Hacker News Reader

Comment by y33t | Hacker News Reader

I love the idea of shortwave but all I ever pick up are Jesus channels.

I'm in Europe, so it's mostly Chinese propaganda in various languages that you pick up on shortwave around here. There's exactly one American broadcast you can get here and that is, you guessed it, a Jesus channel.

It would be funny if a prepper spent $100+ on an emergency radio receiver, and took all the trouble to ensure it's reliably working. Then, when the apocalypus day finally comes, all they can listen to is a jesus channel.

Jesus!

http://www.short-wave.info/

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.

That website is broken. When you drag the dot it says to reload the page for the change to take effect...and then when you do the dot snaps right back to africa.

It works under Firefox. That said, I don't know how reliable the predictions are. My SWR is packed away at the moment.

I used this website to listen to stations just last week. If the signal strength displayed in the right-most column is 3 or 4 bars, I have been able to receive the broadcast most of the time. Of course, it depends on local interference and other conditions too.

I have a shortwave receiver and it is all weird Christian stuff.

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?

How do they finance those radio stations?

Probably the same way a lot of that stuff gets funded, a rich true believer or a bunch of less-rich true believers donating. I used to live in a town where one of the largest landholders was selling off land a few acres at a time. He had a couple thousand acres (had been farmland, but the city had grown since that time and it was not that profitable as a farm) and was able to sell it at something like $25-50k/half-acre lot. Neighborhoods went up, he got money and funded a lot of missionary activities (primarily in Africa, as I understood it). You get someone like that to bankroll a radio station, they could probably set up an endowment to keep it running for quite a while. The land the station uses and towers, if owned by the station, can be rented out for more income as well.

Time to set up more shortwave radio stations then (assuming that's allowed etc) with different content.

I don't think the UK is willing to licence any shortwave for broadcasting. There's pirates of course but I think Ofcom still track down persistent offenders on shortwave.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com