“Radio is Dead” July 1, 2012 – God
http://www.catholicculture.org/news/headlines/index.cfm?storyid=14611
The Catholic Church in Rome is shutting down its radio operation to focus its future efforts on the Internet and satellite delivery of the Message. Notice that the story mentions the Vatican is going to also move away from using “Medium Wave” radio.
Unless you’re a total geek and at least 50 years old – or lived in Europe, you probably don’t even know what Short Wave radio is.
The BBC North American Service you hear on some Public Radio Stations is the residue of what used to be short wave. Virtually every country used Short Wave radio to distribute its political propaganda, and the British Empire (that the Sun Never Set On) was at the top of the list – having radio stations that targeted every part of the world and in many different languages. The BBC World Service was funded by the equivalent of the US State Department – it wasn’t the service for domestic listeners that is funded by the Radio and TV tax. About two years ago, the British government decided it was no longer going to fund the BBC World Service, and at least at one point the US State Department offered to help fund the BBC, and of course your local Public Radio Station is.
Short Wave is AM radio – but at higher frequencies than your old AM radio – signals that more freely bounce off he ionosphere – the layer of the atmosphere that reflects radio signals back to the ground. Your AM radio (in the United States) goes from 530 kHz to 1620 kHz (or 1700 if the radio was made in the last 10 years for sale in the United States)… or 0.530 to 1.620 MHz if you prefer. The rest of the world calls this “Medium Wave” AM. The higher the frequency, the shorter the wave gets, hence “Short Wave” AM goes from 1.8 MHz to 30 Mhz (30 MHz is essentially the dividing line where FM starts).
There is lots of odd “stuff” in Shortwave AM – it isn’t all just the BBC, Radio Free Europe and Radio Moscow. My father was an Amateur Operator – most of his life, he hung out with the “old timers” on the 160 meter band (1800-2000 kHz) at the very bottom of shortwave, an area that was also used by the LORAN-A navigation system, widely used before GPS to tell ocean going ships where they are.. There has been International Cooperation since the beginning of radio that has for the most part been followed, with countries agreeing on what frequencies should be used for what purposes, include “Ham” radio. As a geeky child, I spent a lot of time listening to Short Wave, a lot of it being those odd “Calls to Prayer” from countries in the Middle East a long long way away.
http://www.iaru.org/
Ah memories of my youth 15o yrs ago! For my 6th birthday my dad gave me a Grundig (or GE) multi-band radio. I attached an antenna on a 30-40 foot bamboo and I could hear the universe! That radio spurred my interest in other languages and thus the language geo-political analyst was born. Today I still listen to various internet streaming stations. At 72 my memory sometimes fails me and radio keeps it going. Part of my daily routine is to listen to news stations from France, Italy, VietNam, South America, Israel, et al. Thanks for the memories SHORT WAVE RADIO.
“The Death of Short Wave Radio” That sux.
I would listen to a station in Buenos Aires. It came in good most nights way back in West Virginia. I had no idea what they were saying. I had an old Ross AM/FM/SW radio. Heck FM didn’t work back there and I thought it was broke. LOL
Interestingly, I have a Sharp AM/FM/SW1 /SW2 radio here on my desk, I bet it hasn’t been on in 16 years, I will turn it on tonight and see what is out there.
I will need to turn off the Linksys and other computer crap or I will just hear a Hummmmmm.
parrott
The Civil Air Patrol still actively uses a portion of the shortwave band for precisely the reasons you described, the ability to greatly extend communication range by bouncing signals off the ionosphere. We call it “HF”, for high frequency, distinguishing it from “VHF” (very high frequency AM or FM). VHF-FM is useful only when the transmission is line of sight. Using our HF radios we can communicate directly from stations in Georgia all the way to Colorado, sometime further. HF was used extensively for command and control during the disaster relief efforts in Mississippi and Louisiana when hurricane Katrina wiped out the local cell tower and municipal power grids.
The problem with Shortwave for communications is it isn’t reliable. We know a ton more now about how signals propagate and can predict fairly accurately the time of days that certain frequencies will work (it used to be mostly trial and error, as the BBC and others would switch frequencies at different times of day) – but the wild card is sunspot activity that can totally wipe out the signals. Maybe that’s what project HAARP is really for – to keep the ionosphere working for military needs 🙂
My father had a strong belief that he had figured out a strong correlation between AM radio propagation and weather. Every once in a while, clear channel 50kw AM radio stations would just vanish and the 160 meter band would go dead. That was usually followed be a drastic weather change. This was in the 1960s before we had satellites studying solar flares and the solar winds – which is essentially what he was indirectly observing. The degree to which we yet realize the connection between periods of high solar activity and its effect on short term weather perhaps hasn’t quite fully been realized yet – George Bush is more responsible for the weather.
Based on your criteria, I guess I am an uber radio geek! I am several years short of 50 and I was a rabid shortwave listener up until the Internet killed it.
I had my first short wave (a tiny analog Sangean) back in the mid-1980’s. On that little radio I followed the “fall” of Communism and the Tiananmen Square uprising. I still own 3 shortwave radios but I use them mostly for AM/FM listening these days.
BBC is definitely the King Kong of international radio (at least in English) but I used to enjoy listening to programming from some of the smaller nations of Europe (Radio Netherlands & Swiss Radio International) as well as Radio Canada International.
It amuses me that the leftist “anti-colonial” ivory tower types at NPR came to the rescue of the Imperial Service of Her Majesty. Strange bedfellows indeed!
There was not much as covertly exciting as cruising slowly along the bandwith in hopes up picking up a strange weak signal from a foreign land. I used to love listening to SW. There is some fun to be had still just by driving after dark and running the AM dial and picking up stuff from far away. It’s no Helsinki, but it’s still pretty cool to pick radio in Ontario from my car in central Virginia.
At least at one time on the East Coast, you would hear stray signals on our AM radio band several hours a day originating from Europe – not broadcast stations but other types of signals, not centered on the 10 kHz US spacing. Once the sun comes up in Europe (about 1 AM depending on the time of year, the stations in Europe go to full power, but the Atlantic ocean is still in darkness and will reflect the signals.
It’s probably worth mentioning that the one country that significantly ignored the ITU and would not cooperate with the FCC was Cuba, which would regularly flood the US with its AM radio signals that could be heard all the way to Pittsburgh (and probably beyond). However, it was largely also in reaction to the US flooding Cuba with US anti-Communist propaganda.
You can’t demand Cuba follow international law over the sovereignty of a country’s domestic radio coverage at the same time you’re ignoring it. You can’t turn Stuxnet loose on the Internet and then claim other countries doing the same to you are “terrorists”. Either you believe in the rule of law or you don’t.
That explains why on several ocassions I was able to listen to Cuban stations on AM at 9PM (Pittsburgh).
I too listened to my share of shortwave on my Sharp Boom Box in the early 1980’s. I wanted to hear French stations, especially non-Quebecois ones, so I listened to George Collinet’s morning show on the Voice of America’s French Africa service (right around 1-2 AM EST). Twenty years later, he shows up on Afropop international on PRI…..
In junior high my geek friend George was a Ham Nut. He got all these cool things – the chairman Mao travel alarm clock comes to mind. He had gotten this really good shortwave radio and sold me his old living room console one for $5.
I asked my older brother (a serious electrical engineer geek, at his work now he uses Doppler Radar to measure raindrops.) which way to orient my wire T antenna in the attic. After a half hour dissertation on antenna theory, I still didn’t have my answer.
Later on I got the hand me down family car a 49 Plymouth. I remember it had a great radio, driving thru Idaho on a cold winter night I picked up Chicago, Denver, Pheonix, ABQ, SFO, and Portland.
Radio Canada International is having its plug pulled as well
http://www.newswire.ca/en/story/996467/budget-cuts-radio-canada-international-rci-solidarity-rally-for-rci
The announcement includes the statement that people will now be cut off from the uncensored Canadian news. It’s true that many people in Canada don’t even know their government has official censorship.
http://blog.freedomsite.org/