(Source: The Post Courier via Bill Lee)
Minister for Communication, Information Technology and Energy Sam Basil wants all 22 provinces to have short wave frequency radio stations.
He said this during the Central Province assembly induction program last week Friday in Port Moresby.
“My role as the minister is to make sure that we go back to all the 22 provinces to make sure that we revive the radio stations,” Mr Basil said.
He said most of the radio stations currently using frequency modulation (FM) face the problem of signal loose in the rural settings as it is only powered by repeater and could not be able to penetrate when it meets obstacles.
“This is to ensure that people are kept informed and in tuned with the government of the day,” Mr Basil said.
[…]“I want to go short wave and we want to bring back to all the provinces capital in Papua New Guinea through National Broadcasting Corporation so that people in the mountains can have excess to communication,” Mr Basil said.
They’ve got more sense than the moron politicians in Australia who think shortwave is ancient.
In defence of the “moron politicians in Australia”, the decision to pull out of shortwave was made by the ABC, which is an independent corporation. There has been considerable concern over this decision shown by some in parliament.
Wikipedia says ABC is owned by the gov’t of Australia, just given a wide amount of latitude to ensure “journalistic integrity”, somewhat like the BBC, aussie style.
They may be “independent”, but they seem to get most of their money from the government, only the gov’t doesn’t get to second guess ABC’s decisions.
That’s not correct. Whilst the ABC is funded by the parliament, the act they are funded under is very broad in how they go about broadcasting. It only has a few requirements over the amount of australian music, amount of children’s programming, things like that.
The type of broadcast technology used is up to the ABC itself. The govt had no say in the shutdown of shortwave. It was purely an ABC management decision.
It’s the wrong decision, no doubt about that, basically leaves rural listeners with no radio (during the day anyway), unless they want to listen to CRI all day long which has good reception into Australia during the day ironically.
Thanks, Jason. Well put!
Same like the german politicians and people think,for what in hell do we need shortwave transmissions.
We rely on digital media.Even the DW ceased their multilingual service recently.
Great idea !! buy out the SW in Australia to secure emergency news with a couple of TX to cover PNG. Some frequencies 24/ 7 service on fixed frequency.