In my last posting, I looked at the various call-Santa lines around the world and found the NORAD Tracks Santa line at +1-877-HI-NORAD. Not having previously had any contact with such a service, all the way from Australia, I was surprised to learn of its heritage and the fact it has been in operation for 67 years now. That is most impressive.

I decided to give it quite a few calls to learn how it works and hear it for myself. I’ve also taken the effort to record a number of calls for preservation.

How it Works

The NORAD Tracks Santa Operations Center operates only during Christmas Eve (24th December). If you call outside of those times, you will receive the announcement to call back on Christmas Eve.

Due to the nature of time-zones, the service starts before you might expect, depending on where you are in the world.

In fact, the online Santa radar started service at 8pm on 24th December (UTC+11) or 9am 24th December (UTC). Unfortunately, at that time, the globe display was not working for me – a technical glitch they later fixed.

The website’s other functionalities seem to be available at all times.

At around this time, the phone announcement message is changed – it is instead a recording that states the following:

“Thank you for calling the NORAD Tracks Santa hotline. Please call us again on Christmas Eve, beginning at 4am Mountain Standard Time when we track Santa around the world. Meanwhile, visit our website www.noradsanta.org for exciting games and activities.”

Unlike the previous announcement, this one “rings” before it answers which indicates to me that it is connecting to the PBX of the organisation which then plays out this message.

Giving it a few rings on the evening of the 24th December in Sydney, I did not realise that they actually have real people answering the phone, unlike the other services. This was a nice surprise, but it also posed a few problems for me as recording and sharing telephone conversations can be legally problematic, I’m not part of their target audience and I didn’t want to disturb the family. Nevertheless, I placed a few silent calls to learn how the system worked – my apologies to those who answered them.

It seems that at the beginning, the load is relatively low as there are very few callers in the US dialling into the system. A call can be patched directly to an operator, resulting in behaviour that resembles calling someone’s direct line.

As the load increases, then there may be free agents that it can connect to relatively quickly – as this happens, a repetitive jingle is played out to the line:

Notice that in this example, the ring trips very quickly. But such a system has to scale, so when load grows even higher, then a queue will have to be used. In the case the call does go into the queue, you will hear an answer that sounds like this.

“Thank you for calling the NORAD Tracks Santa hotline. Radars indicate that Santa has launched off from the North Pole. A NORAD Santa Tracker will be with you in a moment. You may want to visit us online for exciting Santa updates at www.noradsanta.org.”

In this instance, you can hear that the ring trips and something that sounds like a billing tone “blips” onto the line prior to the message. This is when you know you’ve joined the queue. As children are probably not so patient, this queue is not very long and you can expect an answer very quickly. Whenever I heard this “blip”, I dropped my call as I had no interest in tying up an actual volunteer’s time.

Instead, I decided to call back nearly immediately, as under heavy load, the system seems to “thin” the load by assigning some of the calls directly to their “automated” system which behaves as follows:

When the center is “operating” and agents are available to answer but load is high, the call goes through first with a rapid ring-trip, followed by a (potentially) “fake ring” issued by the far-end PBX (perhaps early media, perhaps not, but the gateways I use all send early media). It is then answered without a “blip” and a male voice provides status updates.

As I placed my calls through two different free US toll-free termination gateways, it seems that one has better audio quality than the other – look at the spectral lines on this ring compared to the other. Noisy calls to the US are pretty common for me.

Towards the end of the run, most people in the continental US would be fast asleep. At that time, it seems the staff logs off and lets the automated system handle the remaining drip of calls. In this case, the answer occurs without a ring nor a blip, just as the automated “call back on Christmas Eve” message does.

I observed my last message at about 8:30 pm on 25th December (UTC+11) or 9:30 am 25th December (UTC), with the next attempt half-an-hour later resulting in the “call back on Christmas Eve” message.

Recordings of Automated Messages

As mentioned before, I wanted to collect some recordings of the system in operation for preservation, but I didn’t want to capture any conversations with real-life people as that could become a legal issue as that may be considered a conversation. Nevertheless, this depended on the system receiving a high load of calls, otherwise the automated system would not answer the calls. This was difficult for the night of 24th December (Sydney Time) as it was early morning in the US. It was not until the morning of 25th December (Sydney Time) which corresponded to the afternoon/evening in the US that I had success.

Here are the full list of recorded automated messages – these seem to update on at least half-hourly intervals, sometimes more frequently, but usually not as quickly or as often as the online tracker.

All messages follow the formula:

“Thank you for calling NORAD. Our NORAD satellites and radar systems are tracking … [Variable Dialogue]

Visit our website www.noradsanta.org to see his exact location.”

Recordings 25^th December 2022 (Sydney AEDT UTC+11):

• 10:29 am – “that Santa has already flown half-way around the world. He is making his way across the coast of West Africa, visiting the countries of Togo, Ghana, Liberia and the British Isles.”


• 11:03 am – “that Santa is flying south from the Azores to the east coast of Brazil.”


• 11:34 am – “that Santa continues to fly south leaving the east coast of Brazil on his way to Antarctica.”


• 12:02 pm – “that Santa is continuing to zig-zag across South America, visiting Chile, Paraguay and Brazil.”


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