Shortwave listening and everything radio including reviews, broadcasting, ham radio, field operation, DXing, maker kits, travel, emergency gear, events, and more
Many thanks to SWLing Post contributor and noted political cartoonist, Carlos Latuff, who shares the following illustrated radio listening reports, all covering the ongoing Los Angeles Wildfires.
Part of Vatican Radio’s news bulletin (in Portuguese), listened in Porto Alegre:
“In a telegram to the Archbishop of Los Angeles, in the United States of America, Dom José Gómez, Pope Francis expressed his sadness at the loss of life and the widespread destruction caused by the fires that have hit this region of California. In a message signed by the Cardinal Secretary of State, Pietro Parolin, the Holy Father assures his spiritual closeness to the affected communities and entrusts the souls of the deceased to the loving mercy of Almighty God, sending his sincere condolences to those who mourn their loss.
The Pontifex also prays for the emergency teams and grants his blessing to all as a promise of consolation and strength in the Lord. To date, at least 11 people have died and 150,000 have been evacuated due to the devastating fires that hit the Los Angeles region. In addition to the loss of human lives, the fire left a trail of destruction with economic losses of between 135 and 150 billion dollars.”
Part of NHK news bulletin (in Japanese) about Los Angeles wildfires. Listened (indoor) in Porto Alegre in a Toshiba TR486 receiver, telescopic antenna.
Part of CGTN Radio news bulletin (in English).
Firefighters have made some progress in Southern California, earth recorded its hottest year in 2024. Listened in Porto Alegre, Brazil.
For DXers of Latin American stations, the period from about 1978-1998 was the golden age of DXing Peru. Those years saw an explosion of shortwave broadcasting from small towns, especially in northern Peru. Most of the stations were unlicensed and few lasted long. I tell the complete story of the period in Tales of a Vagabond DXer. However, the book doesn’t have many pictures as that would have made it much more expensive to produce and to buy. Fortunately, this blog is a perfect place to share photographs.
In those days one of the biggest radio hotspots in Peru was the department of Cajamarca. Over one hundred stations broadcast on shortwave, however briefly, just from that department. Cajamarca is a special place to me because I visited the region in 1985 during the height of the radio boom and visited over a dozen stations in the towns of Chota, Bambamarca, Cutervo and Celendín and the city of Cajamarca.
Chota is the largest town in the central part of Cajamarca department and played an important role in the development of broadcasting in small provincial towns. It’s about 140 kilometers north of Cajamarca but in between is cold barren Andean altiplano rising to over 4,000 meters elevation. In 1985 the bus ride took twelve hours and we encountered ice storms coming and going.
In 1985 Chota was a sleepy Andean town in a fertile river valley.
Radio Chota was already seven years old when I visited in March 1985. The station only had a medium wave license but also broadcast unlicensed on the out-of-band shortwave frequency of 6296 kHz where it was widely heard by DXers. Later they received a shortwave license and were assigned 4890 kHz but several years passed before they actually switched frequencies. Radio Chota was a success story and is still on the air today. Most of the stations I visited in 1985 were not so lucky.
QSL collection of Don Moore … www.DonMooreDXer.com …
Radio Chota as heard on 6296 kHz in 1982 via On the Shortwaves:
Radio Chota as I heard it in Quito, Ecuador on 4890 kHz in 1997:
Radio Acunta was a more typical broadcaster of the period. The station broadcast irregularly in 1984 and 1985 with a homemade 100-watt transmitter. The station didn’t survive but the transmitter with its crystal-controlled frequency of 5800 kHz was a good starter set. Over the next several years DXers followed its movements around northern Peru as it was sold from one would-be station to another.
This picture with the homemade posterboard signs really captures the transient nature of broadcasting in rural Peru in the 1980s. Radio San Juan de Chota was on 5274 kHz for a few months in late 1984 and early 1985. I doubt they ever had permanent signs made. They did, however, have professionally printed envelopes.
Recording of Radio San Juan de Chota via On the Shortwaves:
Bambamarca is a smaller farming town 20 kilometers south of Chota. It was also home to several shortwave stations over the years. Radio Bambamarca had a short appearance on 5657 kHz in the mid-1980s.
Return to Chota
I always expected to return to the Cajamarca area someday. Finally, in November and December 2017, I revisited all the places I had seen in 1985 and more while researching my historical travelogue Following Ghosts in Northern Peru. A few months later, in May 2018, I returned to the city of Cajamarca and Chota with my DX travel buddies, John Fisher and Karl Forth. Continue reading →
This article appearing in the Washington Business Journal reports that President Joe Biden signed legislation that orders the sale of the Wilbur Cohen Building at 330 Independence Avenue, which has been headquarters to the U.S. Agency for Global Media (ex-Broadcasting Board of Governors) and Voice of America for many decades.
Relocation of the agency and VOA has been in the planning stages for the last several years, with the USAGM CEO and other officials claiming that savings from standing down the Cohen Building, which was constructed between 1939 and 1940, in stages would more than pay for the relocation.
However, sources inside the agency have doubts. The new building selected by the now outgoing CEO, Amanda Bennett, at 1875 Pennsylvania Avenue, NW — just a couple blocks from the White House, is currently just office space with no production/broadcast facilities.
A report by the consulting firm Deloitte lays out a multi-year timeline for the agency through 2027. It contains the following description: “New facility was previously only office space and does not currently have the infrastructures to support Broadcast Technology needs. Facility will need to be retrofitted to do so.”
The article by Ben Peters of Washington Business Journal says:
“Congress has directed the General Services Administration to sell the storied Wilbur J. Cohen Federal Building as part of the government’s ongoing efforts to offload underutilized real estate assets. The Biden Administration last week signed off on the Thomas R. Carper Water Resources Development Act of 2024 that, among its many provisions, requires GSA to sell the 330 Independence Ave. SW, located a crosswalk away from the National Mall, “for fair market value at highest and best use” no later than two years following the vacancy of its last remaining federal agency.
It goes on to note that USAGM and VOA are believed to be the only occupant of the building. At 1.2 million square feet, the Cohen Building far exceeds the area of the planned new headquarters building, but agency officials have asserted that much of the Cohen Building space was not actually used.
Nevertheless, employees are wondering how agency staff at current levels will be able to fit at 1875 Pennsylvania Avenue, and this has been the subject of questions at recent internal Town Hall meetings.
Washington Business Journal continues: “If sold, the Cohen building would join a growing list of federally owned properties that have been or remain in the process of being offloaded as the GSA accelerates long-standing plans to cut back the federal real estate portfolio. That work is expected to accelerate under the incoming second Trump administration.”
“USAGM last year signed a 15-year deal to relocate and downsize its offices from 698,000 square feet at the Cohen building into 350,000 square feet at the EastBanc-owned 1875 Pennsylvania Ave. NW. The deal represented by far D.C.’s largest fourth-quarter lease transaction, helping to move the District’s office vacancy rate down ever so slightly for the first time in years.”
The article also quotes a 2024 report by the Public Buildings Reform Board, which found that USAGM’s offices at Cohen were just 2% full between January and September 2023. The large office space there has a capacity of 3,431 workers but saw, on average, just 72 people actually using it each day during that period, the report said.”
The low occupancy of the Cohen Building came to the attention of members of Congress preparing reports on the abuse of telework and remote work by federal employees, prominent among which is Senator Joni Ernst (R-IA).
One photo of VOA’s near-empty newsroom, taken by a tourist visiting VOA, appeared on the World of Radio group, directly contrasting with what once was a vibrant VOA central news operation.
As Government Executive detailed here, Senator Ernst proposed “a trio of bills targeting Washington, D.C.,-area federal employees that would mandate agencies move staff—or their entire headquarters—out of the region, as well as more closely track teleworkers’ activities.
The Decentralizing and Reorganizing Agency Infrastructure Nation-wide to Harness Efficient Services, Workforce Administration and Management Practices—or DRAIN THE SWAMP—Act (S. 23) would require all non-national security agencies to relocate 30% of their headquarters staff outside of the D.C. area within one year of the measure’s enactment.
The Requiring Effective Management and Oversight of Teleworking Employees Act (S. 21) would “require agencies to measure the login data and network traffic—that is, the amount and rate of data flow—from teleworking federal workers’ computers to ensure that they are doing their jobs while outside of traditional work sites.
Another bill, Strategic Withdrawal of Agencies for Meaningful Placement Act (S. 22), would bar agencies from undertaking renovations or renewing the leases of their D.C.-area headquarters and instead require them to solicit bids from other cities to relocate outside of the national capital region. It is worth noting that 85% of the federal workforce already lives and works outside of the D.C. area.
Ernst directly cites low occupancy rates at agencies’ D.C. headquarters, saying she was “already working hard on my top priorities—to drain the swamp, save tax dollars and get federal employees back to serving the American people,” Ernst said in a statement.
A lot of history took place in the Cohen Building, including President Ronald Reagan’s visit, during which this photo was taken. I was in the building in the early years of a 34-year career with VOA when this visit occurred.
It’s clear that VOA and USAGM itself face potential downsizing especially at a time when the focus of the incoming second Trump administration is on reducing waste of taxpayer funds by federal agencies. The extent to which the agency has its budget (which stood at about $950 million in 2025) reduced remains to be seen.
Many thanks to SWLing Post contributor Steve Allen (KZ4TN), who shares the following guest post:
SDR Signal Enhancer
by Steve Allen
I came across this HF Signal Enhancer for SDR on the RTL-SDR.com website. It was designed and built by Peter Parker, VK3YE from Melbourne, Australia. Below is the link to the video of the signal enhancer in action using an RTL-SDR V4 Software Designed Radio;
It was very easy to see and listen to the improvement to the signal reception the signal enhancer made. Having been a life-long shortwave listener and current SDR user, I had to build one.
I did a screen capture of the schematic, re-drew it using MS Word, and built the bill of materials. In Peter’s original design he included a T-R relay so you could use the SDR along with a transmitter, which I opted to leave out. I had the passive components in my “junk box” but had to source the enclosure, controls, and antenna connectors. I have used these clam shell extruded enclosures with previous projects and love the build quality and the fact that they incorporate a slot in the sides which let me insert a sheet of PCB material on which I can do the assembly.
Referring to the schematic drawing in Peter’s video, you can see that the variable capacitor “floats” above ground, which is not the usual application for these devices. To do that I mounted the vari-cap on a piece of non-plated PCB material that I cut to the width of the enclosure and it fit nicely within the slot. The vari-cap had three pins on the side of the frame that allowed me to force fit it into three holes I drilled in the PCB material. I was very careful to drill the holes undersize and then slowly open them up until the vari-cap press fit on to the board. For good measure I ran UV curing adhesive down into each hole, letting it flow all the way through before I set it with a UV light source.
I then drilled an oversized hole in the front panel for the vari-cap shaft to pass through.
I then mounted the RF gain and band switch. The next step was the assembly of the AM broadcast filter. As SDRs can be overpowered by local AM radio stations Peter choose to include an internal band pass filter that is configured for around 3.5 MHz. The intent of this filter is to attenuate the signals below 3.5 MHz. Strong AM stations will still be heard but there is much less chance of them bleeding through on the higher frequencies.
I assembled the filter on a piece of perf board and connected the component leads on the bottom. I passed leads back up through the perf board for the signal path and ground. I mounted it on the main board with a standoff.
The next step was the wiring of the inductors to the rotary switch. Simple, and I tied them to the vari-cap frame.
For the back panel I chose an SO-239 and a BNC for the antenna input, and for the radio connection an SMA and another BNC. I sanded off the coating on the enclosure at the antenna mounts as well as the four corners where the back panel screws into the top and bottom of the clam shell enclosure to provide good grounding of the enclosure. I wired the 1N4148 diodes on the antenna connectors, and attached the RG-174 coax. As Peter suggested, I grounded the long (relatively speaking) runs to and from the back panel with coax and grounded it at the back panel.
The last step was to apply a bit of epoxy adhesive to the fiberglass board and the slot it runs in to hold it in place. Once the epoxy set, I did the final wiring of the front and rear panel components. You can see how I sanded the corners of the back panel in the above photo.
I connected it to my inverted L antenna and an SDR Play RSP2 and gave it a test run. I like the fact that I can visually see the changes to the signal strength on the SDR software as well as audibly. It makes a noticeable improvement to the reception.
Many thanks to SWLing Post contributor and noted political cartoonist, Carlos Latuff, who shares illustrated radio listening report of a recent broadcast of African News Panorama via Vatican Radio.
Carlos notes:
Vatican Radio’s African News Panorama, in English.
Angola parliament debates on banning the sale of alcoholic beverages in some places, African Union’s Extraordinary Summit on Agriculture in Uganda, Benin’s National Army attacked by Islamic militants. Listened in Porto Alegre.
