There was a mystery DRM test transmission around 11:00-12:00 UTC June 22nd, 2020 on 17660 kHz, first seen spotted by somebody on the Twente WebSDR chat.
Checking it first on some KiwiSDRs, I discovered it was an xHE-AAC stream labeled .... = Zhongguo Zi Sheng = Voice of China, which means it's supposed to be CNR1 // 17605 kHz & others in AM. But the DRM signal transmit nothing but Chinese instrumental music. Curiously, there was an ongoing maintenance at Kashi/Saibagh site (although I'm confused about whether it's really it as 17490 & 17650 kHz AM were running as normal, albeit weaker than usual, while in the evening, transmissions from Shijiazhuang on 6020 kHz are missing), so this suggests a test of DRM transmissions using the newest child in the AAC family.
Moreover, another check of my own rig found quite a good signal so I decided to record an IQ file. Now, the problem is, what to use to decode it? Newer DReaM builds fail to run for me while an older but working one uses an outdated libfaad2 library which doesn't support the newer xHE-AAC codec.
Ultimately I've found some custom builds of DReaM 2.2.1 with xHE-AAC support.
