In the comments section of this recent post about the massive blackout in Europe, SWLing Post contributor Pedro Moreno shared an insightful firsthand account from Madrid. He captured the value of radio during a communications outage so effectively that I wanted to give it more visibility by highlighting it in its own post:
Listener Report from Madrid During the Blackout
By Pedro Moreno
I live in Madrid, and yesterday, after the blackout started, I began to wonder if this was due to a problem with my home electrical installation. Then I expanded my research outside my home to the community 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 absorbed looking at their phone screens—only to see there was no data connection.
So I came back home and took my Tecsun H501x radio to scan, first on the FM band, just to find out there were some missing stations—for instance, RNE1, RN2, RN3, and Radio Clásica, also a Spanish government broadcaster. Then I knew there was something really bad going on.
Next, I switched to the 7100 kHz band in LSB/USB, where some Spanish radio enthusiasts were commenting on the blackout. There, I found out the blackout was going on in Portugal, Spain, and France. Also, a German radio amateur was 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, scanning up and down all the shortwave spectrum looking for more information regarding what was causing the blackout—alas, without finding any specific information about the causes or the expected time for the restoration of the power supply. But I noticed something really new and surprising: the shortwave noise across all the bands was gone, and I could tune into a large number of commercial and amateur stations without noise and quite clearly. That was amazing.
Thank you, Pedro, for sharing this firsthand account. Yes, the only positive in a blackout situation like this is the complete lack of radio interference on portions of the radio spectrum.
I’ll add that in the immediate aftermath of Hurricane Helene, my experience was very similar: the only widely available forms of communication in our region were AM/FM radio and amateur radio.
As SWLing Post contributor qwertymax so perfectly put it:
“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.”
Having spent a month in Spain and activating parks in Madrid and Seville (sorry NO Gibraltar ops) I can only imagine getting stuck on the High Speed train between the 2 cities with no clue to what was happening AND the downtown core would have been a Zoo with the lights out and traffic problems at the intersections.
The nice thing is one can prepare Tapas with no flame needed just bread, ingredients and a knife so one can survive without a stove for some time
Problem I found that my hotel was a noise fest so no radio worked well until I got out to the suburbs
I did not find any SW radios at Le Corte Ingles but I got my Lamy pens and Notebooks from there plus designer goods.
John VE3IPS
That is funny, I have always been interested in radio but being in Madrid during the blackout pushed me to research good portable radios and came to another one of your posts, and now I see this.
Thanks for sharing in your blog, it´s generating many interesting questions to keep me busy investigating for a while (e.g. what is SWL?).
Cheers
SWL = Short Wave Listening. I suppose this link is good to post: https://swling.com/QuickStart.htm
I do VarAC, a very good digital mode for chatting and more. During the power outage in EA/CT I sent the following broadcasts on 40m and 20m:
EMCOMM EA/CT: email return address @.de – I create vmails
Decoded: VarAC allows to send short messages that the receiver converts and sends as emails. But there is no inverse function. Therefore I offered this missing return path: If someone sends an email to a non-existing name of my domain, the mails end up in the catchall account.
Had I received an email to [email protected], I would have converted it to a VarAC short message (vmail) to EA9ZZZ.
When my station then had heard a beacon from this station, my station would have replied with a broadcast message about the vmail.
This had required that enough stations had off-grid power. But I heard very few EA stations. One station, 80 km north of Gibraltar, had power but no Internet.
A very important testimony from someone who was in the eye of the storm and experienced the need to have a radio during critical situations like the one experienced in Spain. Gracias, Pedro.
Dear Thomas,
Thank you very much for editing and correcting the spelling mistakes in my comment.
Your piece was very well written, my friend. There really wasn’t much to alter. Thank you for taking the time to share your experience.
Well done, Pedro!
Cheers, Jock