Bring Back Shortwave
spectator.co.uk
spectator.co.uk
I vividly remember turning it on late in a Sunderland vs. Newcastle match. I was in central Bogota, Colombia. Struggling for reception, knowing we'd gone 1-0 down early in the match, I can still hear the commentator: "and who would have thought, after going one-nil down at St. James' Park, Sunderland would be two-one up". I shouted out loud like a lunatic. We won the game.
I've strung wire coat-hangers from windows in Nigeria, Ukraine, and Macedonia all trying to improve reception so I could listen to a football match.
There's a romance there that internet streaming will never touch.
My particular romance was taking a pair of TV rabbit ears and hanging them out the window by the twin-lead cable, much to my mother's chagrin.
Low power college radio is great! The broadcasts are always so varied, and there's never any commercials.
Some of the stations even offered language lessons over the air. I learned basic German when I was 12 from the ones on Deutsche Welle. I attempted to learn Chinese the following year from the big shortwave station in Taiwan.
Simple broadcast rights for one. It's hard to explain to my father why he needs to still pack a handheld radio for the beach because he can't listen to the game by streaming the local sports station on his phone.
Moreover, in wartime or during some other major catastrophe when technical infrastructure is likely to be impacted or destroyed then establishing and maintaining communications services on these frequencies is easy for reasons that the technology is low-tech and easy to understand—and there's an enormous amount of engineering experience to fall back upon (about 100 years' worth).
That we even have to raise this discussion is a quintessential example of intergenerational information loss.
Given their strategic importance, governments should put priority on educating the smartphone/streaming generation that these other modes of electronic communication actually exist and that they may even have to depend upon them.
I only need to refer to the current debate over retaining AM-band reception in car radios to illustrate the paucity of understanding. That EV manufacturers are pushing for the removal of the AM band in their car radios is proof-positive of how little the current breed of electronics engineers knows about these frequencies let alone their strategic importance.
You can get started for as little as $17: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B074XPB313
For the other amateur radio operators on the site, the UV-5Rs from the main Amazon seller all comply with spurious emissions regs - the ones from AliExpress are hit or miss. Plus searching YouTube with 'Baofeng UV5R' will turn up a ton of material including explaining why people should care about the spurious emissions.
It is interesting that governments have long recognised the power of shortwave such that they have restricted what a citizen can do with it. In wartime, ham radio is usually made illegal. The recipient of a broadcast cannot be detected (save some very local factors - meters range) which is why governments around the world still use shortwave number stations to transmit coded instructions to spies.
I suspect the removal of AM radio in EVs is also because the cost to RF shield the car against EM emissions in that frequency range was deemed too high for the audience it would address, and maybe just lazy or engineering too. Agree, very short sighted.
Hell, even the BBC in the UK is closing down local AM transmitters on cost grounds (but I suspect there is political pressure to move the masses to digital UHF infrastructure).
A medium wave/shortwave transmitter is the ultimate in post apocalyptic film memes!
My grandfather, born in Canada and later naturalized as a US citizen, got his ham ticket back in the 1960s, but, as he wrote: "This was O.K. for one year but to renew & become general I would have to obtain more than just a US passport; It would be necessary to get a certificate of citizenship. This took years and during those years I landed up in the Dom. Republic & got my Ham ticket there without it, HI3XRD."
He later moved to Miami. When Hurricane David came through the D.R. in 1979, he was one of the ham volunteers who helped handle communications from the island.
Oh, and he never got Extra because while he could manage 13 wpm for General or Advanced, he couldn't manage the 20 wpm for Extra.
Thank you very much for pointing that out. I'm in Australia and I've often pointed to the fact that many countries restricted access to the radio spectrum for many reasons—to limit EMI, for state security and strategic reasons, ensure secrecy of communications, etc.
For example, when I got my amateur ticket whilst still at school in the 1960s I had to sign a Declaration of Secrecy and have it witnessed by a registered JP. The reason was that people such as us could come across important transmissions (messages) of a strategic nature that should not be allowed to fall into the wrong hands.
Come mobile phones, WiFi etc. that changed without any real public discussion whatsoever.
What I find absolutely amazing is how—by sleight-of-hand—Big Tech sideslipped both very tight telephony and radiocommunications laws to violate say privacy on smartphones, and the fact that they've gotten away with it. The smartphone generation hasn't a clue about any of this stuff. Right, once the privacy of telephonic communications was inviolable, now it's a fucking joke.
On the matter of the declaration of secrecy, amateurs could possibly come across unencrypted telephonic communications, ship-to-shore etc., and as deemed secret, they (rightly) were not allowed to act on that information in any way, in fact jail-time penalties applied if laws were violated.
Incidentally, as my Declaration of Secrecy has never been rescinded I'm still bound by its conditions.
Yeah in a couple of years it'll just be Radio Caroline and various small-time pirates on AM. Even the venerable longwave transmitter for Radio 4 is getting shut down in a couple of months sadly.
Can't help feeling this is all a bit short-sighted, it's not like you can do anything else with those bands and if things go sideways it's a reliable way to reach a lot of people without power. Personally if we can't keep our medium and long wave transmitters on economic grounds I think those bands should be opened to unlicensed hobbyists, it'd be an excellent technical and artistic opportunity that would allow for actual broadcasting rather than just two-way communication. I doubt there'd be a huge issue with interference as few people have the room to put up a 150' quarter wave, and if copyrights were a material issue rights holders would have gone after public SDRs capturing the broadcast bands years ago.
I love listening to the North Sea pirates on medium wave. So diverse and ecletic!
I lived on the other side of the planet the 1960s when Radio Caroline began transmission so I was deprived of the somewhat 'illicit' fun of listening to it.
Instead I'd come home from school turn on my shortwave radio and witness Radio Moscow and Radio Peking battling it out for the position of which could produce the most outrageous and over-the-top propaganda. It was hilarious, even this naïve school kid wasn't taken in by any of it.
That was at the height of the Cold War (Cuban Missile Crisis, etc.) and especially Radio Moscow could be heard splattered all over the dial—it seemed that no matter where one tuned, it came in at strength 5/9+, its signal was enormous.
I'd love to hear some recording of those broadcasts again and I reckon I'd still be amused (I've not searched but I'd bet there are recording of them in archives somewhere).
Even with this shortsighted decision, the size of the UK is such that FM and digital services can provide adequate coverage. But that's not the case for large countries like the US, Canada, Australia, etc. VHF services major population centres with comparative ease but it's essentially impossible for it to do so for vast sparsely-populated areas. This is where LF, MF and HF are effective.
Years ago I recall traveling by car from Sydney to Adelaide (Australia) which is about 1000 miles and the shortest route is to travel diagonally across the country (the longer way would be to travel the coastline where the population is larger and take in cities such as Melbourne).
Traveling cross-country meant going across sparsely-populated areas where local broadcast services were either nonexistent or very patchy (low power—just enough to service a small community). Nevertheless, that proved no problem as the ABC's (the Oz version of the BBC) capital city AM transmitters located in Sydney, Melbourne and Adelaide provided coverage all the way. Even though Melbourne wasn't on route at points along the way its transmitter was stronger than the other two. (I'd note that was the daytime coverage from all three transmitters sans skip.)
It would be impossible to provide that coverage with only three VHF transmittes no matter their power. Frankly, it'd be crazy to switch off AM transmissions in a country like Australia even if one discounted their strategic advantage.
The difficulty in suppressing switching noise/RFI is one of the stated reasons EV manufacturers give for removing AM reception. They say that keeping AM will increase EV costs.
If regulators/spectrum management were to agree to their request then that would imply a relaxation of existing EMI emission standards. With thousands of EVs on the roads the noise floor on the HF band and lower frequencies would become intolerable, the band would become unusable.
A while ago on HN I referred to a now-dated NATO communications tech note on interference that said the noise floor on the HF band had increased about 6dB. I went on to mention that about a decade ago I'd mentioned the NATO stats to an engineer from a HF transmitter manufacturing company at a trade show. He responded by asking me where I'd been in recent years and went on to state the noise floor on HF had since increased to about 17dB above the pre-digital switching era.
As I said that was about a decade ago when EVs were still only lab prototypes. If EV manufacturers are allowed to get away with emitting more EMI then the HF bands will become altogether unusable. And no doubt this is a serious problem.
EV manufacturers like Musk have enormous power and what worries me is that spectrum management authorities around the world will cave in further to pressure and relax EMI standards even more.
That increase in the noise floor from 6dB to 17dB was the result of spectrum management caving in to commercial pressure from the 1980s onwards. This was the era of deregulation and EMI regulations were loosened—EMR/noise testing etc. was not only relaxed but further outsourced.
It seems to me those who've a vested interest in the LF/MF/HF bands and want them preserved/saved from interference need to join forces and make concerted efforts to save them. An unlikely alliance of say the military, amateur radio (IARU), broadcasters and others speaking in unison to governments/ITU is what's needed to save these bands.
BTW, I once held an AR license which I got whilst I was still at school.
...for varying definitions of 'reliable' :)
But modern comms will switch bands or 'glide' frequencies in sympathy with the changing ['fading'] MUF, etc. and can do so automatically (using OWF in conjunction with IPS also helps). Combine that with modern encoding/digital modulation and say DRM of the right kind—Digital Radio Mondiale—for audio etc. and it's pretty damn reliable.
Want better? Diversity TX/RX and or multichannel via in-band and or cross-band into comparators etc.
There's a scene in The Garden of the Finzi-Continis (1970) where a man (Jewish) is listening to the events of WWII play-out over shortwave. He is living at the moment in relative safety but he understands from what he hears that change is afoot in his country.
At the risk of sounding like a prepper, it was clear to me then that having a radio capable of long distance reception was a very valuable thing to have around.
[1] Unfortunately, many exceptions apply.
Conversely trying to prepare for things that could occur by, for instance, getting first aid training, ham radio license, etc. is a communal activity "how could I be an asset to my community in times of trouble?" I think it's telling that in the cold war the "prepper" activity was putting together civil defense groups. In this century it's building a bunker full of guns and spinning fantasy about protecting your hoard of stuff from the mob.
During my around-the-world solo sail (1988-1991) (https://arachnoid.com/sailbook/), I relied on two-way HF radio for many things no longer present, including open-water phone calls. But that absence represents a choice, not a necessity. Here's an easy receiver project: "Create Your Own Open-Source Software-Defined Radio" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iXNgPYVpTng).
Receiving is cheap and easy. To transmit on these bands, you must get a Ham license. But that's easier than it was -- Morse code is no longer required.
I can remember what I thought when I first heard about the Internet -- that it would make Ham radio look slow and stupid by comparison. I was never so wrong about anything in my life (not for a lack of eager candidates).
Whoever designed the POTA website… it’s uncharacteristically brilliant for the amateur radio community. There are gazillions of metrics you can track about which parks you’ve hunted and which ones you’ve activated, progress bars for every state, all sorts of awards and “achievements” for various operating times, modes, repeats, etc.
It’s turned portable shortwave operating into gamified crack, except these are real skills that are valuable during an emergency. Having the equipment is one thing, but the regular practice of knowing how to quickly set it up and operate it anywhere is invaluable.
This was 70s Edinburgh, with a long-line antenna strung from my window to a tree about 50m away. I tried to make a dipole out of it, not sure it really worked. The radio was WW2 bomber surplus store, about 15U high and probably some precursor to a 19" rack width. you swapped out brick sized tuning blocks to reset it's frequency bands and then used a blade-overlap condenser tuner. I also used bakelite headphones, no soft foam. Hardcore! We had a better one downstairs with a vernier which tuned more accurately, consistently and it did MW for BBC radio. When FM became more common we got a small philips and it sat next to it, doing the hard work.
Shortwave picked up a lot. I was too young to understand what QSL cards would be about otherwise I would have some.
If not exactly that model, very similar.
could be buzzer perhaps https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UVB-76
As a lonely and somewhat isolated child, these fleeting glimpses of the wider world were nothing short of magical.
There are other broadcasts too. You just have to listen during certain periods as they mayn't be up all the time. The website above allows you to figure out what you can receive at your location.
Even if that were my thing, I probably wouldn't listen because it all sounds awful. Is there something about shortwave that limits the audio fidelity?
What am I doing wrong?
An antenna extension (https://www.dxengineering.com/parts/sgn-ant-60) would help.
Even better would be an active antenna. I have only heard great things about the MLA30+ though I don't own one myself.
WWCR (4840) has always been the easiest broadcast for me to pick up in the US.
If there is some distant broadcast (maybe overseas) that you want to receive you can definitely build a very efficient antenna system for that broadcaster's frequency. Be prepared to shell out well over $10,000 for this.
Also interested in what kind of equipment broadcasters use - it's some off the shelf stuff ?
Although I think you can do it cheaper - people have had a lot of success with a Beverage antenna. It takes up a lot of space though!
The same guy also owns an airport from what I recall.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_amateur_radio_organiza...
There's other gear like the cross country wireless loops that aren't much more expensive that perform much better, at least in my experience.
If the radio and its antenna are indoors, that's the problem. As a test, take the radio outdoors to an open area. You should see a big improvement.
To make that change permanent, install an outdoor long-wire antenna that runs inside and connects to the radio. The wire can be invisibly thin and still do the job. Your neighbors don't need to know about your retro pastime.
I can see the case for analog radio as an emergency communications system in regions with unreliable infrastructure. I can see the case for limited-area shortwave transmissions to serve populations with poor domestic media. I really struggle to see the case for throwing vast amounts of RF in the vague direction of the ionosphere, on the off chance that someone in the Pitcairn Islands wants to hear the cricket scores.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Woofferton_transmitting_stat...
I still occasionally operate on top band with a straight key, but even I have to accept that shortwave is now almost entirely irrelevant and rapidly headed towards extinction.
https://www.radioworld.com/columns-and-views/guest-commentar...
If you want to start, the top is to buy a Belka DX (probably the best portable shortwave in the market) but also ATS-25 or a SI4732 based radio that costs less 50$ on Ali.
One thing I'd like to see, especially if there is a concern for communication, is loosening the licensing restrictions that US shortwave stations cannot broadcast to the US. Back in the day when US station operators were interviewed they had to say that the were broadcasting to "Canada and Mexico", which was code for "to the US".
A shortwave radio station is a single point of failure. You can either physically interrupt the transmitter - conveniently it tells you exactly where it is the whole time it is transmitting. Or, you can broadcast interference.
The internet or digital communications does not share that same single point of failure.
Frequency hopping algorithms can be used. Multiple transmitters, globally dispersed and coordinating with each other can deliver service. Shortwave can be digital.
Not everything is a competition, other means of communication don't mean the internet has no use.
Imagine being able to push micro-blogs to a local station and having it broadcasted globally over shortwave.
And even jamming it's not always easy: the Turkish government usually jam the Kurdish shortwave stations like Denge Welat targeting Europe, but they are moving up or down in frequency to avoid the jamming. Moreover, you need a lot of power to jam another station.
Another advantage of the shortwave is that it don't require a complex hardware neither infrastructure to receive them: a rudimentary AM receiver is very simple to implement and can work also on battery for long time.
unless you have one or both of those things, shortwave is useful only iff the government collapses