A low powered pirate station on 87.7 FM started up locally a few months ago with a very eclectic format. Overnight it tends to run long fundamentalist Christian lectures. During the day it mostly plays pop and R&B oldies, primarily from the 1980s, but sometimes going back to standards from the 1940s.
It also runs multiple hours of old American Top 40 programs. But not the full versions. When Casey Kasem prepared each week’s show, he didn’t play the entire song. Instead, for the show’s production for each song they just played a short opening section, immediately followed by the closing part, with Casey adding his commentary to these short segments. Afterwards the production team spliced in the rest of the song to make the final version. However, this station is playing the unfinished versions, which makes for a very quick countdown.
That was the first thing that came to my mind when I read the OP. As I appreciate the OP, numbers stations certainly qualify. Especially on the weird part.
One of the local Top 40 stations plays old Top 40 countdowns, with the abbreviated songs. They’ll do a different era every week; it’s quite interesting to listen to, in a weird sort of way.
When my brother was in college in the late 1980s, he was a college DJ, and at the time, the FCC had no regulations on either radio or TV content, so one night when he didn’t have anything else to do, he went in to DJ all night, and from midnight to 6am, he played the foulest, most profanity-laced stuff he could find in their archive. He was pleasantly surprised at how many people were listening.
WVLI in Kankakee, IL, plays two countdowns in full every Saturday afternoon. One from the Seventies at 3:00 Central and one from the Eighties at 6:00 Central. The rest of the time, their library ranges from the Forties to the Eighties. They recently added one comedy track every weekday afternoon, focusing on one particular comedian each week.
I don’t know if the OP considers shortwave radio to be in the same class as “some guy operating a low-watt FM transmitter out of his garage,” but in addition to UVB-76 and the numbers stations, there’s been other similar strange stuff on it. Most of it is apparently espionage related (like the numbers and UVB-76). Here are some more, (including “Yosemite Sam” and “Chinese Robot”). Otherwise, most regular shortwave stations are just religious programming, but on ham frequencies sometimes you can hear weird things like this Dallas broadcaster which seemed to be just repeating the same gibberish phrase over and over again (here’s a clip).
For most bizarre, I nominate the Omega navigation radio broadcasting stations. I think they’ve been shut down, but not so many years ago.
They broadcast steady tones on 10.2 kHz. Not 10.2 MHz. It’s actually 10,200 cycles per second. I’m not saying they modulate a radio wave with an audio tone of 10.2 kHz, I’m saying that’s the radio carrier itself. And they don’t modulate it, other than switching each one on and off according to a schedule that repeats every few seconds.
You could hear their signal with a wire and an amplifier and a speaker.
It was a clever way of navigating over the entire globe, and each of the several stations reached the entire planet.
KCIV-FM, The Dalles,Oregon, was a one-man show. The owner had been a dj at a pioneering local AM station, and when the owner sold it to fledgling broadcast group, he put the town’s first FM on the air in 1968. The station’s studio and towers were located opposite the town on a hillside across the Columbia River on the Washington side. Had power, of course, but no water other than a big tank he’d installed on the slope above the studios that had to be refilled periodically. And no telephone. For a time he had a salesperson who would call on local businesses then at the end of the day drive to a park above the town and use a CB radio to call in the number and length of the ads purchased as well as the copy.
The owner operated the station 10 to 12 hours per day all by himself. He was in a wheelchair so it didn’t bother him to sit all day. He played whatever, whenever, as long as it wasn’t rock. Mostly middle- of-the-road or show tunes. Often he’d play the whole album, and you could hear the needle traveling between tracks. Sometime it could get stuck when he was eating lunch or otherwise occupied, and you could hear the repletion for sometimes several minute before it was fixed. His sign-off included something along the lines of “…the last three letters of our call letters [KCIV] stands for the Roman numerals for 104, our location on the FM dial, and for civilization, the ultimate hope of mankind.” Occasionally, someone would visit and he’d talk with them,
