Hi to all SWLing Post community! FastRadioBurst 23 here with news of this week’s Imaginary Stations shortwave output.
On Saturday 25th January 2025 at 1200 hrs UTC on 6160 kHz and also on Sunday 26th January 2025 at 1000/1400 hrs UTC on 6160 kHz and at 2100 UTC on 3975 kHz via Shortwave Gold we’ll be bringing you WARM 3 (which was broadcast on WRMI last week if you missed it) a continuation of tunes to heat you up during this winter period (if it is winter where you are). So hitch up the huskies, take off your snowshoes, grab that USB powered hot water bottle and enjoy some great tunes. You can be assured there won’t be any lukewarm songs on the show, they’ll all either be hot or just below boiling.
Feeling cold or feeling run down with a cold? Well on Wednesday January 29th January 2025 at 0300 UTC via WRMI we have WARM 4 with tunes hotter than a thermal vest. Tune in and WARM up! More on our WARM shows here.
For more information on all our shows, please write to [email protected] and check out our old shows at our Mixcloud page here.
Great insight into the small insides of the big picture – I’m afraid all I can add is that in idle moments, I used to insert the top end of a BIC plastic pen onto the electric bars which used to produce a horrible burnt gas smell and left the pens with an “artistic” melted feature at the top end. Happy days?
On a more SWL related topic from those years,
when I first arrived at Newcastle they assigned me to live in “Summerhil House” which was about 3 miles south of the University on the the north bank of the River Tyne, with a good view of the Vickers Machine Gun factory across the river.
Summerhill House was for “overseas students.” A firewall divided it into two isolated halves with a left and right door. Left side of Summerhill was for African continent students who were there on “Commonealth Full Scholarships”.
Right side was for Indian, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Afghan and other “South Asian” full scholarship students. I was the only non-scholarship student, only American, and only “Appalachian Hillbilly.” Tuition was actually “dirt cheap” at $1600 a year for everything including room and food.
Nearly everyone on the right side wanted to listen to shortwave for news from their home country on the other side of the earth but got spotty reception, due to cheap radios on short whip antennas.
I had the best radio – a Sony CRF-5100 Christmas present gift from my engineer Grandfather, which I would bring to the shared kitchen before sunrise.
After about a month I “broke University housing rules” by using a single tree in the backyard to erect a “vertical polarization half rhombic antenna“ with grounded resistor termination pointed toward northern India. This combo worked a good bit better, but of course the ionosphere did not always bless our prayers listening, despite those prayers being from half a dozen different religions.
🙂
Lovely stuff Hank!
Radio station W.A.R.M. ?
I cannot resist commenting on the picture which shows fake pieces of coal on a tray above an electric resistance fireplace insert.
Our lives take odd twists and turns.
In 1979 I was studying “rock mechanics” and mining in grad school at the University of Newcastle Upon Tyne.
I was living in “Jesmond” neighborhood, about a mile south of the “Rendering Plant” where dead sheep were turned into protein powder that was fed to Cows. This business was later identified as most likely place where “Mad Cow Prion Disease” jumped from Sheep to Cows to Humans in the period 1977 to 1980.
I rode the bus down to the University and by chance right at the bus stop was a store selling “Solid Fuels Advisory Authority” approved fireplace inserts that were “smokeless.” The store’s front window had 4 or 5 pictures of fireplace inserts for sale, and a TV playing “on continuous loop” a program about how these insert designs were “high tech and improved with UK gov research money.”
We are radio geeks here
and nearly everyone reading this has seen a “parabolic antenna.”
These coal burning fireplace inserts could “magically” burn coal with almost no smoke because they had a parabolic reflector mounted above the flames redirecting infra-red radiation to an intense “hot spot”
PLUS an air blower fan feeding nozzles that were creating a “tornado” swirl at the spot where the parabolic was concentrating many dBs of “gain.”
About 7 years later at my then job in the USA I had to replace leaking boiler tubes inside a pair of “Kewanee Boiler Company“ stoker sized coal hot water heaters. On a lark I put stainless steel parabolic reflectors above the flame zones and redirected the “overfire air nozzles” to create a tornado like swirl. With those changes the smoke out the chimneys of these two furnaces decreased to the point you could hardly see any.
Years later I learned that Ben Franklin had used similar science to make his “Franklin Stove” put out less “wasteful” smoke.
And to get back to SWLing content,
every night I would listen to SW radio,
when I was not watching
“Smiley’s People” miniseries
as permitted by my BBC TV subscription on my used PAL TV set.
Brilliant Hank! Excellent stuff.
Best read for me on the internet today!!!
5 Stars!!!
Wonderful, Hank! Thank you for sharing that!