Monthly Archives: September 2018

Radio World: “Who’s Got the Biggest, Meanest AM Flamethrower?”

(Source: Radio World)

More broadcasters than you might realize are helping keep the ionosphere warm (and the power companies happy)

In the May 9 issue of Radio World, I reported on a recent power upgrade at TWR’s Bonaire AM facility that brought that station close to the half-megawatt level (440 kW), allowing the station to make the claim that it is the most powerful medium-wave (MW) operation in the Western Hemisphere. After the dust settled, I thought it might be interesting to poke around a bit in the data available to see if they have a close (or even not-so-close) contender for second place for this title.

With only a few exceptions, U.S. stations have been capped at 50 kW since this power level was authorized by the Federal Radio Commission in the late 1920s. Powel Crosley Jr.’s WLW 500,000 kW 1930s “experimental” operation is one very well-known example, as it received a lot of publicity during the five years or so during it operated before being powered down. However, there was another much less well-known superpower operation during that period (it actually beat WLW to the punch by putting 400,000 Watts on the air about three years before Crosley was ready to belt out his hundreds of kilowatts).

[…]Surprisingly, there is one U.S. AM station that has the necessary paperwork and equipment to operate at 100 kW full-time. However, it’s not listed in the FCC’s AM database. I’m referring to the VOA’s “Radio Martí” in Marathon, Fla. which operates on 1080 kHz.

The VOA station (it sports no call sign) appears to be the only operation in its class in the U.S. and Canada, but it if you cross the border into Mexico, you’ll find “muchas estaciones de radio” that emit lots more than a puny 50,000 “vatios.”[…]

Click here to read the full story at Radio World.

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Just for fun: cat approves of Radio Taiwan’s English Service

Many thanks to SWLing Post contributor, Marcus Keulertz, who writes:

I would like to [share a] picture of our other female family member. I’m not quite sure if she loves the shortwave chirping signal which was emitted from Radio Taiwan’s English Service.

What I observed is that she stayed calm while listening to their evening broadcast.

In other words, RTI can entertain even a furry feline friend––right, Markus? She certainly seems to have her ears in the listening position. Thanks for sharing!

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VoIP Hurricane Net details

Many thanks to SWLing Post contributor, Dennis Dura, who shares the following information about the VoIP Hurricane Net in which he is heavily involved:

**VoIP Hurricane Net will activate starting at 9 AM EDT Thursday Morning through 11 PM EDT Saturday Evening for Dangerous Hurricane Florence which is expected to be a major hurricane and will slow its approach to the Southeast North Carolina/Northeast South Carolina Coast Thursday Night through Friday Night with continued hurricane impacts into Saturday.**
**WX4NHC, the Amateur Radio Station at the National Hurricane Center, will activate at 900 AM EDT Thursday 9/13/18 for Dangerous Hurricane Florence**

Here are the VoIP Hurricane Net and WX4NHC Activation Plans for Florence as of Wednesday Evening 9/12/18 at 745 PM EDT/2345 UTC:

The VoIP Hurricane Net will activate starting at 900 AM EDT Thursday Morning through Saturday Evening for Dangerous Hurricane Florence’s impacts to North and South Carolina. WX4NHC, the Amateur Radio Station at the National Hurricane Center, will activate at 900 AM EDT Thursday 9/13/18. Florence is expected to be a dangerous major hurricane and slowing her approach to the North and South Carolina coast Thursday Night through Friday Night with hurricane impacts and landfall some time on Saturday.

Any Amateur Radio Operators in the affected area of Hurricane Florence or with relays into the affected area of Florence are asked to provide surface and damage reports into the VoIP Hurricane Net for relay into WX4NHC, the Amateur Radio station at the National Hurricane Center. We appreciate any and all support from Amateur Operators in the affected area or Amateur Operators with relays into the affected area. We are looking for reports based on the National Weather Service SKYWARN Reporting criteria. This can be seen on the VoIP Hurricane Net web site at the following link:

http://voipwx.net/voip-hurricane-net-reporting-criteria/

Any pictures or videos of wind damage, river/stream/urban/storm surge flooding etc. can be sent to the following email address: [email protected] and credit will be given to the Amateur Radio Operator, weather spotter or individual that took the photos and media and be shared with the Amateur Radio team at the National Hurricane Center and other agencies and outlets.

Advisories on Hurricane Florence can be seen off of the Atlantic Tropical Products menu selection on the voipwxnet web site, via our Facebook and Twitter feeds, and off the National Hurricane Center web site via the following link:

http://www.nhc.noaa.gov

Reports as obtained via the VoIP Hurricane Net from Amateur Radio Operators in the affected area, relays from the affected area or from APRS/CWOP Weather Station feeds and other social media outlets can be found at the following link:

http://report.voipwx.net/qilan/nhcwx/list_VOIP_records?auth=OK

Stations outside the affected area who would like to listen into the VoIP Hurricane Net can use any of the following systems for listen-only purposes and can connect on either Echolink or IRLP:
*NEW-ENG3* Echolink conference node: 9123/IRLP 9123

Stations outside the affected area who would like to listen into the VoIP Hurricane Net can use any of the following systems for listen-only purposes on Echolink:
*KA1AAA* Echolink conference node: 4439
*WX5FWD* Echolink conference node: 372418
*ARERT* Echolink conference node: 27366

Stations outside the affected area who would like to listen into the VoIP Hurricane Net can use any of the following systems for listen-only purposes on All-Star by dialing *33009123.

We will have an audio livestream as provided by KC4QLP-Bob Carter. That link is listed below:

http://173.249.54.155:9050

The VoIP Hurricane Net Management team continues to closely watch Hurricane Florence. Thanks to all for their continued support of the VoIP Hurricane Net!

73,Rob-KD1CY.
Director of Operations for the VoIP Hurricane Net

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Justin Moore on Making Music with Radios

Many thanks to SWLing Post contributor, Justin Patrick Moore (KE8COY), who is a radio host, radio enthusiast and musician. At my request, Justin has shared the following article excerpts from his blog that discuss the convergence of music and radio:


Imaginary Landscapes

The development of telecommunications technology and electronic circuits had a major impact on the creation of new musical instruments from the very beginning, but it was only in 1951 that a composer first got the idea that the radio itself could be used as a musical instrument.  Since then the use of radio as a source for live, unpredictable sound, music, and voice has become commonplace across the genres of contemporary classical music, and various styles of electronic, rock and pop music. Using the radio as an instrument has become part of what composer Alvin Curran has called a “new common practice” and is just one of many methods being used to create the sonic backdrop of the landscape we now inhabit in this age of electronic multimedia.

“It’s not a physical landscape. It’s a term reserved for the new technologies. It’s a landscape in the future. It’s as though you used technology to take you off the ground and go like Alice through the looking glass.” John Cage wrote this about his series of Imaginary Landscape compositions. Imaginary Landscape No. 4 was first performed in 1951 and is scored for 12 radios played by 24 musicians, two on each radio, one to control the tuning, the other to control the volume. It is a great example of indeterminate music. The only guarantee about the piece is that no performance of it will never be heard the same way. This is guaranteed because John incorporates chance operations to determine how much the dials of each radio are to be turned by each performer. The novelty of each performance is also guaranteed by the nature of radio itself. Depending on the place and time of a performance, the things coming out of the radio speakers are going to be different. During its premier concert at Columbia University’s McMillin Theater those in the audience heard the word “Korea” over and over again, as well as snippets of a Mozart violin concerto, news about baseball, static, and silence. The performance took place around midnight and many of the stations in New York had already gone off the air for the night.  Of course the silence never bothered Cage, who considered  in an integral part of the experience. He had said that “silence, to my mind is as much a part of music as sound.”

Read the full article at Sothis Medias.

The Radiophonic Laboratory

Radio is the perfect medium for the diffusion of electronic music. The unpredictable sounds coming from radios are also a perfect source material. In many cases the production studios available at broadcast facilities made them the first laboratories for the scientific investigation of sound, for the sole purpose of making music, to be used by electronic music pioneers. Likewise these stations became the first to introduce electronic and other avant-garde music to the public. Such was the case with Westdeutscher Rundfunk, or WDR, the German public broadcasting institution located in Cologne. Their Studio for Electronic Music was the first of its kind in the world and became an epicenter for musicians working in the new medium. On the broadcasting side the WDR promoted new music through unique programming that included radio lectures, the playing of live and recorded music, and commissioning new works from composers working in the field.

Read the full article at Sothis Medias.

Telemusik

As the world caught wind of the work being done at the WDR’s Electronic Music Studio, other radio stations and broadcasting corporations followed suit. NHK (Nippon HosoKyokai) in Japan built their electronic music studio in 1955, directly modeling it on the one at WDR. In 1958 the BBC created their famous Radiophonic Workshop. (I blame starting to watch Doctor Who as a ten year old, with its strange soundtrack and incidental music, for what became my lifelong fascination with electronic music.) The studio at NHK was just over ten years old when they invited Karlheinz Stockhausen over to work there and create two pieces for their airwaves.

When he arrived in Japan Karlheinz was severely jet lagged and disoriented. For several days he couldn’t sleep. That’s when the strange hallucinatory visions set in. Laying awake in bed one night his mind was flooded with ideas of  “technical processes, formal relationships, pictures of the notation, of human relationships, etc.—all at once and in a network too tangled up to be unraveled into one process.” These musings of the night took on a life of their own and from them he created Telemusik.

Read the full article at Sothis Medias.

Kurzwellen

Starting in the early 1960s Karlheinz Stockhausen composed several instrumental works which he called “process compositions”. These did away with traditional stave notation and instead used symbols including plus, minus, and equal signs that indicated the successive transformations of sounds that were otherwise unspecified or unforeseeable by the composer. In this way he brings elements of improvisation into the fold of Western classical music where the strict adherence to a fixed score left little room for interpretation by musicians. The scores in his process pieces don’t dictate specific notes or ways of playing but rather specify the way a sound is to be changed or imitated. Taking a cue from his studies of information theory Stockhausen created a way of writing music that is similar to computer programming. The program “determines the way information is processed while leaving the choice of information to be processed to the individual user.” (Maconie 1990, 156-157)

Stockhausen’s process pieces include Plus-Minus (1963), Prozession (1967), Kurzwellen, and Spiral (both 1968). Eventually they led to the text based processes of his intuitive music compositions in the cycles Aus den sieben Tagen (1968) and Für kommende Zeiten (1968–70).

Kurzwellen (Short waves), the third of the process pieces also marks the beginning of Stockhausen’s magnificent voyage using shortwave receivers as a medium for musical transportation. The formal procedures in Kurzwellen (and the others) are fixed. Stockhausen thinks of these not as fixed in the way Beethoven’s Fifth symphony is a fixed piece that will sound the same to a greater or larger degree from recording to recording or performance to performance. Only the processes themselves are fixed. These are indicated primarily by plus, minus, and equal signs and constitute the composition.

Yet the sound materials themselves, like the knobs on the tuners, are variable. The process scores can be followed and bring about very different results each time they are played and yet somehow still sound similar. The sound material coming in from the shortwave radios is unpredictable. Yet the prescribed processes themselves can be heard from one performance to another as being “the same”. These developments in musical theory and practice make live performances and new recordings exciting events.

Read the full article at Sothis Medias.

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How to listen to Hurricane Watch Net frequencies

As Hurricane Florence starts to make landfall today, it is expected to have a serious impact on coastal South Carolina and North Carolina. Florence is currently a category 2 hurricane, but they expect wind speeds to diminish quickly upon landfall. No doubt, we’ll remember Florence for the tremendous amount of rainfall she packs–there will be significant flooding in her path.

A few readers have asked about frequencies to monitor as the storm approaches.

Hurricane Watch Net (HWN)

hwn-hurricane-watch-netThe Hurricane Watch Net is a group of amateur radio operators who are trained and organized “to provide essential communications support to the National Hurricane Center during times of Hurricane emergencies.” The HWN focuses on “ground truth” observations (much like SkyWarn nets).

The Hurricane Watch Net is activated when a hurricane is within 300 statute miles of expected land-fall. The HWN covers the Caribbean, Central America, Eastern Mexico, Eastern Canada, and all US Coastal States.

The HWN operates in both English and Spanish, and is active on 14.325 MHz (upper sideband) during the day and 7.268 MHz (lower sideband) at night. The HWN is known to operate on both frequencies if propagation allows.

Please keep HWN frequencies clear

If you’re an amateur radio operator, please avoid using 14.325 MHz and 7.268 MHz anytime the HWN has been activated.

Monitoring hurricane frequencies

If you have a shortwave radio with a BFO/SSB mode–and you live within the propagation footprint–you can monitor the Hurricane Watch Net.

Note that you’ll need to use upper sideband on 14.325 MHz and lower sideband on 7.268 MHz.

You can also monitor the Hurricane Watch Net via a number of WebSDRs on the KiwiSDR network and even potentially via the U Twente WebSDR in the Netherlands (although a WebSDR in North America would be preferable).

Click here to view the Hurricane Watch Net website.

At time of posting, there are a number of tropical storms in the Atlantic. If you live in an area prone to hurricanes, tropical storms and other natural disasters, please keep an emergency kit fully-stocked and at the ready. Click here for some ideas about building your own simple kit.

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Slow Radio via BBC Radio 3

Described as “an antidote to today’s frenzied world”, the BBC has launched a new radio program with 30-minute recordings of “the sounds of birds, mountain climbing, monks chatting as you go about your day.”

With the popularity of Slow Television and ASMR (Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response) I imagine Slow Radio will be quite popular.

Of course, Slow Radio can be heard on Radio 3, via the BBC iPlayer and as a podcast. The BBC iPlayer is geo-blocked outside the UK, but the podcast is available albeit with some advertising.

Click here for the Slow Radio homepage on the BBC.

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Spectrum Management and the Impact on Amateur Radio

Many thanks to an SWLing Post reader who has shared the following document which was published during the IARU Region 3 conference in Seoul. The document is titled “The evolution of spectrum management in the era of hyper-connectivity and its impact on the amateur service.” Certainly a tough look at the realities of spectrum use and amateur radio’s part in it.

Click here to download (.docx format). 

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