Monthly Archives: June 2015

Shortwave Radio Recordings: Voice of Turkey, English language service

For your listening pleasure: the Voice of Turkey English language service.

This program was recorded on June 7, 2015, starting around 2205 UTC on 9830 kHz. I started recording the program a few minutes after the top of the hour when a digital transmission on the same frequency finally went off air. I made this recording with the TitanSDR Pro hooked up to my horizontal delta loop antenna.

You will actually hear a few seconds of the digital broadcast at the very beginning of the recording. Click here to download the recording as an MP3, or simply listen via the embedded player below:

Spread the radio love

99% Invisible: “Voices on the Wire”

4 Replies

Many of you know that I’m a huge fan of 99% Invisible–a podcast and radio show about “design, architecture & the 99% invisible activity that shapes our world.”

This past week, 99% Invisible’s episode, Voices on the Wire, featured Tony Schwartz, a recording pioneer, and Frank Conrad, a broadcasting pioneer. While not specifically about shortwave radio, you’ll hear how the ether weaved its way through both of their histories.

I should mention that Roman Mars, creator of 99% Invisible, is quite a fan of shortwave radio. Indeed, in the past, he’s featured our friend, David Goren, of Shortwaveology.net.

You can listen to Voices on the Wire and read the show notes on 99% Invisible’s website. Click here to download the episode as an MP3 file, or simply listen via the embedded SoundCloud player below:

Note that the Tony Swartz segment was originally produced by The Kitchen Sisters, Nikki Silva and Davia Nelson, from their series Lost and Found Sound; the segment on Frank Conrad was originally produced by Radio Diaries.

And, hey…if you happen to be chatting with Roman Mars anytime soon, ask him to do more shows on shortwave radio: a technology I consider to be the ultimate invisible medium!

Spread the radio love

The Panasonic RF-2200: an early birthday gift

21 Replies

This week, I purchased a radio that I have lusted after for years: the Panasonic RF-2200.

I justified this eBay purchase because June is my birthday month and…well…do I need anymore justification!?! Just look at this beautiful analog dial:

In truth, I’ve been wanting a benchmark portable medium wave receiver for ages, and I believe there are few better than the venerable RF-2200.

I picked the RF-2200 this morning and I’ve only had it on the air a few minutes. It effortlessly picked up my local benchmark medium wave and FM stations. The audio fidelity is brilliant and the ‘2200 appears to have a very low noise floor. I haven’t had a moment to truly cruise the shortwave bands, but I plan to over the course of this week and shall report back.

Spread the radio love

The Siru Innovatios SDR20 multi-touch portable SDR

Leave a reply

A few weeks ago, at the Four Days In May conference (held alongside the Dayton Hamvention) I met Jarkko Mäkivaara from the Finnish company Siru.

Jarkko was demonstrating the SDR20: a radio that immediately grabbed my attention from across the room. The SDR20 is a fully portable, robust, multi-touch portable SDR transceiver.

The screen on the SDR20 is as responsive as an iPad and fully developed around SDR functionality. While Jarkko didn’t have an HF signal of any sort inside the hotel convention room, I was able to play with the interface a bit, which I found rather intuitive.

(Source: Siru)

The SDR20’s product brochure lists some of its features:

2-channel transceiver operation
Two methodologies for implementation: IQ Mod / Demod and Direct Down and Direct Up (DDC, DUC) conversion
Up to 200MHz bandwidth per channel
100mW transmit power. Higly efficient 1kW exciter available separately.
Frequency range covers DC to 2.5 GHz
State of the art Altera Cyclone SOC-FPGA (Including dual-ARM9 Cortex)
Graphics Prosessor accelerated Multi-Touch screen with a slick user interface
GNURadio, C++ API/Python, VHDL/Verilog/High Level Synthesis sandbox
High-speed ethernet interface for computer connection
Internal clock 20 PPS
Coherent operation with external clock source (GPS, Rubidium etc.)
Rugged and stylish enclosure / Rack mount

Of course, the SDR20 is truly designed for industrial and government/military applications, thus it carries a price tag reflective of those markets: €3,395.00 (about $3,800 USD).

Still, seeing the SDR20 gives me hope that multi-touch, portable SDRs will become more commonplace as capacitive screens, processors, DSP chips and solid state storage continue to decline in price. Indeed, I wouldn’t be surprised if Siru is able to lower the price on future iterations of their portable SDR line.

If you would like to take a look at some of the SDR20’s specifications, check out this PDF product sheet and the video embedded below. Of course, you’ll find even more information and updates on Siru’s website. The SDR20 has shipped to Beta testers and should begin full production in the fall.

https://vimeo.com/122629896

Spread the radio love

Nigeria’s Freedom Radio shortwave frequencies

Socotra Island: Myke posts tracks from 2013 travels

Nigeria’s Freedom Radio to broadcast via shortwave

1 Reply

(Source: Albawaba)

Residents of Nigeria’s north-east have lived in isolation for two years. Terrorists frequently target phone lines in order to cut off communication. Traders avoid the region. Journalists live under threat.

But a new radio programme is now bringing important information to three states – Borno, Adamawa and Yobe – which have been under a state of emergency since May 2013 and turned by the army into a battleground against Islamist terrorist group Boko Haram.

[…]Most radio stations in north-eastern Nigeria are government-owned and broadcast in Hausa or English. For the tens of thousands of Kanuri-speaking people, there is no independent source of information, only state-sanctioned news and Boko Haram propaganda.

“Boko Haram controls people by inducing fear. Without alternatives, people are very much under the influence of Boko Haram’s propaganda,” says Wada. “Through Dandal Kura, we try to work against the propaganda by giving listeners objective information.”

Dandal Kura, which means “the big hall” in Kanuri, was initially set up in January as a three-month pilot project funded by United States development agency USAID. Since April, the programme is managed and run by Freedom Radio, a private broadcaster based in Kano.

[…]What is special about Dandal Kura is not only the language. The programme is transmitted by shortwave, on 9940 kHz, instead of the commonly used FM frequency band.

Shortwave is especially important in rural areas across Africa where FM waves hardly reach, but shortwave radios are easily available for an affordable price. In northern Nigeria they can be bought at any marketplace for about 600 Naira (3 dollars).

There is another key advantage: The shortwave transmission system is located hundreds of kilometres away – on the Atlantic island of Ascension – which means it cannot be destroyed by Boko Haram.

An FM transmitter, in contrast, would have to be installed on the ground in northern Nigeria.

“If we had set up FM transmitters, there would have been a high chance that Boko Haram would take them out,” says Smith, who has experience in setting up radio stations in African conflict zones, including Somalia and Central African Republic.

Click here to read the full article at Albawaba.

Spread the radio love