The decline of AM broadcast radio is a slow but inexorable process over much of the world, but for regions outside America there’s another parallel story happening a few hundred kilohertz further down the spectrum. The long wave band sits around the 200kHz mark and has traditionally carried national-level programming due to its increased range. Like AM it’s in decline due to competition from FM, digital, and online services, and one by one the stations that once crowded this band are going quiet. In the middle of all this it’s a surprise then to find a new long wave station in the works in the 2020s, bucking all contemporary broadcasting trends. Arctic 252 is based in Finland with programming intended to be heard across the Arctic region and aims to start testing in September.
The hack in this is that it provides an opportunity for some low-frequency DXing, and given the arctic location, it would be extremely interesting to hear how far it reaches over the top of the world into the northern part of North America. The 252KHz frequency is shared with a station in North Africa that may hinder reception for some Europeans, but those with long memories in north-west Europe will find it fairly empty as it has been vacated in that region by the Irish transmitter which used to use it.
So if you have a receiver capable of catching long wave and you think you might be in range, give it a listen. Closer to where this article is being written, long wave stations are being turned off.
Harris & Ewing, photographer, Public domain.
They are starting with only 1KW, that could be a struggle. 100KW high fidelity AM would be more like it.
Thats great. I will be working on antenna for 252. Any information on UTC time table of this broadcast?
Then, there is the fundamental question whether AM can be received at all. Hackaday has discussed the issue of car manufacturers dropping AM radio from their electric vehicles because RFI caused by the switching of heavy currents to the motors makes AM reception impossible—or so some car manufacturers claim. The news on that front is not good. See https://www.radioworld.com/news-and-business/business-and-law/attempt-to-pass-am-for-every-vehicle-act-in-senate-falls-short . Maybe you have better news about this, Jenny?
To.bad about eliminating AM, I enjoy driving long distances and hear 1 am signal fade put and another fade in..FM just gets choppy and breaks away,it doesn’t fade out then another in like AM signal..I like to go to the far ends,outer limits of AM,which is usually no signal at all,just to see if a passing signal might come through, maybe a unauthorized signal of unknown origin..keep an open ear..
I feel the same. AM is way more pleasant, more harmonic than FM.
AM radio waves do converge, they don’t wipe each others out like FM signals do.
Reminds me of the AM days in CB radio, were you could hear quiet whispers of a fellow in the background.
A big part of the hobby was to listen to distant voices “in the wind” (the air waves, the ether). It was kind of romatic.
It is rare, but FM signals can skip.
Back in the 1990s, the Armed Forces Network station in Frankfurt, Germany received reports from a nordic country (I think it was Norway) that people were picking up AFN Frankfurt on 98.7 MHz. That’s like 1000 kilometers (600 miles) or more (depending on where in Norway they were.) There was a local station on the same frequency. Some times the local station would fade out and AFN Frankfurt would fade in. One of the DJs in Frankfurt did a telephone interview with one of the folks who heard it.
I’ve had it happen to me in about 2004, maybe 2005. There was a German radio station (Rockland) that I could listen to on 87.6 MHz. At a particular point during my daily commute, Rockland on 88.3 MHz would fade out and I’d have to switch to a different station.
One day, Rockland faded out and some dude speaking French came on. This happened for the next few days. – Rockland fades out, strange language and music fades in. I eventually picked out enough to figure out that it was the station Tataouine Radio from Tunisia, also on 87.6 MHz. That’s a straight line distance of over 1900 kilometers (1180 miles.)
Yes, Tataouine Radio. Probably Luke Skywalker’s favorite station. (That’s a joke.)
The scenes of the farm where Luke Skywalker lived with his uncle and aunt were filmed in Tunisia. (https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/lars-homestead) The sets are (or were in 2019) still standing.
The folks who worked on Star Wars in 1976 could not (of course) have listened to Tataouine Radio. The station first went on the air in 1993.
“At a particular point during my daily commute, Rockland on 88.3 MHz would fade out and I’d have to switch to a different station.”
Oops, dammit. That’s supposed to be 87.6 MHz.
87.6 MHz ??!?! Where on earth?
Ah, ITU Region 1, that’s where.
I live on the east coast of Ireland picked up a Spanish station on FM one summer on my car radio, wasn’t even trying, just randomly picked up on a Frequency that should have been dead. It was the perfect weather for skip, but that seemed a bit mental to me.
Tropospheric Ducting
No, no, no… You miss the point. Yes, FM can skip. This is a function of frequency and the state of the atmosphere. It’s rarer at the higher frequencies typically allotted to FM transmission, but it’s nonetheless a possibility.
The magic of AM is that it both skips and the modulation doesn’t require a “lock” by the tuner (sorry, RF gurus, lots of liberties taken here). FM signals of similar strength on the same frequency fight for your tuner’s attention. The result is garbled and inelegant.
AM is additive. When you listen to AM at the fringes of reception, you get the very audio that was transmitted layered atop the background noise. If there’s a competing AM signal, it just combines for one conversation (or diatribe) layered on another.
Although analog, FM is more akin to the blocky noise of digital compression when packets go missing. AM is a crowded room where some voices are more distant than others while, at the same time, every step, clack, or abrasion is audible. AM is beautiful, combinative, and ethereal. It’s a technological and communicative chorus existing side by side with the background chatter of human endeavor and the universe itself. FM first brought us stereo, and thus got a pass for being the quarter step to digital that it is.
I live on the east coast of Ireland. I drive a Hyundai Ioniq EV. For whatever bloody reason it defaults to AM after Android Auto disconnects, so I had to find something to listen to that wasn’t static (no AM in Ireland).
It’s currently tuned to Manx radio (Isle of Mann) and while the receiption is too poor due to the fin aerial to be enjoyably listenable to, there is certainly no electrical interference from the Motor, inverter etc…
No AM in Ireland? What, if anything, can you receive within that range. Can you receive distant stations at night?
Good to see the frequency of AM station recycled: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlantic_252 ( last broadcast on 2002-01-02 )
RTé radio 1 took over that transmitter though until about 2022ish.
200 kHz. frequency,why does the regular AM store bought radios only go to 530 kHz. or 1710 khz…where can you get 200 kHz. radios..this is the first I have heard of such..PS..most public service bands are going digital in my area,what happens to all the previously used analog frequencies, are they still there but inactive..shame,I am sure someone can make use of the abandoned analog frequencies?
In Europe and Africa (and some parts of Asia) the long wave band (approx 145 to 285 kHz) has been very popular for over 100 years. Most radios manufactured in Europe in the 20th century feature LW and MW bands (and sometimes SW). But for some reason it never took off in the USA and Canada. However even the venerable BBC Radio 4 LW signal is scheduled to be turned off later this year as people in Europe move over to DAB and internet radio.
DAB is utter dirt for a bunch of reasons.
I can see us skipping DAB entirely and if FM is scheduled to be shut off, some sort of internet based radio taking its place.
That may also depend on which part of the world you live in. Here in Central Europe, DAB+ is already a established and well functioning standard in most regions. My cars have had DAB+ for many years. At home, however, the Internet has of course replaced everything else years ago.
And yes, I also see the decline of FM and especially AM radio ( LW / MW / SW ), which happened decades ago here, with a sad eye – I just associate a lot of nostalgia with it. But everything had it’s time – just like the steam engine or the stagecoach ;-)
Central Europe.. Oh yes. That term is hard to get used to.
Way back in the 90s, my home country was commonly being referred to as being part of Western Europe.
I know that one description is meant geographical and the other one rather political (old east vs west), but still.
Central Europe or Middle Europe sounds so weird at times.
Btw, there’s technically still Digital Radio Mondiale (DRM).
It’s meant for spectrum below 30 MHz and could have been a worthy successor to AM.
Giv it to the hams.
“why does the regular AM store bought radios only go to 530 kHz. or 1710 khz…where can you get 200 kHz. radios”
Modern marketing in commerially available radios uses it’s own terminology:
FM – UKF with frequency modulation
SW – short wave with AM
AM – medium wave with AM (should be called MW)
LW – long wave with AM
So look for radios with LW band. There are still few:
Cheap option: V111 (from many brands like Retekess, Tividio etc.) has LW but I don’t know how good it is. Eltra has many models – this brand is Polish and Poland still uses 225kHz to broadcast Polskie Radio.
Cheapless option: World receivers from Tecsun, Sangean, XHData, SIHUADON, Qodosen, HRD. Go to:
https://radiojayallen.com/ and search for LW – there are some reviews on radios but they barely mention performance on LW if available in given model.
I haven’t found a single cheap pocket type model (2xAA or 2xAAA powered) like Sony ICF-P26 or Sangean SR-35 or smaller that would cover this band. Found one old article how to tune MW receiver down to LW (from around late ’90) but it will not work with modern DSP radios.
“FM – UKF with frequency modulation”
I ment VHF 87-108 Mhz (sometimes 65-108 Mhz) with frequency modulation.
This article is quite confusing for a European…
LW (aka Long Wave) is AM… Differentiating it as though it’s something different is really confusing.
What I think the original writer means when they refer to AM is what in much of Europe we call MW (Medium Wave), which – like Long Wave uses AM ?
Exactly this. You look at the scale on receiver and read: FM, SW, AM, LW. But in reality it can only do AM on SW, MW and LW. This nomenclature became so popular it confuse customers. Recently I have read review of a “FA/AM radio” where customer gave low rate for the product because it was useless on AM for him (he needed LW scale). And this will remain with us because most customers already got used to it.
That’s an historical thing, I think. The Americans merely had two broadcast bands, medium wave band (MW) and Super High Frequency (SHF), also known as Very High Frequency (VHF).
(They are virtually same, but technically there’s surely a minor difference.)
It’s what we would call “ultra shortwave” (USW; in German Ultrakurzwelle aka UKW).
To make matters more complicated, the Americans also have UHF, Ultra High Frequency, while we still consider that as being part of USW.
That’s why ham radio transceivers do referr to 144 MHz (2m Band) as VHF, but 430 MHz (70cm Band) to UHF:
‐ In Germany, both bands would be stilll being called USW bands casually (even in ham radio).
(The VHF/UHF terminology is known here, but is rather something being associated to TV tuners. And ham radios, of course, though USW encapsulates both.)
Anyway, back to the Americans.. So they had both medium wave and ultra shortwave band, one using amplitude modulation, the other using frequency modulation.
To make things simple, they simply referred things to “AM radio” and “FM radio”.
The terms were being universally used for both the medium and the type of radio receiver .
Now this may seem a bit simple‐minded to us, but I think we should keep in mind the circumstances.
Back then when radio was new, the USA were a huge land with comparingly little population.
Many people lived in insulation, in smaller scattered towns and villages and the people’s mentality was different, to.
So it was just natural that the citizens tried to have things simple.
A radio with both an AM and FM switch and two different scales was complicated enough.
Speaking under correction.
Or in other words.. “AM” equals 530 to 1720 kHz, “FM” equals 88 to 108 MHz.
In other regions around the globe, the frequency allocation is slightly different.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AM_broadcasting#Broadcast_band_frequencies
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FM_broadcast_band
Edit: Forget my comment about Super High Frequency, it was a mistake.
I meant to referr to something different here. My bad.
Question, do one need license to operate in 252khz?
Yes.
There is always a need of a licence when it comes to radio broadcast. 252kHz is part the spectrum where you need to buy a licence.
Your WiFi network has a license for the manufacturer to pay and follow.
For ham radio, you need to prove that you know what you are allowed to do to get a license.
Hi there,
I have just heard over the past 2 days that on 252Khz will be Atlantic_252 will be coming on air. As I do not have any more information on this new station, can you tell me please when is the date that it will be running?
And the receivers I have are Realistic-DX-200, Realistic DX-302, Realistic-DX394 model B, Yaesu FRG-7 with Yaesu FRT-7700 antenna tuner. all with 40 ft long wire antennas both 20ft of the ground. A 6 ft copper rod into the ground.
Others I use are Icom-718 using an MFJ-949-E, Kenwood-TS850S with builtin ATU, both using a 66ft long wire, 20ft of the ground. orientation North, West. What are me chances will I have of picking up Atlantic_252 with the above radios? My QTH is Bilston, Wolverhampton, West Midlands, 440ft ASL
Thank you.
Mike.J.Lee
Thanks for the heads up! I’m also curious how far south we’ll hear it.
I’ve oft wondered if the US with 60Hz power and thus higher harmonics and hash vs. 50Hz in the rest of the world was that what stopped LW or was it just elegant one knob tuning one band radios that won out. Also the national radio service in most countries vs. commercial independents and then 3 or 4 networks in the US. We didn’t get NPR which isn’t till 1971, the VOA is not for domestic consumption we can and should but they won’t respond to letters on the air.