May 2025 Schedule Updates: From the Isle of Music & Uncle Bill’s Melting Pot

Many thanks to SWLing Post contributor, Bill Tilford, who shares the following update:

From the Isle of Music, May 2025

May’s program will feature music from two Cuban artists in Scandinavia, Yeisy Rojas in Norway and Eliel Lazo in Denmark.

Friday, May 9:

6070 kHz at 1700 UTC
3955 at 2100 UTC
Sunday, May 11:
9670 kHz at 1700 UTC using beam E (repeat of May 9 episode.)

Uncle Bill’s Melting Pot, May 2025

May’s program will feature music from the Kingdom of Bhutan and will air as follows:

Friday, May 16:

6070 kHz at 1700 UTC
3955 at 2100 UTC
Sunday, May 18
9670 kHz at 1700 UTC using beam E (repeat of May 16 episode).

**In addition to direct radio reception, we do honor reception reports using remote SDRs as long as the whole program is described and which SDR is specified.

More atmospheric phenomena predictions on shortwave

Hi to all the SWLing community worldwide. Imaginary Stations have a couple of programmes on the shortwaves this week for your listening pleasure. The first is on Saturday 26th April 2025 at 1100 hrs UTC on 6160 kHz and then repeated on Sunday 27th April 2025 at 0900/1300 hrs UTC on 6160 kHz and at 2000 UTC on 3975 kHz and 6160 kHz via Shortwave Gold.

It’s another episode of The Weather Channel where we bring you “All weather, all the time”. Expect an avalanche of tunes that feature mentions of atmospheric phenomena all the way from Isobars to Icicles, some classics of a high- and low-pressure nature and some heavy “Weather rock” to play your air barometer to. Tune in and enjoy!

Recently we found some bad news on the internet where it mentioned that “TV test cards are now only rarely seen outside of television studios, post-production, and distribution facilities. They are no longer intended to assist viewers in calibration of television sets”.

That made us feel very sad here at Imaginary Stations, so on Wednesday 30th April 2025 at our new time of 0200 UTC via WRMI we bring you another episode of Test Cards on Radio. We want to bring back the good times where it was all about screen calibration, test tones and adjusting that TV antenna on the roof with a bit of the good old “left a bit, right a bit” technique.

Tune into a golden time when the standard resolution was 525 and 625 lines and bring back some vertical and horizontal hold back into your life.

More on the Weather Channel here:

For more information on all our shows, please write to [email protected] and check out our old shows at our Mix cloud page here.

FastRadioBurst 23

Judge: The Dismantling Of The VOA Stops And Employees Can Go Back To Work

 

Published by SWLing.com contributor Paul Walker

From Politico:

 A federal judge agreed Tuesday to block the Trump administration from dismantling Voice of America, the 83-year-old international news service created by Congress.

U.S. District Judge Royce Lamberth ruled that the administration illegally required Voice of America to cease operations for the first time since its World War II-era inception.

(Their article is here: https://www.politico.com/news/2025/04/22/voice-of-america-donald-trump-00303983)

From The Washington Post:

Staffers at the government-funded Voice of America news service can go back to work, a federal judge in Washington ruled on Tuesday.

Another article is here: https://democracyforward.org/updates/voa-pi-granted/

Associated Press Story:  https://apnews.com/article/voice-of-america-trump-f30c48df0c16de622ec5fd99ee6c627c

Remembering Pope Francis through Carlos’ Illustrated Radio Listening Reports

Many thanks to SWLing Post contributor and noted political cartoonist, Carlos Latuff, who shares an illustrated radio listening report from Vatican Radio reporting the death of Pope Francis, along with a recent Kyodo News Agency Radiofax, and numerous archived reports from Carlos also featuring Pope Francis:


Carlos notes:

Pope Francis has passed away:

Full news bulletin (in English) of Vatican Radio Africa’s Service about the death of Pope Francis. Listened in Porto Alegre, Brazil, on a Xhdata D-808 receiver.

Click here to view on YouTube.

I received this radiofax today, it’s the English Edition of Kyodo News from April 21, the date of Pope Francis’ death, and it has the following news: “Pope Francis emerges from convalescence on Easter, delights crowd with popemobile tour.”

Pope Francis in the Archives

A few illustrated radio listening reports about Pope Francis from 2021 to 2025

Tuning Out Tibet: The Closure of VOA and RFA Tibetan Broadcasts

Many thanks to SWLing Post contributor Fred Waterer for also sharing the following article from Tibetan Review. This piece raises questions about the future of Tibetan-language broadcasting and the broader implications of VOA and RFA closures:

Click here to read: The Silencing of Tibetan Voices: Who Benefits and Who Loses from the Closure of VOA and RFA?

BBC Sounds and Overseas Listening: A Shifting Landscape

Many thanks to SWLing Post contributor, Fred Waterer, who shares the following post from James Cridland’s blog and notes:

Overseas listeners could listen to BBC Domestic broadcasts, then they couldn’t, then they might be able to and then they might be able to for a fee and then who knows….

https://james.cridland.net/blog/2025/bbc-radio-overseas-what-now/

Don Moore’s Photo Album: Guatemala (Part Five) – Visiting Nahualá

Many thanks to SWLing Post contributor Don Moore–noted author, traveler, and DXer–for the latest installment of his Photo Album guest post series:


Santo Tomas Church, Chichicastenango, Guatemala (by Lucía García González via Wikimedia Commons)

Don Moore’s Photo Album: 
Guatemala (Part Five) – Visiting Nahualá

More of Don’s traveling DX stories can be found in his book Tales of a Vagabond DXer [SWLing Post affiliate link]. If you’ve already read his book and enjoyed it, do Don a favor and leave a review on Amazon.

After my first attempt to visit La Voz de Atitlán failed in June 1983, I turned my sights northward. The next morning in Panajachel I boarded a bus bound for Guatemala City but got off when the bus reached the main highway at the Los Encuentros intersection. A few minutes later I caught a ride on a ‘chicken bus’ headed north to my first destination of the day – Chichicastenango.

Chichicastenango is not a town that DXers would be familiar with but anyone who has seriously traveled around Guatemala has surely been there at least once. The outdoor markets held on Thursday and Sunday are among the largest in all of Central America. Guatemala has dozens of towns with long names ending in …tenango, meaning “place of.” Chichicastenango is the place of the chichicaste plant, in reference to a thorny bush that grows in the area. Most of the time people just call the town Chichi as it’s common to drop the tenango part from names when speaking.

For over five hundred years, Quiché Mayans from the surrounding area have been coming here twice weekly for the market held in the plaza in front of the Santo Tomás church. The steps to the church are always filled with flower vendors and men swinging containers of incense.

In the early days of the Spanish conquest, Catholic churches were often built on the sites already holy to the Indians. It was a clever way to get the newly forced converts to come to mass. In the case of Santo Tomás, however, they unknowingly picked a location of major spiritual importance in the Mayan religion. As a result many Mayan ceremonies involving nature and natural gods have survived in this area. Some became intertwined with Catholic practices while others were practiced in secret for centuries until it finally became safe to bring them out into the open again.

It was only June but I did my Christmas shopping that day and mailed everything home from Guatemala City a few days later. Guatemala’s post office was very reliable. Everything arrived safely in less than two weeks.

On to Nahualá

With my purchases packed in my now very heavy bag, I got on the next bus heading south and once again got out at Los Encuentros. This time I was looking for any bus heading west. I wasn’t going too far. A few minutes later a bus bound for Quetzaltenango stopped and I got on, telling the driver’s assistant that I wanted to get off at Nahualá.

I knew Nahualá was in the northwest corner of Sololá department a little way off the Pan-American Highway but I was surprised when about an hour later the bus stopped next to a cornfield in the middle of nowhere. I gave the driver’s assistant a puzzled look when he told me this was my stop. He explained that they could leave me off further down the highway where the road to Nahualá branched off. But it would be a long walk from there. From here, the walk was only about ten minutes. There was a well-worn path leading upwards through the cornfield, so I took him at his word. Continue reading