Halloween is typically the most active day of the year for shortwave pirates. Halloween falls on Wednesday, October 31st, and although this is the middle of the week, expect pirates to emerge like The Great Pumpkin!
Here are three things you’ll want to do Halloween night:
1. Hobby Broadcasting Blog
Check out Andrew Yoder’s pirate radio blog ,the Hobby Broadcasting blog.
Andrew is the author of the Pirate Radio Annual and a guru on shortwave pirate radio. Andrew has already logged some Halloween stations this weekend.
2. HF Underground
Follow real-time pirate radio spots and loggings on the HF Underground discussion forum. Chris Smolinski at HFU typically posts post-Halloween pirate stats on the SWLing Post as well–always a fascinating overview.
3. Listen!
Photo by Bill Patalon
Listen for pirate radio stations today and throughout the weekend! Turn on your radio anytime today, but especially around twilight and tune between 6,920 – 6,980 kHz. Pirates broadcast on both AM and SSB; you’re bound to hear a few. If you’re brand new to pirate radio listening, you might read my pirate radio primer by clicking here. I will be listening until late in the evening.
Happy Halloween to all!
Thanks for the reminder, pirate night had completely slipped my mind. Bagged Wolverine Radio on 6955 USB and X-FM on 6975 AM last evening. There may have been a few more down in the mud, but not enough to count them.
Thanks for the post! I’ll add another thing to do:
4. Join us on the HFU RocketChat, where we log pirates, and other SW stations, in real time. Details are here: https://www.hfunderground.com/board/index.php/topic,41066.0.html
Thanks for rerunning this piece! After a hiatus lasting more than 25 years, I had just gotten back to shortwave listening for a month or two when you ran this same primer ahead of Labor Day, so I headed to the HFUnderground.com forums and tuned into the frequencies they reported.
Long story short: Less than two months later, I’ve logged 17 different named pirate stations (and several unidentified ones), gotten a few eQSLs, and I hunt almost every weekend for their wacky, wonderful programming.