Today, parts of Spain, Portugal, and France experienced widespread power outages, knocking out electricity, internet, and mobile networks for hours.
One BBC article captured a personal account of how radio became a vital lifeline. SWLing Post contributor Balázs Kovács shared this note from the BBC Live Update:
Meanwhile, a friend of our family living in Barcelona reported that her Sony ICF-SW100 proved invaluable during the blackout.
While phone and internet services were unavailable, her SW100 kept her connected to critical news and updates.
In another update, our friend Carlos Latuff noted that Radio Exterior de España — Spain’s external broadcaster — was off the air on shortwave frequencies, likely due to the blackout.
Carlos shared this video from Porto Alegre at 20:26 UTC:
Click here to view on YouTube.
Closing Thoughts…
I’ll keep this simple: When the grid goes down and the internet disappears, local radio often endures.
Millions of us have experienced this first hand.
🙂 🙂 At least four that I can account for at the moment, but the Versalog is the one that is sitting next to me right now along with four portable SW receivers. 🙂
(Now someone will say, “Only four receivers…?”. 🙂 )
In such situations, there are two crucial things needed to get the info delivered, namely: a capability to cover vast distances and the possibility of receiving the signal with a device that uses as low energy as possible – and these are the main traits of analogue radio.
This morning we had a total blackout here in the city of Göttingen, Germany. No traffic lights, nothing worked. Hopefully just a crazy coincidence.
This morning we had a total blackout here in the city of Göttingen, Germany. Hopefully just a crazy coincidence.
I’m glad there’s still a place to get prepping reports that isn’t intentionally intersecting with the gun community. I understand that firearms can be very useful in certain parts of the world which have more bandits and bears than there are in my locale, but it’s all a bit weird.
Keep up the good work and spread the word.
I live in Madrid, and yesterday after the blackout started, I began to wonder if this was due a problem with my home electrical instalation, then I expanded my research outside my home to the comunity premises and discovered that there was a mains shortage as well, so I went further afar and came out to the street to note that there were no noises of electrical tools and most of the people walking in the street were absort looking to their phone screens only to see there was no data conection. So came back home and took my Tecsun H501x radio to scan first to the FM band, just to to find out there where some missing station for instance RNE1, RN2, RN3 and Radio Clasica also a spanish gov broadcaster. The I knew there was somenthing really bad going on.
Next I switched to the 7100Khz band in LSB/USB where some spanish radio entusiasts were commenting on the black out. There I find out the black out was going on in Portugal, Spain and France. Also a german radio amateur commenting on his station about a “blackout in Spain Portugal and France as well. So then, I knew what was going on.
Then I began to search for more information scaning up and down all the all the SW spectrun looking for more information regarding what was causing the blackout, alas, without finding any specific information about the causes or the spected time for the restoration of the power supply. But I noticed some really new and surprising, the shortwave noise in all the band was gone, and I could tune into a large number of commercial and amateur stations without noise and quite clearly. That was amazing.
The lower noise on HF is certainly a silver lining to what is otherwise a major disruption to modern life!
Did cellular service really stop working that quickly after the power went out? Maybe it’s the US that is the outlier due to our propensity for natural disasters, but many cellular sites here are on battery backup and/or generators that can keep them running for a while. Same with the data centers that keep the internet going.
Even after my first (and hopefully last) major hurricane, I never lost my phone service even though power was out for about a week.
It just takes one serious blackout to make anyone a radio fan. Looks like there will be a bunch more of us in Spain and Portugal now. Here’s hoping that the long, dark night of the outage is uneventful.
“It just takes one serious blackout to make anyone a radio fan.”
Testify to it Brother!
https://swling.com/blog/2024/10/from-the-archives-when-the-fertilizer-hits-the-fan-radio-kit/
Cheers, Jock
during extended power outages in WMA., local radio stations provided no coverage or updates at all.
Radio to the rescue again! I’m ready, with lots of radios, lots of batteries, and my Post Versalog slide rule. 🙂
I’m curious about the mention of lengthy power cuts in Virginia, though.
Only one slide rule….. pffft amateur!!