Many thanks to SWLing Post contributor Markku for sharing this Yle News story about an FM propagation opening along Finland’s eastern border. On a warm July morning, residents of Lappeenranta suddenly found their radios picking up multiple Russian FM stations—some from as far away as St. Petersburg, over 200 km away!
The cause? A temperature inversion and high-pressure system.
Yessir.
If being afraid of what and whom we should be afraid of, what and whom our grandparents were forced to fight to the tune of millions of lost souls, makes me a “Russophobe” then that’s exactly what you should call me.
My Finnish friend, where can we get the T-shirts?
When I was visiting Eastern Finland (Kerimäki, KP41pw) in 2019, I was surprised that I could hear only one Russian FM station with my XHDATA D-808 there. That happened to be Dorozhnoe Radio (Road Radio) mentioned in Yle’s article but via a different transmitter. The station has short news at the top of the hour, the rest is music and advertisements — pretty uninteresting to me. Considering that only very few Finns have any Russian skills Russian stations wouldn’t get much audience in Finland.
Comparing to the situation to Helsinki, I can normally receive more than five Estonian FM stations with transmitters in Tallin Teletower here. Stations in other places of Tallinn or Estonia become audible only during good propagation conditions (often associated with heat waves and high atmospheric pressure).
It is also noteworthy that FM network is much sparser and has fewer powerful transmitters in Russia than in either in Finland or Estonia (see maps fmdx org). This explains also in part why there were so few Russian FM signals audible in Eastern Finland when I visited there.
As far as I live in Helsinki, the FM band is my favorite broadcast band as I can receive so many interesting and informative broadcasts from both Finland and Estonia there. If I lived somewhere else, I would probably spend much more time with other wavebands.
A few days ago I was receiving BBC Radio 4 here, indoors on a XHData at tremendous levels , up to +44dBuV at times . I do not have view of the sea but fairly level in the direction of S W Wales , 104.9 MHz transmitter.
That level of signal is about 250uV and has to be severe ducting !
Another DX signal was from a military airfield weather transmission on 142.225 MHz from central France , but only a couple of uV . Real DX !
Des Walsh , Co Cork .
July 19th
Or the Russkies are cranking up the power prior to a planned invasion.
Stranger things have happened.
They’re not cranking up power – these things happen every now and then in this part of Finland when the weather conditions are suitable for this kind of VHF propagation – but they’re are definitely cranking up their propaganda effort against us. These days we feature regularly on Russian state media with accusations of Nazism, Fascism and something called Russophobia, which is an interesting coinage, as in their parlance it refers not so much to fear as hatred or loathing.
You can’t blame the Russkies for unusual levels of creativity, though. These are the same accusations the Russian public was fed before they started de-Nazifying Ukraine.