New Star. In order to preserve bandwidth I have cut out the parts that were repeated. It's still 292 kb, so better find an off-hour to download it. (Note: this is not the same broadcast as used in explaining the program line-up, below. The line-up is similar, of course.)
HEAR New Star HERE
Back to New Star's main pageTransmissions usually start with a piece of traditional Chinese music , featuring a flute. Once you hear it you never forget it. Usually two women are featured: one for the general announcements, the other for the messages. They are both pre-recorded and machine generated and this clearly shows in the coded messages which suffer from lack of proper intonation. The outline of the transmissions is as follows:
PROGRAM LINE-UP1. Station ID + program ID.
An example: Zheli shi Xin Xing Guangbo diantai, di si tai. (2x) [Here is New Star Broadcasting Station, the fourth program]
2. Call for particular units (danwei) that cables (dianbao) are coming.
These stations have 4 or 5 letter call-signs. Also indicated is the month and number (...yue, ......th report) of the cables and how many cable characters (dianwen) it consists off. An example:
........you 5-3-2-5-3 danwei [.....for unit 5-3-2-5-3], shi yue fen di yi hao dianbao [October 1st cable], yi fen dian bao dianwen 53 zi [one cable, 53 characters]. You 4-4-7-1 danwei [for unit 4-4-7-1], shi yue fen di si hao [October 4th cable], yi fen dianbao dianwen 61 zi [one cable, 61 characters]. 5-3-2-5-3 danwei 4-4-7-1 danwei zhuyi chaoshou [Unit 5-3-2-5-3, unit 4-4-7-1, stand by for reception].
This announcement is repeated one or two times, with the interval music in between.
3. The actual code transmissions
It begins preceded by this announcement: Zheli shi Xin Xing Guangbo diantai, di si tai. [Here is New Star Broadcasting Station, the fourth program] Xianzai women.... [Now we....] kaishi..... [begin...] baogao gei nin [with the reporting for you]. Qing nin zhuyi, zhunbei chaoshou. [Please stand by for reception]
Then the actual reading of numbers starts in this format, each number repeated twice. If the cable is finished this is also announced:
9093 9033 8799 8799 9989 9989 1956 1956 4244 4244 3904 3904 9939 9939 8988 8988. yishang shi gei 4-4-7-1 [The preceding was intended for unit 4-4-7-1], shi yue fen di si hao [October 4th cable], yi fen dianbao dianwen 61 zi [one cable, 61 characters]. Xianzai yijing bowen wan le [now finished with broadcasting the cable].
4. Finally the whole broadcast is ended with the following words:
Yishang tejie heyue .....bosong wanbi. Xiexie nin de shouting. Zhu nin jiankang kuai le. Zaihui. [The preceding special programme.......now finished transmission. Thank you for listening. We wish you health and happiness. Goodbye.]
[Disclaimer: my Chinese is not perfect and Xin Xing’s audio is not that great, so I might have made minor mistakes in translation, or in copying content (90% is correct though). Even my girlfriend had trouble understanding the Chinese and she is a native speaker, so there you go! Please send her a nice e-mail at bijou@m2.dj.net.tw and maybe she will let me play with my radio more often then, hi!]
Back to New Star's main page(c) 1997, 1998 Hans van den Boogert