Between World War II and Y2K, shortwave listening was quite an education. With a simple receiver, you could listen to the world. Some of it, of course, was entertainment, and much of it was propaganda of one sort or another. But you could learn a lot. Kids with shortwave radios always did great in geography. Getting the news from a different perspective is often illuminating, too. Learning about other cultures and people in such a direct way is priceless. Getting a QSL card in the mail from a faraway land seemed very exciting back then.
Today, the shortwave landscape is a mere shadow of itself. According to a Wikipedia page, there are 235 active shortwave broadcasters from a list of 414, so nearly half are defunct. Not only are there many “dead” shortwave outlets, but many of the ones that are left are either not aimed at the world market or serve a niche group of listeners.
You can argue that with the Internet, you don’t need radio, and that’s probably correct in some ways but misses a few important points. Indeed, many broadcasters still exist as streaming stations or a mix of radio and streaming. I have to admit I listen to the BBC often but rarely on the air. My computer or phone plays it in crystal clarity 24 hours a day.
So, while a 14-year-old in 1975 might be hunched over a radio wearing headphones, straining to hear NHK World Radio, these days, they are likely surfing the popular social media site of the week. You could easily argue that content on YouTube, Instagram, and the like can come from all over the world, so what’s the problem?
The problem is information overload. Faced with a shortwave radio, there were a limited number of options available. What’s more, only a small part of the band might be “open” at any given time. It isn’t like the radio could play games or — unless you were a ham — allow you to chat with your friends. So you found radio stations from Germany to South Africa. From China and Russia, to Canada and Mexico. You knew the capital of Albania. You learned a little Dutch from Radio Nederlands.
Is there an answer? Probably not. Radio isn’t coming back, barring an apocalyptic event. Sure, you can listen to the BBC on your computer, but you probably won’t. You can even listen to a radio over the network, but that isn’t going to draw in people who aren’t already interested in radio, even if it really looks like a radio.
If you made a website with radio stations of the world, would people use it? Something like a software version of this globe or a “world service” version of RadioGarden. Probably not.
Do you listen to shortwave radio? If so, what are you listening to? Do you listen to “world services” at all? Tell us in the comments. Many careers were launched by finding a shortwave radio under the Christmas tree at just the right age. When Internet access is compromised, there’s still no substitute for real radios. If you want to listen to some of those vintage programs, they are — unsurprisingly — on the Internet.
That’s the price of progress
Or money thinking. Large shortwave transmitters draw a few hundreds KW, which seems too much in the eyes of certain people.
They see merely the costs, rather than a medium that spreads information across the borders.
If we want so see much the internet technology is trustworthy and dependable, the recent news about Crowdstrike will do.
It’s not just that, though. Internet users can be tracked, shortwave listening is anonymous.
Then there are the Internet’s backbones. Once they’re taken down, large parts of the internet become inaccessible to the public.
The internet as is, never was meant to be used in this form. It was meant as a military network, originally. It was later expanded to connect research facilities.
It was never meant to replace TV or radio broadcasts.
I mean it’s doing a pretty damn good job of replacing TV or radio broadcasts for the past say 20 years. I’m not sure how much more it needs to do to prove its validity to you.
I think there’s a problem with the bandwith, too.
The speed of expansion of the internet structure in relationship of increase of the multimedia related traffic.
If all cable TV users and satellite TV users would switch over to IP based TV, then good night everyone.
I mean, it’s about 4K streams and not PAL/NTSC video in MPEG‐2 anymore.
If IP based streams will eventually catch up with Blu Ray (1080p/UHD) in terms of quality/bandwith, it will be quite a stress test to the internet infrastructure.
We already see heavy use of CDNs. It makes sense to cache the content most in demand close to that demand… Like a city library branch. There is plenty bandwidth near the edge.
That’s the same argument used when we first started seeing online videos in the 90s. “The bandwidth of the Internet will never keep up”. That’s when a 1.5 mbps T-1 was fast for an enterprise connection. What you have to remember is the Internet can evolve. Shortwave frequencies have no chance of carrying all of the 4k content of the Internet and cable and neither can the terrestrial OTA television allocations.
Internet stream’s have long *passed* 1080p and now 4K is the home standard. CDNs alleviate the load with local caching.
we switched everything to IP 6 months ago in Australia. it still holds up but i want to strangle everyone using it around 6-9pm
I get 4k UHD in 25Mbps. It’s quite acceptable.
Sure. Until an X.50 flair aimed at Earth happens. What you gonna do when da C-Mass hits you?
Its not gonna do your shrtwave receiver much good either will it. I suppose you could go back to your Gilligan’s island coconut radio powered by a bicycle. Read up on what solar flares and cosmic rays do to HF radio transmission. It is quite challenging and way more unpredictable than the Internet, trust me I’ve been a communications engineer on HF, microwave, satellite, topospheric scatter, moon bounce, telephone (analog, ISDN, VoIP) and the Internet. The Internet is hands down easier and more reliable than any of those.
It will until the outages take everything out – tv, information, audio, phone. People who still own analogue equipment laugh when that happens because everyone’s world comes to an end. Radio will still be operating.
True. The lower frequencies are the only part of the spectrum that survive in, for example, a nuclear environment.
Perhaps you should google “ATT Uverse”.
Any idea of the power consumption of a few billion internet routers, billions desktops, smartphones tablets and laptops? True, not wll of it is used for listening to radio, but the power consumption argument doesn’t hold.
Well Said !!!!!
This is something that most people Never consider
2 billion routers (one per family with 1 kid, at 10W) is about 20 GW. Or about 30/440 nuclear power plants we have.
Then there are the refrigerators…
I have attempted to repair vintage radios for the past several years. I prefer shortwave tube radios above all because a radio I listened to while in my youth. I still listen to SW and know others like to listen as well.
Yah, Shortwave tube radios are awesome!
Just lie on your couch all day and you will get to hear all sorts of stations without even getting up because the VFO is constantly drifting and the weak filtering lets through a few stations at a time!
I totally agree. The internet, server farms, bitcoin miners, etc suck up so much juice there’s little left over for us plebes.
You strike several valid points. I remember how important RFE when I was a kid. It was no less important when serving in the military, countries that lacked internet and telephone privacy. Even today, North Korea severely punishes anyone who finds work-arounds that allow them to watch South Korean TV using the internet. Shortwave still has a mission to fulfill.
This is all way wrong. First, shortwave was never exactly a commercial success, it was mostly govt run stations sending propaganda. Simple fact is that it doesnt reach enough people anymore to make it worth their while. Second, the Internet does not have a “backbone” anymore. For years it has become so highly meshed that a large scale takedown is not possible except for nuclear war which will devastate shortwave frequencies as well. Crowdstrike has nothing to do with the Internet’s reliability. It took down Windows systems not the network. As for what the Intenret was “built for”, it is irrelevant because the RFC mechanisms of the Internet means it evolves constantly just like your phone was never “meant to” be a camera. The Internet was “meant to” survivably transport data from place to place. Audio data, video data, text data. Actually one of the other military goals other than survivability is interoperability between different system architectures. By the way, the military themselves was one of the first to transport voice and video over ARPANET and the DDN. I know because I sent RADAR imagery over the DDN network in 1988 in the US AIr Force.
Technically internet is solid as rock. But:
– Facebook is down: internet is down!
– WhatsApp is down: internet is down!
– what is the website/app dedicated for your local crisis control center?
– power crisis/outage – can your smartphone work as long as pocket radio (30h-100h on 2xAA battery)?
– local emergency situation – how many times simple accident overloaded cellular network?
– a lot of areas are still not covered with cellular network – those are areas where people work.
I was never part of “radio crowd” and I never listened anything on SW (except some tests few years back) but the older I get the more I realize that we should really care for radio. Internet is great and in many critical situations much better than radio. But it is complex, requires complex equipment and most people will simply not get it.
I recently saw an article that stated Switzerland will cease all FM broadcasting in the near future in favor of internet streaming. And I also realized that everyone who listens to a stream can be monitored, whereas broadcasting is anonymous.
Years ago there was a project… can’t remember the name… it was a p2p streaming solution. The idea was one person could stream on a budget because they only needed enough bandwidth to stream to a few peers who would then re-stream.
That wouldn’t give completely gauranteed privacy but it would certainly make getting the entire listener list difficult. Add some well designed encryption and it could be anonymous.
I’m pretty sure the project died because… YouTube. Suddenly you didn’t need to provide the bandwidth yourself and shared recordings that could be listened to or watched on the user’s time was more convenient than a live stream anyway.
But hey.. if broadcast radio and TV die completely then maybe those who still miss broadcast will be motivated to bring such an idea back.
Switzerland is ceasing analog FM broadcasting in favor of digital radio (DAB+). More bandwidth, and you can still listen anonymously.
I forgot to mention, there had been promissing attempts to modernize shortwave.
I was there when DRM, Digital Radio Mondiale had been in a large testing phase in late 2000s.
It worked fine, even had an over‐the‐air web browser for Journaline service.
The DREAM software on PC was easy to use, too.
All it needed was a soundcard and a direct conversion receiver (7 to 12 KHz IF out).
I’ve used an EF95 based tube receiver back then (link below).
It could handle the longwire antenna the best (transistor circuits did overload too easily).
The reason DRM didn’t became popular was same as with DAB back then.
Receivers did cost slightly more.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Radio_Mondiale
https://www.elexs.de/ef956.htm
It’s a real shame DRM didn’t catch on, with the way China turns out cheap electronic crap they could provide DRM radios to the entire world.
Just saying, but 7-12kHz IF isn’t direct conversion, it’s low IF.
Close, but no cigar. :-)
I used toblisten to SW as a teen. Now I bought another, and installed an antenna on the ceiling, but I seldom use it, it is pretty dull.
My thoughts exactly. I rarely missed a night on my trusty Grundig or Super Radio. It was always great to hear something new. I had a long wire antenna in the attic. But it’s just not a thing anymore; things change.
Yup, i would never had the job carrer I had of not for my experience with short wave radio as a kid living over seas as a military brat. I then modified a 7 transistor walkie talkie with a bnc con for a dilole external ant. I spoke with pirate radio stations all over europe on 100Mw , still have the QSL cards to prove it. I was 12 yrs old, NOw 62. Yes it was top of an 11 year solar cycle. I went on to become a Ham with a full un restricted licence at age 14. I worked in 2 way radio for the rest of my life to retirement.
That’s the COST of progress.
I really wish Digital Radio Mondiale was supported by more widely known manufacturers and broadcasters.
Being AM, it can be long range.
Modern codecs mean that decent quality audio can be achieved over really small bitrates. If using the Opus audio format it’s license free.
Being original radio over the airwaves, it cannot be censored like the internet can. Something to consider with current conflicts around the world.
There are some “pirate” radio stations like Radio Caroline that have invested in increasing their coverage over AM: https://www.redtech.pro/radio-caroline-increases-coverage/
Instead I would have thought they should be promoting Digital Radio Mondiale, perhaps a partnership with Raspberry Pi / supporting vendors to provide a DRM HAT module to make the receivers abundantly available.
From: https://forums.theregister.com/forum/all/2024/07/02/switzerland_to_end_2024_with/#c_4889353
In Australia, radio is bouncing back. People have discovered that the internet isn’t as immediate as they think. On the other hand, radio can get emergency messages out to the masses in an instant.
In today’s world most use internet for everything. They were schooled,raised and know nothing but internet. The shortwave stations today are a niche market mostly to 3rd and 4th world countries. The days of shortwave are numbered but will continue on for many decades to come. However,it will be for the few and not the many.
Boomers gave us shortwave, millennials gave us google.
> Between World War II and Y2K, shortwave listening was quite an education
Well before WWII. According to my ma, during Japanese occupation it was a capital offense to have a radio. Allegedly her grandmother had a SW radio buried in the back yard and when all the soldiers suddenly put away their guns she dug it up and listened to the BBC (or was it still Empire Broadcasting back then?) to answer everybody’s questions.
Some countries censor the Internet.
If a student protest, over thirty years ago, was dealt with by military forces – but all references were deleted – would local citizens even remember?
Other nearby countries, without the censorship, can certainly talk about it over HF. Even send pictures, using Slow Scan TV. The trouble is distinguishing the truth from propaganda.
As the article pointed out, radio is a great way to hear alternative viewpoints.
I remember reading that in some places (Cuba?) citizens had exchanged USB thumb drives because of a situation like this (no internet or censored).
However, I’m not sure anymore about the details. Speaking under correction, thus.
Needless to say that listening to radio is less dangerous than exchanging stuff with strangers.
About SSTV, there’s also fax over radio.
Same format as weather fax (still in use, ships use it to have uptodate weather chart).
Some news agencies, especially in Japan, had transmitted news papers via shortwave.
The transmission time took a few minutes each, but was in high‐resolution. Better than the fax machine on the landline.
World service type broadcasts are worth if for the “soft power”, if the BBC tells you something is so, there was a time when most people listening from anywhere would believe them – it was a hard won reputation.
Exactly. Is this still the case, which SW stations can claim this reputation now?
Propaganda can be used both ways.
Back in the day (cold war) I remember Voice of America versus Radio Moscow.
You knew who was who (usual announcers etc) but now, with AI speech generation, even that won’t be guaranteed.
As a ham operator, I’ve listened to shortwave for most of my life.
Most of what’s on the shortwave bands now are religious stations, and there are some
countries that still broadcast, but as this article states, shortwave is a pale shadow of its former self.
There are still a lot of things to hear on the bands, ham radio operators, numbers stations, time signals,
planes using HF, mysterious RTTY signals, ships at sea, there’s still plenty to hear but sadly, the shortwave of the 1940s
to the 1970’s is long gone. What I do like is broadcast band DX, how many AM stations in the USA can
I pick up at night? The simplicity of radio. The simplest of pleasures. I wish I still had my grandfather’s
1937 Philco. That thing to a small kid was huge, and I would spend many many hours tuning around the
shortwave bands. It was a fun time. I’d bet from the 30’s to the 70’s there was plenty of good listening.
A time that will never come again…..how sad….
I am in the final stages of restoring my great-uncle’s 1939 Philco, the same one I learned morse code on in the early 70’s to get my HAM license. AM is fun, but I do wish some more of the International stations would resume more active programming… I installed a Bluetooth link to be able to at least stream some good material when the airwaves are dull… But when the Net goes silent some day, I look forward to powering up the Philco and staying in touch!
Other than pop music programing on WRMI, shortwave is a wasteland. I agree with George that DXing evenings on the AM band is where it’s at.
By the way, people who were serious into the radio hobby didn’t have a “shortwave radio” but had invested in a so-called “communications receiver”.
Many of them did cover 100 KHz to 30 MHz in all modulation modes.
Higher‐end models also did cover VHF/UHF range and were nice radios to radio amateurs or people interested into air band etc.
“The problem is information overload. ”
Maybe not. IMO, there is not a problem at all, just a shift in approach and interests. When the world was isolated with walls, the BBC and VOA provided views across borders. Today, the EU has no border, per se. While Russia, China, N. Korea are isolated, there is a remarkable amount of public news escaping over the Internet.
I have several shortwave radios, but find them nearly useless due to the RF noise generated by home networking. I “could” put up an outside antenna but hiding it from the HOA is more trouble than it is worth.
I turned on the home FM component system for the first time in years yesterday as I was cleaning out the home theater room which is also little used: the main home flatscreen produces an exceptional picture and sound. Firing up the DLP system just to watch a DVD seems like too much trouble when I can stream DVD quality and have a vast selection, a good percentage free if I agree to punish myself with a few instream advertisements.
And why tune in WWV when time.gov is a far easier approach?
I keep my shortwave radios working and with fresh batteries mainly for emergency purposes as they are inexpensive units that “may” prove useful; cellular service towers seem to be a highly visible target for any disruptive event.
Smoke signals, pony express mail, telegraph, wired telephone service, and newspaper are mostly referred to in past tense. Such is evolution.
Your points are valid, as you ask why tune into WWV when time.gov is a far easier approach?
Try going time.gov when you have no internet, cell is down because the power has been off
for weeks. Yes, smoke signals etc. are the referred to in the past tense, but I can say, compared to the cheap plastic phones made today, my old Bell and Western Electric phones have stood the test of time. When you have reliable internet, power and all the creature comforts of home, yes, indeed you can go to time.gov. A kid saw my ham radio handheld and basically said, so what? I can do that with my cellphone. (This was before satellite phones mind you) to which I replied, OK send me a text or call me when you’re in the middle of a forest with no cell service. Radio is simple, and as I said above, it’s one of life’s simple pleasures. Speaking only for myself, I prefer simpler things. The people in Texas without power, many are relying on radio for information and news. To each their own I guess….
I believe that proven communication methods old and new can coexist. Each has it’s merits. Radio and ham require no wifi connection. Just the ionosphere. Everything Internet based will let us down during/when catastrophic events occur and we will have to use the “old faithful” radio technology. Bring I grew up without computers. Then in the 90s my career demanded it to use mechanical design software on a PC to design products. There’s an efficiency and precision using today’s technology without a doubt. But on the other hand “over the air radio” will get us through the eventual EMP events in the future. The ionosphere (radio’s version of a Wi-Fi connection) will not let us down either.
That’s a bit like with CGI and hand‐drawn animation, I think.
Both have their pros and cons. CGI seems like the future, yet same time people cheerish hand-drawn animation or real special effects using animatronics and a real hand‐made set.
I think that coexistance is real, too. Whenever I work with tube, I realize how good they are in supporting solid‐state technology.
They both improve each others if being allowed to work together.
Ask the military why they are still using HF radio for strategic communications. Ask China why it is omnipresent on SW in so many languages. You’ll be surprised.
I was born in the 60’s…I am amazed at the bounty of options I now have for getting information . Amazed and grateful to all those who work at making this embracement of riches possible. Places like Internet Archives. websdr.org, Youtube, etc etc etc are vast wells of goodness we only dreamt of in my youth.
If you want to do something like SW, it is still there to do. There is also so much more. Find the joy in the IDIC
Things are not how they were…yep. Every few years that is the case. When that stops we are either in a dark age or the heat death of the universe.
Wait 20 years there will be folks nostalgic about Annoying Orange and Twitch Streamer Bath Water Sales.
File under Horseshoers Of The World Unite.
“I was born in the 60’s…I am amazed at the bounty of options I now have for getting information . Amazed and grateful to all those who work at making this embracement of riches possible. Places like Internet Archives. websdr.org, Youtube, etc etc etc are vast wells of goodness we only dreamt of in my youth. ”
We’re talking about mainstream, I suppose?
Because the shiny new internet world isn’t as shiny as it seems.
Many technologies had been in existance in earlier form in the 70s and 80s already.
CompuServe had a chat‐room called “CB Simulator” in early 80s, already.
It also was among the first to have pictures inside the “browser” (information manager).
Then there was Promenade/Quantum Link for Commodore users.
Later on in the 90s, then‐new AOL featured a lot these, too.
Initially through its own network, which was NOT the internet.
A lot of ex-AOL users seem to miss that bit. Like CompuSrve or Minitel, AOL had its own servers/mainframes.
It wasn’t just an ISP, but also an online service.
But back to the 80s, my father here in Germany had used Datex-P service to access databases in north america in early 80.
This worked via X.25 packet‐switched networks, the grand daddies of the internet.
And in my case, I had used videotext service on TV to read the news.
It didn’t cost anything extra, it was a data stream embedded in the video signal.
And when I needed information, it could always visit my local city library.
But that wasn’t needed even. As a kid, I had a colorful lexicon.
It had a lot of pictures in it.
About WebSDR.. It’s good and bad same time.
It’s nice to play with, but many hams use it as an excuse not to build a reception station at home. Like in case of QO-100 geo satellite.
That’s sad, because good amateurs did start as SWLs and focused at being good listeners first.
By listening, you learn a lot about patience and gain social skills.
Something that many hams could put to good use.
In my place, there even used to be a term to radio amateurs that didn’t transmit.
It was “Höramateur”, the listening amateur.
He was (is) an shortwave listener, SWL, but also interested in all types of radio communications.
In my country, the radio club does still issue hearing signs (counterparts to call signs) to them.
To obtain them, they either have to pass an exam or have an existing call sign issued by our FCC‐counterpart.
Last but not least, SDRs experience isn’t that new, really.
The WinRadio receivers from the 90s had a similar look and feel.
You could control a superhet box from within Windows 3.1/95 or macOS 8/9.
Depending on the model, the receiver also had an IF output, so the spectrum could be displayed on screen.
Really, all the modern technology we do constantly hype doesn’t come from nowhere.
It had been there decades before already. It was just less being mainstream.
Growing up in the United States along with Germany, I had my fair share of listening to shortwave broadcasts on my mother’s GE Trans-Oceanic radio and my Oma and Opa’s Grundig (with the “kerchunk” buttons on the front panel). If not listening to Deutsche Welle, Radio Bayern or other broadcasts in the little dorf where they lived, I was allowed (since I could return the radio back to UKW mode) to listen to other countries from that beautiful box in the kitchen. Mind you, they did have a colo(u)r television, but programming came on in the afternoon. Radio was where the entertainment was.
When I was living in the states, my mother just listened to public radio (because of the classical music they would play). She never used the shortwave bands to tune in to DW or the other stations. One day, before she came home, I went ahead and ran a long wire along the roof of the house and went around the 6Mhz and 11Mhz bands and found Deutsche Welle. When she got home, she was furious with me for “changing the channels” on her radio…until she heard the broadcast from home. She softened up, and let me keep it there until she wanted it back to public broadcasting.
Now, I’m a Radio Amateur (Amateurfunk) and still use my radios (when not contesting) to try and finagle a signal or two from back overseas. I even have a Grundig receiver (one with Kerchunk buttons) that has Shortwave and the listings of the countries on the bandplan. Oh the fun is still there, but the stations are fleeting.
Alles Gute, and keep your ear to the ether,
Chris (KC8KVA)
I used to sit and listen to the radio with my grandfather. We’d listen to all sorts of stuff.
In the 1970’s there was a radio series called The CBS Radio Mystery Theater.
I found that was was hooked. Now there is a station here in Washington (KIXI) that broadcasts old time radio shows nightly.
https://archive.org/details/cbs_radio_mystery_theater
Brilliantly put. Some people need enlightened to the fact the term Internet comes from “Inter-network”.
It’s the result of different networks coming together using shared protocols, not a military installation that got opened up to the public.
Notably, shortwave does have new developments, but they’re in data transfer, usually for high frequency trading.
Coming from an amateur radio background, I’ve tried listening to shortwave before, and the quality is terrible.
The only benefit it has for the average person is that you can receive it most places on the earth with cheap and compact receivers, but that’s about it. Great for large-scale emergencies, but having few other advantages over other options if you have them available.
DRM was the thing that had the ability to keep shortwave relevant, but it never was fully fleshed out.
A DRM replacement with modern technology and dirt-cheap receivers/ICs might be able to turn the tide, but the stations need large effective service ranges, high fidelity audio, and programming people want to listen to.
“You can argue that with the Internet, you don’t need radio…”
Unless, of course, your government decides that they want to filter/alter/block your internet access.
And not just them. ISPs are quick to block IPs if they’re told.
They do that to avoid any potentional trouble.
“Radio isn’t coming back, barring an apocalyptic event.”
Of course, this covers such a broad range of severity, with events in the lower end becoming more and more common…. Guess it’s time to get serious about modding that Quansheng! ;)
In the past decades, many international broadcasting services have moved to the Ku band for many reasons like cheaper on both ends, better quality and hard to jam. No internet or subscription needed (except maybe in the US).
https://www.lyngsat.com/index.html
The #1 thing about the internet is you don’t have to listen or watch. You can just read or take quick look at headlines at any news site that tickles your fancy. And then read an article if interested. Wonderful. No longer have to sit through an hour of news or listen at top of the hour by some talking head that may/does have an agenda. Just click, look, done at YOUR convenience. Really has changed how ‘I’ at least get my news. I don’t get how people still will sit and ‘watch’ television in this day and age. Even movies, you can watch at your convenience, skip thru parts of it as desired, no advertisements (or skip over them), etc…. win win.
That said, I also had a short wave radio in my teens. Was fun to pick something up not local… But now … I certainly don’t need it. But then I have access to the web. Some areas still might not have access where Short wave and radio may still be useful. Of course you still need the basic commodity of ‘electricity’ whether battery or a power source.
I spent a lot of time spinning the dial in the 70s and 80s… Spent a lot of time living overseas so I had some interesting listening opportunities.
Nowadays, I can’t find anything interesting to listen to on shortwave.
Yep. Not many people care about trying a new hobby when they need to pass an exam to really get into it.
I have talked with a lot of people about my radios and antennas on my property. Every one of them who has more than a passing interest in the field immediately stops caring when they learn about the exam and fees.
Probably for the best, keeps the airwaves open for me.
Yeah that exam now it’s true and costs money too, but it’s very easy ( nowadays with no Morse code)for the basic level in the USA and you can take it over zoom. Just saying, it’s not a very high barrier to entry.
The USA had it cheap. Everything was free of charge by comparion to other countries.
Here in Germany, we have to pay a fee every two years for frequency use. That’s about 50€, I think (2×27€, for both year).
The issuing of the license costs 100 € (one time) after passing exam. Attending that exam itself does cost 70€.
It’s kind of understandable, though.
The fee covers certaing things, like the band guard which monitors our bands for intruders.
So It’s okay, I think. If you truely love ham radio, it doesn’t matter.
Comparing to getting a drivers license in Germany, it’s dirt cheap. That’ll cost you 2000 to 3000€. ;)
I find it fascinating that young YouTuber “Report of the Week” aka Reviewbrah hosts a shortwave podcast.
I think when a world catastrophic event occurs, that would bring back all the reliable old tech and make them interesting again. Perhaps a strong solar flare, or a large asteroid hitting the ocean. While the current world is rather technology advanced, it also gets more and more fragile over time.
You can use sdr or software defined radio and some free sites to listen to shortwave over the net and it’s got no overhead such as buying gear or an antenna. I’ve gotten back into shortwave because of it. Check out http://websdr.ewi.utwente.nl:8901/ there is a little getting used to what you’re doing. Granted there are a lot less stations than in my youth but it’s still fun to hear media from around the world.
Shortwave died when Popular Communications magazine died.
I worked shortwave back in the late 60s and 70s on an old Hallicrafter and a Heathkit HR10b. I still have my QSL cards and various items from world stations in my files. My favorite is a commemorative stamp issued by Radio Netherlands in 1973 that had a big 73 on them. (Years ago I tried to sell one on eBay but no Hams were interested). I miss White’s Radio Log and the list of frequencies and times in the back of Radio TV Experimenter magazine. I remember listening for the “interval signal” or the unique 25 second sound/musical clip that each station played over and over when it was going to come on air on a particular frequency Keeping a written log of contacts and pushing record on a Radio Shack cassette deck to grab 15 minutes of broadcast so could mail it overseas to score another QSL card. My little town post office was always having to get out a book to look up postage rates to the exotic places. I am still looking for a set to get back into it but to get my fix I go to Radio Garden (www.radio.garden) and jump around the world on my computer.
Same here. When my kids were younger we tuned in some stations and they got a hoot out of receiving QSL cards. I even piped the audio output of my old 1945 Hallicrafter SX-25 into a computer with Morse code decoding software so they could read what was being sent. Showed them how to report the signal and look up the hams address to get his QSL.
Eventually I got an extra class amateur radio license, AC9GL. It’s 5 letters because they ran out of 4 letter call signs. Maybe with fewer people getting into amateur radio I can find a good 4 letter call sign.
SW as a broadcast medium may be struggling but the trend for authenticity and analogue has led many to a resurgence of the SW duplex that is ham radio. Perhaps in time this trend will also re-emerge in broadcast also.
Yes I do listen to SW 15215 KHZ ON 19 Band every Wednesday and Saturday 13:00 ET – 14:30ET. It’s called FANO Radio
I used to work at the Radio Australia Shepparton transmitter site for around 15 years, with its 100KW, 50KW and a couple of 10KW AM transmitters. While I was there, the 4 old AWA 100KW transmitters (12KV @ around 12Amps) were replaced with 100KW (30KV @4Amps) Harris transmitters that used PWM modulation. I think those figures are about right, but is was 30 years ago…
One could make a crystal set and listen to the radio but The Powers To Be decided everyone has Internet, so the site was closed down a few years ago and millions of $$$ worth of equipment went to scrap metal. It was a very sad and ill advised decision in my opinion. Still, I managed to get a power supply and a bit of test gear I made while out there, as well as a couple of the monitor speakers, saving them from the trash dump.
There is a short recording of the last couple of mins of the tuning signal..
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HbgclVGneJg
Out local Ham Radio club got access for 48 hours to use the antennas and that was fun but very sad. I made up the BALUNS, connected them to the antenna feed and others ran cables etc.
Hooking your Ham Radio set to a full sized curtain array or rombic antenna works VERY WELL!
Here is the closing of that 48 hours…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ONKnBSP9reI
This last transmission from the Ham Radio and playing the tuning signal brought tears to my eyes.
I think there is a great need for open radio to tell the world what is going on, and not having governments censoring the internet feeds and short wave radio filled that need pretty well.
I bought a $20 shortwave receiver. The stations were full of static and 90% in other languages or else religious wack jobs. And even then only at night.
It wasn’t worth the $20. Yeah yeah maybe a better receiver but just listening to that … naw man.
And this from a pretty die hard CW and HF ham dude.
I bought a small Eton portable last year, and usually just pick up NOAA / USGC broadcasts, time signals, etc. Rarely find (or can pick up) anything of interest, and larger antennas are not an option for where I live for getting anything out of country.
But even just the utility broadcasts I will put on just out of a sense of pre-Internet (even pre-dial up) nostalgia. Hearing those things as a kid gave the sense that someone was minding the store, watching the seas, and making sure the world ran on time.
Here in Europe we also have longwave broadcast band.
Maybe a few stations (if any left) can be heard over the big pond during night time?
I think short wave radio listening was the start of my migration to Australia.I used to listen to Radio Australia in my bedroom in North London on a valve radio picked up at a jumble sale.The antenna was an excellent army Tank antenna brought from the local ex army surplace store.It was probably too short but hey,What would I know at 14 about SWR.
Tube/valve radios are the best for fun and listening. My Hallicrafters SX-25 is still my favorite for SWR listening. Fist time I showed it to my kids they thought it was on fire. 🤣
If that’s how Australians spell “surplus” you’d better stay there!
Was it on the £10 crossing?
My poor Zenith 12S232 😥
I saw the writing on the wall by the late 90s with the emergence of the Internet. And I let KD6NMI fade away.
It wasn’t just the internet, maybe. Digital radio via satellite was available by late 80s or early 90s. At least here in Europe, my knowledge about North America is limited.
Audiophiles surely had preferred it over shortwave, I think. CD quality audio vs AM radio.
Anyone, where does HAM Radio fit into this discussion? I built an 80m rig in my teens and enjoyed just Morse coding ( WN7PHR). I live in WA and was thrilled to “talk” to someone in Texas.
Ham radio is alive and well. Lots of new digital modes and great radios at an affordable price.
My first shortwave receiver in the mid 50’s was a war surplus ARC-5 that tuned 40 meters. I still have a couple receivers, a Panasonic RF-2200 and a Kenwood R600. I spent many an evening listening to foreign broadcasts and hams. It was magic, a direct link to far off places. And, it took some effort. You had to know where and when to find them and when you did it was so satisfying.
Now, those far off places are just a click away. The magic is gone. The broadcasters get more bang for their buck on the internet. So, there’s nothing worth listening to anymore. And, as mentioned, the spectrum is now full of noise.
I note that the BBC restarted service to Eastern Europe after the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Internet, power and cellular were down in some areas, Viasat got hacked for sattelite internet.
You can build a single shortwave reciever from spare parts if you have the time and ability. You can’t build a world wide web in a hurry.
It’s very hard to locate a user accessing a foreign shortwave broadcast. It can be very easy to find an online user. Shortwave isn’t dead. Many broadcasts might end, I call it good, way less interference that way..
It depends how you construct the receiver. In the old days LO leakage back up the antenna was one way, especially with single-valve front ends.
The world is full of information overload. It’s so bad that where people used to write letters that were 2 to 5 pages long…. A letter now must be a footnote or a sound bite in size or people won’t read it.
You could blame restrictions on message length a trend started and continues today. You must say whatever it is you with to say in 100 -750 characters or less.
I’m a person who first studied Philosophy for my first University degree and if you really want to say something of substance and if you have something to say worth saying it would normally take much more than just quick tweet or 250 character limited comment.
People now don’t have the time or the patience to read anything that’s longer than the first paragraph normally of even most newspaper stories.
Even research journals people merely just read the abstract and maybe they read the methodology or just the conclusion after the above three and even in law school we were taught to speed read using a well-known us lawyer method called I.R.A.C because with the average $250 plus pages of reading that’s required per day in most US law schools and the other rejection to increase the time. Due to the ever-expanding body of Law and case law which one must both research and then look for other similar cases where they’ve analyzed the facts and situations of any particular case and made a decision based on what we call “the fact pattern”. So you could cruise through a 20 Page legal decision and quickly find the ISSUE: the main question is being examined and the law any question, the RULE: the law as it’s written or any regulations and law that applies which can include progeny which are cases that have been decided already that match your fact pattern and either slightly differentiate it or support it sometimes over willing the rule of law favoring adjust and fair outcome. The ANALYSIS: the courts rationale for either her sticking with the absolute clear reading of the text or their rationale for interpreting that text in light of unforeseen future variables that could not have been foreseen by the legislators who wrote said law or rule when they wrote it. The CONCLUSION: the summarized verdict of the Court based on all of the above.
This is a summary of how Allah your or a legal professional in a common law jurisdiction would approach the research and evaluation of any case based on the “law” and “its fact pattern” and we use a common citation format that for some reason has been made property by the Harvard School of Law and is published in a book which is updated from you to year maybe every few years called the BLUE BOOK.
Using this citation format you can go to a law library anywhere in the United States and you can look up your case using this particular format or the law itself and see a list of other citations which either affirm the law as written or differentiates it and in some cases overturns it based on either a fundamentally Fair outcome or that the law was written too vaguely to be understandable and applicable so therefore invalid, or that it violates either the state or federal constitution. A state constitution can grant you more rights but can’t curtail any of your rights granted to you by the Federal Constitution. Ratified treaties of the same force of law as the Constitution followed by federal law and federal code where they have the right to legislate which does not include police powers but of course due to incremental creep towards federalism in the United States the US Federal code uses both legal extortion and the commerce clause which at various times has been just merely mentioned or the Supreme Court has rained in its use allowing it only to be used as long as you make a reasonable and rational connection to interstate commerce. The legal extortion part for me is so obscene that it should be forbidden because it sends a very bad message to both the population and it says something about the system itself. When you allow the federal legislators to overstep their bounds and tell the states that they have to pass this law and if they don’t you’ll withhold withhold their Federal road financing money the size of the United States makes it impossible for a state to maintain the extensive network of roads. This is how they changed the legal age of drinking to 21 and the list goes on and on.
Then there’s the question of extra territorial law which grants jurisdiction of the United States law over people who are doing anything in the world so long as they are US citizens or have a legal residency card regardless of whether or not a whole dual nationality or not because Jewel nationality is not officially recognized but is allowed. Again this is poor behavior of the United States they should either allow it because we live in a modern world where people move around much more and they fall in love get married have children and they’re most certainly countries where the fundamental ideologies of those countries do not clash with the general interests of the United States.
To my knowledge Albert Einstein was the first official legal us dual National as he required that he be allowed to keep his Swiss nationality if you were to become an American citizen and he was granted variance. Many decades later I myself and the tool us and swiss National but when I signed the documents for my nationality here I had to acknowledge that I was aware that I could lose my US citizenship at any time because the recognition of dual nationality by the United States is merely a new interpretation of the law not the law as it’s written. They want to hold people accountable for us tax regardless of whether or not they’re living in the United States or not and they want to make it very difficult for you to expatriate and still be able to visit the United States without a Visa even if you’re coming from a country like Switzerland and they don’t want you to expatriate for tax purposes.
I became a Swiss National because I have two children here and I’ve spent most of my adult life here. This country is also one of the only direct democracies in the world so we vote quite often on just about everything of major importance or anything where 100,000 people sign a petition. So it’s quite easy to get any legislative act put to a national referendum. Switzerland is a neutral country and we’re feeling the pressure from our neighbors especially now that the European Union has become a single market economy and from the United States to abandon that neutrality in favor of their way of thinking or their way of doing things regardless of whether or not they’re more effective or less effective.
It’s been a common understanding that everyone wants to become an American but when the pandemic came into full effect and unlike the first version of the same family of virus called SARS 1, which using the advice of The who and tried and true methods of epidemiology which were invented by a man named Jon Snow in the United Kingdom during the outbreak that outbreak was contained within one month. During the recent pandemic the world leaders all decided they wanted to do their own thing and it’s rather than rely upon people who are paid very well and you are top there feels and what they do rather than listen to the agency that’s dedicated to dealing with a situation like this everyone went their own direction and now we have a virus that’s endemic. Endemic meaning that we were unable to contain it and it’s now forever with us unless it in some way g evolves or mutates to the point where is no longer a risk to your health and life.
Given that there’s been pretty substantial proof that it was a manufactured virus that got loose and the very bizarre side effects that it can produce it’s very possible that that could happen and it could change into a inert or less virulent and deadly virus or it could go the other direction we just have to wait and see.
But I noticed that my government put on our national news of this countries where you could not be certain or sure of the truth being told to you by those news outlets and lo and behold to my disbelief America was on the list with Russia China North Korea Iran etc…
Having taken epidemiology and emerging and evolving diseases just before the outbreak of the pandemic I had a mask on before most people did and I even used a special surgical mask which has a layer of a type of acid inactivate viruses and bacteria to protect both the patient and the surgeon should the surgeon have some type of airborne communicable disease.
But they also wash their hands extensively and where several layers of gloves even scrubbing their hands with special soap underneath their fingernails etc and they enter into a surgical room where everything has been similarly disinfected or sterilized before it ever touches the patient and the zone where they’re operating has been draped and the area where they make incisions have been sterilized with special iodine and other agents to reduce the risk of infection.
Well as a research student Department of infectious diseases at the University (Universti) of Malaya during a lunch meeting with all of the staff of the infectious diseases Department we would review a journal every week and this journal was on MRSA or Methalyathin resistant staphylococcus Aurelius. I noticed in the statistics that of vast majority of the deaths associated with this infection were due to a lack of hygiene or infection control in hospital during the placement of main lines. Everyone looked at me very strangely because I was the only non-board certified doctor on the team and my supervisor head of the hospital and the dean of Medicine spoke up very quickly and said how very correct you are Mr McBrayer. And the discussion devolved into infection control and that one of our residents at her Hospital in Australia had done experiment where they tried their very best to reduce or eliminate in hospital infections. It takes an enormous amount of control effort and policing, and in their case they empowered the nurses to act as the police, and they were able to reduce that infection rate by 90 plus percent from its normal. And not just the one I’m speaking up above but there are enormous number of either resistant or extensively resistant bacteria that survive only in hospitals especially in the intensive Care unit. They are unable to completely clean everything without taking extensive efforts including emptying a room and deploying a very high intensity UV light higher than a person could handle for any time so they would have to close off the room and do this but they still couldn’t get inside the air movement and duct work and all the cracks and crevices..
So some of the worst infections to this day occur within the hospital so it’s probably always in your best interest to get in and out of the hospital as quickly as you can while it’s still necessary to go there and to have operations and surgeries you do run the risk of catching persistent or extensively resistant bacteria and or virus that doesn’t exist outside the hospital in large numbers.
And the real fault of the entire pandemic from my perspective was the delay in reporting an international Public Health Emergency of international concern, this should not be a determination made by a single nation state but laboratories should be set up throughout different regions and with a mirror majority of a multinational staff present at set laboratories should that determination be made because the conflict of economic isolation and the damages for declaring such an emergency are clearly in favor of delay but promote the ongoing circulation of people via aircraft and otherwise spreading the disease throughout the world as has happened with you SARS 2.
While it’s true that the governments of the world should have forced the pharmaceutical companies to release the ingredient list of the vaccines because that’s a part of the Helsinki protocols and part of informed consent which is one of the key stones of bioethics.. it also does nothing but fruit juice conspiracy theories and we had our fair share of those and still do.. at the same time the government’s allowed us to be exposed to phase 1 through phase 3 clinical trials without full informed consent so it was a worldwide violation of the Helsinki protocol and bioethical norms. The fact that we didn’t practice infection control and contact tracing as we had during the first outbreak and the delays and declaring an emergency have left us with a forever new circulating Health threat.
This is the first time I’ve ever spoken on the subject because it’s such a heated political debate and it’s one of the reasons that I stopped working in the area of Public Health because it’s so politically charged and people just f*** the ignored the science and finally ignored the historical precedent which we learn in epidemiology on how to control an outbreak which has worked from Marburg, Ebola, Nehph, etc etc there’s a very long list of viral outbreaks most of them have been zonic meaning they jump from animals to humans and these are generally the most dangerous but so are bacterial resistance from overuse of antibiotics both in humans and in animal husbandry.. a recent survey by the United Kingdom found pharmaceuticals in every single waterway and I would assume that the case throughout the world.
Our water treatment plants were never designed to remove pharmaceuticals and in fact use bacteria themselves away to help clean the water and by introducing antibiotics to that system nothing good can come as well as the myriad of other pharmaceuticals from chemotherapy to antivirals and the human metabolites and animal metabolites the mixture of which and the effects of which in nature are completely not well understood. That’s basically a statement used in most research journals which means we have no idea whatsoever and normally it’s not a very good statement.
not always but quite often especially in something like infectious disease.. but this whole story goes to show you that people will only read the first paragraph and once they’ve decided what you’re speaking about they’ve already made their own minds up regardless of their training education or background based on what they’ve heard from some supposed expert who may be a podiatrist (a foot doctor) has was the case with a Kentucky politician who spoke out very loudly on the subject. I think podiatrists are important and they do go to medical school but most of them and most General practitioners have never done any medical research nor have they published any peer-reviewed journals.
That is an advanced Medical course which is a masters of Public Health or a specialized course like one in tropical diseases from the London School of tropical diseases the best in the world. These people and people who specialize from a university like Emory and Atlanta which is next to the Centers for disease control have absolutely incredible specialized courses on infectious disease and coughing and emerging diseases as we are seeing and have seen throughout our entire lives on this planet.
Donald trump, a podiatrist, Boris johnson, Vladimir putin, the head of the Communist Party in China have no idea what the hell they’re talking about as do most people I would ask people if they knew who Jon Snow was and if they didn’t I would refuse to speak to them on this subject it became so politically charged in people became so angry with their positions to be right..they were so sure that they were right and that they had some heavenly given inside knowledge that the rest of us don’t and they acted that way and still act that way.
The truth is it’s the truth that the vaccine that we gave was rushed but it did save enormous number of lives especially those who are vulnerable and those who are vulnerable should continue to get boostership shots with the new variants that are showing up around the world if they want to make sure that they stay alive as long as possible and don’t suffer the effects of long covid which has not been proven to be something that can be very detrimental to a person’s quality of life. Does the vaccine have negative implications to your health possibly but probably less and less as they refine their techniques and they learn more about what they’re doing. Medicine and research as well as vaccine production takes time and we didn’t have time so because of the failures of our politicians and the failure to listen to The experts what wasn’t outbreak became an epidemic and evolved into something that is now endemic. This means it went from something that was possibly controllable to a full-on global pandemic and now a disease that will circulate in our population forever until we either find a cure for it or it mutates to something innocuous or it could very well mutate to something much more serious we just don’t have an answer.. nobody can give you an answer to that question and I don’t care who they think they are or say they are if they do they’re either far too egotistical or far too on educated.
The answer to the question is we don’t know and that’s something people have a hard time doing now it’s accepting that we don’t have all the answers that even in the modern era we’re still stumbling our way through science both life science and in physics though we have seen enormous changes in both areas and we have discovered much about our world and universe we are still taking baby steps.
So do I think that radio is important and that people should read more and more often and spend less time on social media without a question. My best friend in college who is probably the smartest person I know has a PHD in rural molecular biochemistry and is a professor of neurological surgery so he’s not only a neurosurgeon but he’s a professor of neurosurgery and I’m making a joke about neurosurgeons and rocket scientists. On top of that, he’s a rockstar in his area and has one of the highest impact point levels of anybody I know and he’s about 20 years younger than I am.
So, I hope that he wins the Nobel prize because I know what he’s working on and we would all benefit especially people who have issues with their central nervous system or suffer injury or trauma to their optic nerve or spinal column. Being a major Brain Research Center due to the amount of money donated by a lot of the tech companies his university got pulled into research on an emerging disease very similar SARS II (COVID-19). I use the first designation for that virus because that’s the official designation the latter came second because it actually belongs to the family of viruses which caused a similar respiratory issue then originated from Southeast Asia. And no we’re not certain that they come from baths it’s quite likely because bats do harbor an enormous number of zoonic viruses both historically and presently as do rodents.
But people should keep their minds open and not form opinions so quickly without having done the necessary prerequisite research and study and given that we do have access to Medical journals online and that we have to be careful because of the publisher parish paradigm which I agree is a big problem that needs to be addressed.. it has also made science and medical research the subject of skepticism and conspiracy theories but in reality of vast majority of these people are really trying their best to both discover things about our physical world in the case of experimental and particle physicists and are biological world in the case of life scientists.
Add to this all of the people who are interested in this area of specialization either be it an electrical engineer, mechanical engineer or a hobbyist or hacker using the old definition of hacker or not the current one and that also makes another point supporting everything I’ve said above. Why is being a hacker such a bad thing now why is it automatically seen as someone who is doing harm or up to no good when that’s not the definition of what a hacker is or what but one that was made by media and our social media who are out to do nothing but sell you things and influence your perspective to match their own and to do so with extreme levels of effort because they have to be right. That’s the definition of narcissism and I grew up with it and have been an object of it damage including the fact that I would have preferred to get a degree in electrical engineering or in medicine but I was manipulated and forced to become a lawyer. I’m so bright they tell me that I was an extremely good lawyer and still am but it’s not something I love.
Be careful what you read do your own research and don’t listen to Google but read Google scholar and if you can’t understand it take the time to learn how to understand it because of the lawyer can understand it at the degree that I do now after having read thousands and thousands of papers so can you. And now I wish to learn more about the electrical engineering and electronics and I’m also the data scientist already having done research in science because I have a background in research methodology and statistics which is the basis of many sciences so the lateral movement is a lot easier.
Send me I don’t have enough life left to become a doctor which I would have preferred or a researcher with a bench science degree or one in electrical engineering or mechanical engineering and even experimental physics or astrophysics but I was robbed of that by a narcissist someone who had to be right no matter what even if it meant harming his own son.
So if that’s the case in my life imagine what people will do to get your money or your vote.
AquahoodJD (neohackjd) -yesterday cheesy hacker name but I am somewhat new while at the same time I had my own pbs, a commodore 64 with four Daisy chained floppy tribes in my own private phone line with an auto dialer as my parents got fed up with hearing the scream of my us robotics modem.
Social media can be such a good force in the world and so can the internet but at the same time it must be taken with a huge grain of salt and you MUST READ THE MANUAL (OR MAN PAGE). AND EVEN AT PRESENT YOU HAVE TO ALSO TAKE SCIENTIFIC RESEARCH AS WITH A GRAIN OF SALT AND IT WOULD BE WHO APPEAR TO READ ABOUT RESEARCH METHODOLOGIES WHICH IS A CLASS BECAUSE MANY OF THE PAPERS THAT I READ EVEN AS OF YESTERDAY MADE THESE BOLD CLAIMS ABOUT SOMETHING PEOPLE HAVE USED QUITE SUCCESSFULLY FOR GOOD MENTAL HEALTH BUT THEY ONLY HAD 900 PEOPLE AS PARTICIPANTS IN THEIR STUDY AND NO CONTROL GROUP! MAKING SUCH BOLD CLAIMS WITH SUCH A WEAK STUDY IS ACADEMIC CLICKBAIT!
“The world is full of information overload.”
There is also the case to be made for tailoring your work for your audience and staying focused.
I started to read your response to the short article/original post but then quickly wondered, what is the point being made here? So, I scrolled and scrolled and realized your reply is about six times as long as the article itself. It also mentions the word “radio” one time – the only potential link I could see to the question posed by the article title, though I’m sure there were parallels etc.
You may legitimately question the purpose of my reply.
We can surely sit through a hour long TV or radio show and come away with insights that we never would get from Tweets and TikToks but the vast majority have no interest in investing that much time or effort.
I got lost when ALLAH was referred.
I wondered if it was a typo, or a reference to religious law.
While giving it a second reading, it appears a voice to text program was used in making it, with the program making a few Lady Mondegreens.
Honestly wondered if this was AI generated at first.
The primary problem with the above post exemplifies a problem with “long-form” content. It takes more time to read it than was likely spent creating it. If you’re not willing to spend the time to make your point clear then it largely isn’t worth reading (excepting being historical documents).
Sir, you are Frank Abagnale, and I claim my $50!
Among the radios I have is a 1945 Hallicrafters SX-25 “Super Defiant” shortwave receiver. I completely restored it in 1981 after and old wax capacitor shorted out. It’s still my favorite radio with glowing tubes and a heavy steel case you could use as a jack stand to work on a car.
Using a sophisticated Crystal calibrator with decade box I designed and built I can tune into exact frequencies as if it were digital radio. 😎 I have other shortwave radios and a few I built from kits but none are as fun as the Hallicrafters. 😊
I have an old vacuum tube German SW radio, but its main transformer is open circuit. Someday (Sigh!) I hope to see if has a broken wire just inside the shell.
I also inherited a solid state Sangean SW radio, but I keep that inside a Faraday cage for post-SHTF.
Does anyone remember the Minilabs crystal radio? My bedroom was transformed into an antenna for quite some time.
It still works for me. I’d be less than half as informed about the Black Sea Region if there weren’t the transmissions by Radio Romania International, in a number of languages.
Same about Africa – wouldn’t know much about it without Radio France Internationale. Same with domestic Chinese programs – the content is quite different from what they post online.
Etc..
Underestimate shortwave broadcasting at your own risk. ;)
How different is Chinese domestic compared to their online or national stuff? Were/are the radio stations you listen to largely “amateur” run or company/official?
You get rather well-built, but shorter reports on domestic radio, and the flagship news programs are extremely reverent to the leadership, especially party and state leader Xi Jinping. All of the radio stations have a party secretary or a party cell secretary, so they’ve made sure of that.
Many online websites are privately-run. When that’s the case, they are always nationalist, but try to come across as worldly-wise.
The implied message is that state radio and TV is for country bumpkins.
I usually listen to China National Radio, Radio and Television Tibet’s Chinese channel, and to China Radio International.
Paul (the PE), Ham Radio Callsign, GROL ID
This brief note is in response to an article written by Al Williams in ‘Hackaday’ titled “Is Shortwave Radio on Live Support?”
Dear Al, you did a nice job with the article on shortwave radio. The cover artwork was phenominal. Most anyone that stared at a Hallicrafters SX one hundred and something knows that face well. And the superimposed carrier waveform, yeah……that’s some great art.
I’ve always been moderately into shortwave and HF band ham radio. It’s not a serious pursuit. I take out the equipment, build stuff, validate it, use it. I’ve worked most any country that I wanted to, but I never got into the bragging rights or serious DX chasing. For me it’s more of a random event. Wow, I just worked a VK, cool. Now I’m going fishing.
I’m a little ticked off with the present voice(s) of shortwave radio. There used to be a fair number of middle of the road stations on the air. That number has dwindled, perhaps to reflect modern times and our asymptotic overreaches where the pendulum must CRASH in to the extreme right or left in its compressed cycle rather than hovering in the middle. WRMI has some good talent, but most are just howling at the moon, blasting an agenda, with someone screaming into a microphone in their outside voice.
But why are these stations there? WRMI isn’t funded by the tooth fairy, they are funded by advertisers, just like the media sector that the commission isn’t spending much time overseeing. If it sells advertising, it’s on the air. Would you like to buy some emergency rations? How about a bunker? If you give “god” enough money at some nondescript PO box, you might make it…..
With an emitter or source efficieny of maybe 65%, all of those power output devices in the 50kW minimum transmitter cost a little bit to run. Selling advertising keeps the lights on. If extreme outside voices sell advertising, then by golly, extreme outside voices carry the band.
And I understand this. Shortwave radio at these ends is a business. Business is politics. Outside voices seem to rule the day with tons of experts screaming the right answers while seemingly no one is asking the right questions.
I still do find some enjoyment limiting my exposure to the screaming nut jobs and finding some nice music or some decent news once in a while.
To your artwork, I’m reminded of a 9 month battle that I fought just after I was first licensed. I couldn’t drive to the test site, so my dad took me. I passed the morse code test and forgot it as I was leaving. I made my telegraph key into a nutcracker. But then I landed in a trigonometry class. The teacher was a miserable jerk on any metric of humanity you’d care to gauge. He wanted to be an engineer, but he couldn’t hack the mission, so he landed at a high school, teaching troublesome punks like me trig and hating the world. He taught for maybe 5 minutes and had us memorize what seemed like a million trig identities for the rest of the class period.
But to my curious mind, the Trig machine wanted to fly….so I flew it. When we got to the identity about the square of a cosine or sine, my life changed. This idiot saw it as a memory assignment….I saw it much differently. cos(theta^2)=1/2+1/2(cos(2*theta). To most it was just a crank, another identity to scribble down on the jerks quiz……but to me it was much more. If I take a sinusoidal signal, multiply it against itself (cos(theta^2)), then I get a CONSTANT value and a time varying value at twice the frequency. This is how AC power does work. The constant is the power that spins the motor, the phase relationship between voltage and current can then be shown to drop the constant when the two waveforms (perhaps current and voltage) are 90 degrees out of phase. This is REACTIVE power, does no work but sure as heck heats up the wire and burns fuel in the generator. Nothin’ imaginary about that. In the signal domain, if I took an amplitude modulated signal, mixed it with itself and filtered off the higher frequency components, I would have BASEBAND signal reception. This law changed my life. While the miserable jerk would never be an engineer, I could weld, machine, fix most anything electronic, and lay out my own circuit boards in the Kepco etching system. Electrical engineering was for me. But I knew this when I was 5 or 6. The jerk didn’t motivate this, but he did move the needle on the D’arsonval scale.
Shortwave is where I did my first experiments with direct conversion and later superheterodyne receivers. I still use WWV all the time to check alignment, allthough the GPS disciplined chipscale atomic clock in my bench reference has a stability in the few parts per billion, the WWV Hydrogen MASER stacks in Boulder CO are much better….if you sit on them long enough. It’s a simple test. Tune to 15.00000 MHz, listen for good signal, clear reception, relatively on frequency. Then slide off 1KHz high and flip to USB. You should hear a 1KHz tone. Then flip to LSB, again you should hear a 1KHz tone. If the tones are off in pitch, you have some tuning to do.
Thanks for the good memories. I’m out there, just not too often. Fishing takes higher priority than listening to a preacher screaming like a cat in a blender. I do miss Dr Gene Scott though. I actually got to work on his shortwave transmitter on route 380 just east of Denton Texas before they took it apart and moved it to TN under a new owner. While Gene was WAY out there on the air, he was a brilliant reasonable man off the air. Seems his daughter is carrying on with it, but I haven’t heard much of her on the bands. She’s probably getting better circulation on the big internet and related TV outlets.
My “once in a while” evening consists of working on fishing tackle, making lures, sipping a nice glass of smooth kentucky bourbon with a little ice in it and tuning around the bands on modern equipment with the new groovy sliding spectrum analyzer built in (maybe the proper advertising term is a band scope). Once a month maybe……once a quarter……something like that. As for old time radio, the internet archive does a great job cataloging and sharing the old shows. I’m drawn to Red Skelton, Stan Freberg, Johnny Dollar and a couple others.
Thanks for a good read. 73 sir. May the road rise up to meet you!
I enjoyed reading your comment!
But, I’m not sure if I want the road to rise up and meet me, that sounds like it would be painful!
B^)
Best of best regardses!
Thanks Paul. By the way, all of our great art is done by Joe Kim. See https://hackaday.com/2024/05/13/the-art-of-hackaday-hack-chat/. He is amazing, I agree!
73
SWL is dying on the consumption side for the same reasons amateur radio is evolving – there are now other more common modes of easy worldwide communication. Fewer consumers eventually leads to fewer stations.
Allow me to plug WBCQ for Maine. It’s got yer loonies, yer ranters, yer holly rollers, but it got some vey unique musical stuff, too.
It’s ALL entertainment.
http://wbcq.com/schedule/index.php?fn=sked&freq=All
I am a ham, and do some HF band scanning a few times per month. It is oddly satisfying knowing my home-built station can pick up stations from around the world.
Shortwave radio is inportant, so is regular am radio, the problem we have is over regulation, in australia we have the acna, in my town of goulburn we have no local am radio stations, i am a radio collectors and cb radio enthusiast, there are no local am radio broadcasts any more, so i contalcted the acma askining for a broadcasting licence for nostalgia reasons, just 10 watts, for nolstalgia, a non commervial radio station i would fund mysef, they said there is no space available on the nand, there is literally nothing on tyhe air in the area, so multiple karens i spoke to could not fathom what i was trying to do and these karens zare incharge of allocation licences for something they dont understand, get ready. No sonder there are not pirate radio stations popping up around the place. Am going to try one last time through a 3rd party thatnegotiates with these types of draconian over regulation bodies. I also inquired about setting up a shortwave radio station, same thing but was also told that i the acma does not handle shortwave licebcing and it is even harder to get a licence with the body that governs it also. Problem with internet streaning is it relies on the internet and can be shut down and ccontrolled by the ppowers that be at a given botice and you need an internet connection to access. Radio provides a communication source available to weveryone for fre provided they have a radio receiver and power. This is something more important that peole dont realise as there is no forsight given to inportant redundencies.
RE there is no space available on the band, Offer to not transmit at night when it might widely propagate? and cause interference?? ….
RE “IS SHORTWAVE ON LIFE SUPPORT” Radio has significant advantage. Just needs a transmitter and often a relatively low cost receiver. THe receivers ability can be enance of with relatively simper aerials. Internet has many points of failure between the transmitter and the receiver . For example relies on power being widely available Most transmitters have emergency generators and most transistor radios run on battery’s. These especially important in Emergency , such as wide spread floods and or fire , earth wakes etc , where internet infrastructure is damaged….. So I would say both are needed and useful
Being a young individual seeking to learn more about electronics and radio, shortwave has always fascinated me. I’ve got my own shortwave radio, and I have even built a couple shortwave transmitters to learn about the topic. There are rarely any transmissions during the day, and only a couple closer to night time, but it nonetheless interests me! I sure wish I was around in the Era of shortwave… I think it would have been really fun!
The last shortwave radio I listened to (reception was best at night) was the Becker Grand Prix in my 1967 Mercedes-Benz 300SEL. I sold it in 1991.
Bloody lovely that.
I don’t listen to broadcast voice programs but I sometimes tune utility stations transmitting weather fax, Volmet or time signals. I never get tired of the magic in HF propagation. It is global but not totally predictable and that’s why I enjoy it.
What people do not realize is that a certain very large country in Asia is marketing extremely cheap very effective shortwave radios for less than $10 to the Third World Market. This country is in a major effort to influence continents like Africa and they are doing a pretty good job of it with multiple broadcasting stations with all sorts of different programming to influence core third world population areas with no internet access. It’s an amazing thing to see and all you have to do is go to the 31 m, 49 m for the 25 M BAND early from dawn until about 8:00 in the morning on the West Coast. You will hear stations coming in from all over Asia and Indonesia and other parts of the world at that time. Sureway was so alive at that time from the other side of the world. It’s a great way to influence poor countries who have great natural resources. An amazing thing to see happen under the radar.
Is this in Chinese, English, or other languages?
What am I listening to? WWCR. RNZI was coming in pretty good last winter (6-8 am local).
BBCWS was the big kahuna, RN tried to fill the void.
I got a brand new Drake R8B for 1/2 price in ’02. Wonderful, a dream come true (its marvelous SyncDet); made useless in a few years.
Death-knell – no more PWBR.
Long live over the air shortwave! My favorite hobby for over 50 years… It is no fun listening to streaming. :^(
Useful 👍
Hal Turner seems to do very well with his program five days per week, for literally decades on WBCQ and now also on WRMI and WWCR. He takes calls in the last few minutes of his broadcast and apparently he gets enough donations to stay on the air and support his lifestyle.
There are some other interesting shows whose hosts seem to do them as hobbies. It is like pirate broadcasting, except that they are buying the time instead of buying a transmitter and going on illegally.
Compared to Internet, shortwave broadcasting is like leafleting. You reach random people.
It;s CHEAP. WBCQ has not raised its hourly rate since it went on the air in 1998.
A friend of mine does quite a good Internet show but complains that gets very few callers. The reason is that he is talking only to people who already know of him. So I told him: if you want callers, go onto shortwave.
He didn’t take my advice.
So, I am doing it myself. Since July 2024 I have a weekly program called The Devil’s Advocate on WBCQ.