Woofferton Transmitting Station (Photo by Shirokazan via Wikimedia Commons.)
Many thanks to a number of SWLing Post contributors who share the following news item from the New York Times. I’ve included an excerpt below, but the full article article can be found on the NY Times website. You may need a NY Times account to read this article if you’re not a paid subscriber; the account is free and allows you a limited number of free articles each month:
BBC revives shortwave radio dispatches in Ukraine, and draws ire of Russia.
As Russia is trying to cut off the flow of information in Ukraine by attacking its communications infrastructure, the British news outlet BBC is revisiting a broadcasting tactic popularized during World War II: shortwave radio.
The BBC said this week that it would use radio frequencies that can travel for long distances and be accessible on portable radios to broadcast its World Service news in English for four hours a day in Kyiv, the Ukrainian capital, and in parts of Russia.
“It’s often said truth is the first casualty of war,” Tim Davie, director-general of the BBC, said in a statement. “In a conflict where disinformation and propaganda is rife, there is a clear need for factual and independent news people can trust.”
On Tuesday, Russian projectiles struck the main radio and television tower in Kyiv. Oleksii Reznikov, Ukraine’s defense minister, wrote on Twitter that Russia’s goal was “to break the resistance of the Ukrainian people and army,” starting with “a breakdown of connection” and “the spread of massive FAKE messages that the Ukrainian country leadership has agreed to give up.”
Shortwave radio has been a go-to vehicle to reach listeners in conflict zones for decades, used to deliver crackling dispatches to soldiers in the Persian Gulf war, send codes to spies in North Korea and pontificate through the Iron Curtain during the Cold War. But more modern forms of radio along with the internet eventually pushed shortwave out of favor; the BBC retired its shortwave transmissions in Europe 14 years ago. [Continue reading the full article…]
These are times of crisis. One radio may be heard by more than one person. The critical content is then spread by word of mouth!
Some questions need to be raised.
1. How many people will listen?
2. Who is going to listen to 4 hours a day in English?
3. How many people still have pre-1991 working shortwave radios?
Information is getting in through modern technologies. Even with for example the Russians blocking a number of social media sites. People are using VPNs, just as they do in China to access websites that are blocked.
Nobody is listening to four hours of BBC English in Kiev. They’re listening to a small bit of it,if anything. While I will be interested in how this turns out I will be surprised if the new service accomplishes anything useful.
I read a few hours ago about how the BBC and VOA have measured web site traffic that they’re attributing to Russian and Ukrainian clients but they never spilled the beans on the methodology used.
You assume they’re “listening to a small bit of it, if anything”. But no one can produce any facts to back this up.
Both the Russian and Ukrainian sites of the BBC and VOA have seen a huge increase of traffic over the last two weeks. You said “they never spilled the beans on the methodology used”. You are aware it isn’t complicated.
Why does the radio have to be pre-1991?
How many people in Mariupol, Ukraine that has no electricity and no internet are using “modern technologies” or VPNs? They would be happy to have battery-powered shortwave radios to listen to.
Maybe there are some stations left on mediumwave in Ukrainian but probably not for long. A lot of people in Ukraine knows English. It’s a good move from the BBC and the UK.
Providing content in English is a bit odd, but there are still some shortwave radios kicking around Ukraine, I’m sure. All it takes is for a few ham radio operators (who can’t transmit due to the war and all) to hear the broadcasts and relay them to their neighbors. That’s the best way for information to get out.
1. More than would’ve done without it.
2. People that can.
3. You’d be surprised.
What happens when the internet goes down or there is power failure?
Shortwave just works it’s old compared to today’s technology but like a compass, it still works when your GPS doesn’t.
Watch out for Russians with umbrellas, BBC!
Now that Putin has made the Duma sign a law against “fake news” with draconian penalties for calling the war a war, the internet censored and the last free radio stations in the country closed (which is a shocking, Stalin-esque dimension of demolishing freedom) – shortwave might be just as important again as it was 50 years ago, the Russian people are depending on it.
Another interesting shortwave-related aspect is that lots of civil folks seem to be jamming not only the famous stations believed to be of Russian origin (buzzer, pip, squeaky wheel, you name it) but also actual comms wherever they are (hopefully correctly) identified as Russian troops. Not that this would make any difference and just trying to jam or insult them is certainly not achieving anything.
To be honest, BBC management *are* to blame for quite a lot of it, and the BBC probably could have fought the Foreign Office more for shortwave provision if they’d really wanted to. The BBC wanted to fund the expansion of World Service TV and new TV services like BBC Persian etc. so all that took money away from radio.
There is a set of three entertaining diaries by Chris Moore, who used to write the hourly World Service bulletins (start with the one called “Greg Dyke: My part in his downfall”) which detail, amongst other things, how shortwave fell out of favour to selling content to stations for rebroadcast on FM. (Also, anyone who listens to World Service will know how the bulletins are shorter than they used to be and much the hourly schedule is fitted around fixed opt-in/out points).
Wofferton is fascinating and still broadcasting all kinds of stuff – I find it a bit magical it still exists yet so few people in the UK will ever know or care about it.
Is there any data on how many people in Ukraine already have shortwave radios? Wondering if there was any growth in listening when Russia annexed Crimea, or maybe after that people kept onto old receivers as a precaution (considering there’s still a system of air raid sirens and so on).
Whether they’ll really get a great deal more in terms of news from the BBC than they already do from Radio Ukraine (whilst it’s still safely broadcasting) and the neighbouring shortwaves services from countries like Romania and Slovakia…
Actually have or even listen to SW radios. I doubt anyone under 50.
I am 34 and I have a shortwave radio because I find it fascinating it can go this far. Also, most importantly, it is the ONLY way to transmit information over vast distances without some kind of intermediary satellite or relay. Which is extremely important for people in a situation like Ukraine.
This underscores your post of the other day: https://swling.com/blog/2022/03/everyone-should-have-a-shortwave-radio/
Cheers, Jock
You are aware it’s 2022 not 1982. Distribution of content has changed, the audience has change, how people listen too content has changed.
What I have noticed having only retired from broadcasting in 2013 after spending 30 years at Radio France is that swl’s and dxers continue to go on at length on a shortwave audience that no longer exists. What I find most amusing of all is this group seem to know more about shortwave broadcasting than the people who work in it, but none of them have spent anytime working in international broadcasting.
Reading this NY Times article requires passing a paywall or making a payment-in-kind to NY Times by disclosing your personal information (in the form of a valid email address) to the NY Times. Discretion is advised as this journalistic material is also available anonymously and without conditions elsewhere on the internet.
As far as I am aware, the BBC “did not retire SW broadcasts” as such but the Government’s Foreign Office refused to finance them any more.
The photo of Wofferton is a little confusing. It was originally operated by the BBC but primarily used to broadcast VOA SW transmissions rather than BBC broadcasts. It is the only remaining SW transmitting station left in the UK and now owned by a private company and presumably available to broadcast on SW bands for anyone willing to pay.
The electricity supplies in Ukraine seems to have been surprisingly resilient and the cellular system as well as internet would be the easy way to listen to radio broadcasts. Few cheaper radio sets now have SW bands.
See the last paragraph Cooling Relations for the reasons shortwave broadcasting to Russia ended. This was around the time when the Russian state broadcaster was closing down all its domestic shortwave and medium wave outlets, expanding FM including a new network Vesti FM to join Radio Rossii, Mayak and the youth network Radio Yunost. There were fewer shortwave radios in use and other ways to reach the audience in Russia than radio broadcasts than there were in the Cold War era. They continued to broadcast on shortwave where research showed that there was a significant audience. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-12820788
Unfortunately this marketing ploy is more the norm than the exception in today’s world. The nice thing about having a newspaper in your hand is that you can ignore/read the ads on an ad hoc basis without being barraged with seemingly endless pop-up advertising.
Agreed. But hyperlinks in ink are very slow.