Hi SWLing post readers! Fastradioburst23 here to let you know that we’ll be bringing part two of hippie/hippy special WHPY this Sunday 25th June 2023 at 2200 hrs UTC on the Imaginary Stations show on 9395 kHz via WRMI. Take a trip & never leave the radio and groove along to the far out sounds of WHPY 2.
Welcome to the SWLing Post’s Radio Waves, a collection of links to interesting stories making waves in the world of radio. Enjoy!
Many thanks to a number of SWLing Post contributors including John, Andrea, and Dennis Dura for the following tips:
Tens of thousands of ordinary Russians are joining the resistance
n a bedsit in Vologda, a Russian city 500 miles north of Moscow, a man sat at a desk surrounded by recording equipment. In his early 60s, tall and thin with long grey hair, glasses and a moustache, he looked like an ageing rock star making a new album. His name was Vladimir Rumyantsev. He lived alone, and his day job was as a stoker, tending a furnace in a factory boiler-room. In the evenings he was the dj of his own pirate-radio station, broadcasting anti-war diatribes against Putin’s “special military operation” in Ukraine.
Rumyantsev set up the station before the war as a hobby. Radio Vovan (a play on a nickname for Vladimir) mainly broadcast music from the Soviet era that he found in online archives. He said he needed a break from oppressive state propaganda. “Some kind of ‘patriotic’ hysteria started on the airwaves, and as the sole occupant of the flat I voted unanimously to ban the broadcasting of federal tv and radio channels in my home. Well, I had to create something of my own to replace it,” he wrote to me. [Continue reading. Note that this article may be behind a paywall from your location…]
JOHANNESBURG, SOUTH AFRICA —
Jabrallah Tia was a teacher in Sudan in 2011 when a brutal war forced him to flee to a refugee camp in newly established South Sudan. Thirteen years later, Tia is still in a camp but with a new career: journalist.
The Ajuong Thok camp in the Ruweng Administrative Area is home to almost 40,000 refugees and displaced people, most from Sudan. Another influx is expected soon, after a fresh conflict broke out in April.
“It’s terrible now when Sudan has started another war. … We’re expecting more people to come from Sudan, as they’re fleeing the war there,” Tia told VOA in a video interview over Zoom.
He knows what that’s like. Tia had to leave everything behind when he fled his home in South Kordofan state. But he said he has found new meaning in his journalism work. Continue reading
Halley VI: The British Antarctic Survey’s new base (Source: British Antarctic Survey)
In the comments section of this post, I’d like you to share your recording of the BBC Midwinter Broadcast to Antarctica!
In years past, I’ve created a post with all of the Midwinter recordings curated in one article. This usually takes me 12+ hours to prepare over a couple of weeks as many of the audio clips and video recordings must be formatted for the site and embedded. There is also a lot of discussions back/forth confirming details with listeners. This year once again, my schedule is such that if I try to piece one of these articles together I might not have it published for many, many weeks.
The past two years, this format worked brilliantly, so we’re doing it again…
Our intrepid contributor, Richard Langley, reports:
According to a posting on Glenn Hauser’s World of Radio IO group, the following frequencies are confirmed for the broadcast on 21 June 2023 [at 21:30 UTC]:
Listening to the 2017 BBC Antarctic Midwinter Broadcast from the back of my vehicle in Saint-Anne-de-Beaupré, Québec, Canada.
I’ve created this dedicated post where you can comment and include links to audio and video of your 2023 Midwinter Broadcast recordings. This will allow you to post your logs and recordings at your convenience without my availability becoming the bottleneck.
Here’s the format I’d like you to leave in your comment of this post:
Name:
Listening location:
Notes: (Include frequencies and any details about your receiver and antenna.)
Link to audio or video: (YouTube, Vimeo, Internet Archive, SoundCloud, etc.)
There is no way to directly upload audio in your comments, however, you can link to the recordings if you upload them to the Internet Archive (which I’d highly recommend) or any of the video streaming services like YouTube and Vimeo–or audio services like SoundCloud.
If you have a photo you’d like to include in your comment, send me an email from the same address you used in your comment. I’ll manually post the image at the top of your comment when time allows.
As with each year, I’ll make sure the BAS team and the BBC receive a link with all of your recordings!
Every year, the BBC broadcasts a special program to the scientists and support staff in the British Antarctic Survey Team. The BBC plays music requests and sends special messages to the small team located at various Antarctic research stations. Each year, the thirty minute show is guaranteed to be quirky, nostalgic, and certainly a DX-worthy catch!
After successful listener events from years past, I’m once again calling on all SWLing Post readers and shortwave radio listeners to make a short recording (say, 30-60 seconds) of the BBC Antarctic Midwinter Broadcast today and share it here on the SWLing Post. Details on this below.
Our intrepid contributor, Richard Langley, reports:
According to a posting on Glenn Hauser’s World of Radio IO group, the following frequencies are confirmed for the broadcast on 21 June [at 21:30 UTC]:
Recording the Midwinter Broadcast has become an SWLing Post community tradition! Read our previous post for more details.
I’m especially fond of this broadcast as it always falls on my birthday and it’s always fun capturing this unique DX!
During the Midwinter broadcast, I will publish a dedicated post where you can comment and include links to audio and video of your 2023 Midwinter Broadcast recordings. When this post is available, I will link to it here. This will allow you to post your logs and recordings at your convenience without my availability becoming the bottleneck.
So that there’s no confusion, I’ve turned off comments on this post so that comments are left on the appropriate article.
Here’s the format I’d like you to leave in your comment of the dedicated post:
Name:
Listening location:
Notes: (Include frequencies and any details about your receiver and antenna.)
Link to audio or video: (YouTube, Vimeo, Internet Archive, SoundCloud, etc.)
There is no way to directly upload audio in your comments, however, you can link to the recordings if you upload them to the Internet Archive (which I’d highly recommend) or any of the video streaming services–like YouTube and Vimeo–or audio services like SoundCloud.
If you have a photo you’d like to include in your comment, send me an email from the same address you used in your comment. I’ll manually post the image at the top of your comment when time allows.
As with each year, I’ll make sure the BAS team and the BBC receive a link with all of your recordings!
It’s that time of year again! Time to tune into one of the most unique broadcasts transmitted by the BBC World Service: the Midwinter Broadcast to Antarctica.
If you have confirmed the 2023 frequency details, please share them in the comments.
(Source: BBC Media Centre)
The Antarctic Midwinter Broadcast is unlike anything else on the BBC World Service. We make this special programme for just 37 listeners: The team of scientists and support staff isolated at British research stations in the Antarctic midwinter.
Presented by Cerys Matthews, the programme features messages from family and friends at home as well as music requests from Antarctica. For decades it has been part of the traditional midwinter celebrations.
For the staff living at three British Antarctic Survey research stations (Rothera, Bird Island and South Georgia), and at other national bases across the frozen continent, midwinter is a special time. With no sunlight, Antarctica is at its coldest and those stationed on the frozen continent face months of total isolation.
Midwinter celebrations at the British research stations include a feast, exchange of presents, watching the 1982 horror film The Thing (where an alien monster terrorises an Antarctic base) and listening – on short wave – to the BBC’s Midwinter Broadcast.
Welcome to the SWLing Post’s Radio Waves, a collection of links to interesting stories making waves in the world of radio. Enjoy!
Many thanks to SWLing Post contributors Kim Elliott and Dennis Dura for the following tips:
My most prized possession was once somebody’s trash.
It’s a blocky, black radio that was manufactured in 1941, the year my father was 12 years old. I snatched it from the county landfill when I was 13, in 1978.
The person who threw it away must have determined they couldn’t fix it, though it seemed they thought someone else might. They had set the radio off to the side of the dumpster, safe in plain view, just in case some industrious person with know-how appeared.
That person was my father, who ran an electronics repair business from our garage. Though at first reluctant to save “that ugly old thing,” he seemed pleased hours later when he entered the kitchen announcing that the radio worked fine and had only needed a tube. For years after this, my father kept that radio on a shelf above his workbench, listening to country singers croon about lonesome truckers.
I like to think of myself as a minimalist, but since my father died in 1994, I’ve carried what I consider to be “our” radio thousands of miles from the Appalachian farm where I grew up, out to Los Angeles, and then many years later back home again. In California, I’d tune our radio to horse races being transmitted from Santa Anita or Hollywood Park while cleaning my kitchen. Or I listened to Paul Harvey, Casey Kasem or evangelists spouting “truths” about Jesus and cars. [Continue reading…]
New analysis of AM reach provides market-level insight to listening habits
Following up its recent report on the 141 local markets where at least 20% of the market listens to AM radio, Nielsen has released a deeper look with new data at the state- and DMA-level.
Pierre Bouvard, chief insights officer of the Cumulus Media / Westwood One Audio Active Group, recently posted an analysis of the findings. The data comes from the Fall 2022 survey, but is based on all U.S. radio stations, not just Nielsen subscribers.
Nationwide, 30.9% of radio reach comes from AM stations, representing 82,346,8000 American radio listeners aged 12+ who listen to AM every month. At the state level it ranged from a high of 52.7% in North Dakota to a low of 4.6% in the District of Columbia. In 29 states, the percent of radio reach via AM is greater than 20%. [Continue reading…]
Auto group also says it would take two decades for fleet to turn over and AM to phase out
“Whether or not AM radio is physically installed in vehicles in the future has no bearing on the multiple methods of delivering those emergency communications alerts to the public.”
So writes the president and CEO of the Alliance for Automotive Innovation. John Bozzella used a blog post this past week to summarize the auto industry’s case against a mandate to include AM radio in cars.
It’s simply not necessary, he wrote; and government shouldn’t be propping up a particular technology that’s competing with other communications options, either.
“It’s tempting to take a cheap shot at misplaced government priorities and unnecessary mandates or make light of the whole thing with a jab about laws for hand-crank windows or cassette players,” he writes, calling the legislation a bipartisan solution searching for a problem. [Continue reading…]
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Many thanks to SWLing Post contributor, Dennis Dura, who shares he following announcement from Airspy:
This year, we offer a 15% discount on all the Airspy products between the 17th and the 25th of June.
Check it out: https://airspy.com/purchase
Thanks for the tip, Dennis!