Author Archives: Thomas

USAGM’s Official Announcement on Agency Downsizing and Workforce Reductions

Curtain Antennas at the Edward R. Murrow Transmitting Station

Following an earlier report from NPR covering (and other sources) the U.S. Agency for Global Media’s restructuring, this is the full official announcement from USAGM. It outlines the agency’s efforts to comply with an executive order aimed at reducing non-statutory functions, cutting costs, and downsizing operations:

USAGM, Senior Advisor Kari Lake cancels obscenely expensive 15-year-lease that burdened the taxpayers and enforces Trump’s Executive Order to drastically downsize agency (USAGM)

Today, in compliance with President Trump’s Executive Order titled, Continuing the Reduction of the Federal Bureaucracy, dated March 14, 2025, the US Agency for Global Media initiated measures to eliminate the non-statutory components and functions to the maximum extent consistent with applicable law. USAGM and the outlets it oversees will be reduced to their statutory functions and associated personnel will be reduced to the minimum presence and function required by law.

This action will impact the agency’s workforce at USAGM, Voice of America, Office of Cuba Broadcasting, and all Grantees. Most USAGM staff affected by this action will be placed on paid-administrative leave beginning Saturday, March 15, 2025, and remain on leave until further notice.

“While at USAGM, I vow to fully implement President Trump’s executive orders in his mission to reduce the size and scope of the federal government. Today we continue the process of doing that by streamlining our operations to what is statutorily required by law,” said USAGM Senior Adviser, Kari Lake. “The US Agency for Global media will continue to deliver on all statutory programs that fall under the agency’s purview and shed everything that is not statutorily required. I fully support the President’s executive order. Waste, fraud, and abuse run rampant in this agency and American taxpayers shouldn’t have to fund it.”

A few of the most egregious findings:

- Massive national security violations, including spies and terrorist sympathizers and/or supporters infiltrating the agency
- Eye-popping self-dealing involving contracts, grants and high-value settlement agreements
- Obscene over-spending including a nearly quarter-of-a-billion-dollar lease for a Pennsylvania Avenue high-rise that has no broadcasting facilities to meet the needs of the agency and included a $9 million commission to a private real estate agent with connections
- $100s-of-millions being spent on fake news companies
- a product that often parrots the talking-points of America’s adversaries

This agency is not salvageable.

From top-to-bottom this agency is a giant rot and burden to the American taxpayer—a national security risk for this nation—and irretrievably broken. While there are bright spots within the agency with personnel who are talented and dedicated public servants, this is the exception rather than the rule.

It is unfortunate that the work that was done by self-interested insiders in coordination with outside activist groups and radical Leftist advocacy organizations to “Trump-Proof” the agency made it impossible to reform. In fact, they weren’t just “Trump-Proofing” the agency from political leadership, they were accountability-proofing the agency from the American people. They did all this while spending taxpayer money to create false narratives. These were amplified by biased media counterparts with clear conflicts of interest at the Washington Post, NPR and more, to actively cover up their obscene waste, fraud, and abuse.

“This is a significant step toward restoring the greatness of the United States and promoting freedom and democracy. Going forward, I am going to ensure accountability will be the norm and not the exception. I appreciate the work of the dedicated public servants and their contributions to the Agency and its outlets. I look forward to moving forward with modernizing the core mission of telling America’s story throughout the world in a meaningful, impactful and effective way,” Lake added.

“Bloody Saturday”: Mass Suspensions at Voice of America and USAGM Networks

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Edward R. Murrow Transmitting Station in North Carolina

Journalists at Voice of America and the Office for Cuba Broadcasting arrived for work today only to find themselves locked out, following an order from President Trump’s administration. Over 1,000 employees were placed on indefinite paid leave, and contracts with international broadcasters like Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty and Radio Free Asia were abruptly terminated. According to NPR, the cuts, pushed by Trump’s senior adviser Kari Lake, are raising serious legal and ethical questions — with former USAGM officials calling it “Bloody Saturday” for global media.

These networks, which reach 420 million people across 63 languages, are crucial for delivering uncensored news to regions where press freedom is suppressed. The full article at NPR dives deeper into the shutdowns, political motivations, and what this could mean for global journalism and American soft diplomacy.

Read the full story on NPR.

Bob’s Radio Corner: Pairing a Phone or Tablet with a Radio

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Pairing a Phone or Tablet with a Radio

By Bob Colegrove

The Internet is full of resources for radio listeners and hobbyists. There are numerous examples of general information, frequency, and schedule lists. There are also WebSDR sites, which allow you to compare reception experiences from around the world. All of these can be accessed quickly and easily by having them loaded on your phone or tablet operating side-by-side with your radio and having Wi-Fi or cellular access. We never had any of this when I was starting out.

I realize there are other ways to go about what I have described below, for example, merging station listings with SDR. This posting is for folks like me who are SDR-challenged. I listen to plain old radios. My modern-day experience with newfangled technology has been limited to hitchhiking on WebSDR sites for the last few years. It has served me well.

Ideally, I would like to generalize this topic to simply cover all phones and tablets. In truth, my experience has been limited to an iPhone and Kindle Fire tablets. They have worked very well as I shall explain. Perhaps you have paired a different phone or tablet with your radio, in which case, feel free to share your experience.

The choice of a phone or tablet is yours. Either works well. Your decision will be affected by what you have available and what is easier to use. If you intend to buy a new device and associate it with your radio, cost will be an additional factor.

A noteworthy device (the one I tend to favor) is a Kindle Fire. Mainly, they are cheap. The regular price of a 7-inch model is just under $60 and can often be purchased for less during Black Friday and Prime Day sales. It is versatile, possessing all the usual functions except for cellular access. Perhaps most importantly, it is virtually noise-free. For a while I struggled using Internet sources on a laptop computer. Even a good one located about 10 feet away from the radio antenna generates noise. On the other hand, I have taken a 7-inch Kindle Fire in hand and placed it against the resonant coil of a loop antenna. This abuse generated no more disturbance to the antenna than if it were a block of pinewood. I have noticed some slight noise from the 11” Kindle when the antenna is exposed this way, but when that tablet is held at arm’s length from the antenna, all is well. Recently, I have expanded this application to my iPhone and found its noise immunity matches that of the Kindle Fire 7.

Broadcast Schedules

The most useful Internet resources are the broadcast schedules. These are the comprehensive frequency-time-station listings that tell us where and when to tune. There are many good ones. My favorites are the EiBi listing http://www.eibispace.de/, and Dan Ferguson’s https://groups.io/g/swskeds/topics. For the latter you will need to request membership. SWskeds merges EiBi, Aoki (https://www1.s2.starcat.ne.jp/ndxc), HFCC (https://new.hfcc.org/index.php), as well as other sources into a single list.

Processing

The EiBi listing comes as a CSV-formatted text file, which can be imported into a spreadsheet. I have done some processing using spreadsheet functions to produce a customized listing. Processing the frequency-time-station lists is most conveniently done using a computer rather than the phone or tablet. Processing includes selecting, arranging, or filtering the downloaded data tailored to your needs. This might include adding a filterable column to indicate only stations that are on at the current time. Some users might favor filtering by country or station. The heavy lifting processing is done automatically whenever a new listing is published by simply dropping the new file into the existing spreadsheet. No, the functionality of a spreadsheet and ease of editing are not as good on a tablet as with the mouse and keyboard of a computer. My processing on the computer includes measures to optimized the screen view to the most essential information thus minimizing the amount of scrolling on the tablet.

After the files are downloaded and processed, they can be loaded on the phone or tablet in a couple of different ways. They can be directly transferred over a USB cable, or they can be transferred using a cloud server. The USB cable-transfer method may be difficult on some devices, particularly iPhones. The Kindle seems to be the more convenient device. Being an obedient Microsoft customer, I can also transfer the files from my computer to OneDrive, then pick them up on the Kindle or iPhone using the OneDrive and Microsoft 365 apps which are available for both phone and tablet.

Examples

The screenshot below shows an EiBi example at 0014 UTC. Although the “ON” column filter is set to show only transmissions currently “ON,” it had not been manually updated on the Kindle for a couple hours and thus includes listings from a previous time. The EiBi database does not include transmitter power or beam information. However, the identification of countries and transmitter sites is extensive. These are determined by downloading and printing the README.TXT file on the EiBi site.

The SWSkeds listing is available in both CSV and Excel formats. It contains several additional data fields, very importantly including transmitter power and beam direction when available. For this list, I make the simple conversion of the existing Excel data range tab, “COMBINED” to a table so I can easily apply filters. The screenshot below shows an example at 1750 UTC with the “ON” column filtered to “ON.”

Not to be left out, the complete medium wave broadcast station list for Region 2, the Americas, is easily downloadable at https://www.fcc.gov/media/radio/am-query. The entire database is formidable and contains nearly 600 pages in a printable format. Much of this bulk is due to the doubled size necessitated by giving both daytime and nighttime power separate entries for each station. A number of marginally useful data columns can be eliminated in spreadsheet processing. I have added formulas to calculate the azimuth heading and distance from my listening post (blanked out in the example below).

A variation of the downloadable file format is the direct-query site, SHORT.WAVE.INFO. Here you can simply enter queries by station, language, frequency, or band, and produce listings which match your criteria. Any listings which are currently on the air will be highlighted in red.

WebSDR

Finally, I would like to mention the WebSDR sites. While not used explicitly for broadcast schedules, these sites are great for anyone wanting to compare how well they are receiving signals relative to what others are experiencing. Granted, location and time of day are big factors that affect reception, but it is still useful to make these relative comparisons.

Home base is http://websdr.org/ which presents a catalog of many WebSDR sites by location. At the bottom of the page is a world map which pinpoints the location of each site. Most of these sites cater exclusively to hams; however, The University of Twente, Enschede, Netherlands (http://websdr.ewi.utwente.nl:8901/) covers 0.000 to 29.160 MHz unabridged. The screenshot below shows the tablet/phone version of the U. of Twente site. There are also two sites on the US East Coast which cover some non-hamband portions of the SW spectrum: http://na5b.com:8901/ in the Washington, DC area and http://websdr.k3fef.com:8901/ in Milford, Pennsylvania. The SHORT.WAVE.INFO and WebSDR sites can be directly accessed and queried over the tablet’s browser and a Wi-Fi or cellular connection.

Using the System

In my relentless pursuit to log the Nibi-Nibi Islands, I will load up one of the frequency-time-station listings and start my DX session. This typically includes a scan of a particular band, checking signals I can receive against the lists. If my interest peaks on a particular catch (usually a weak one), I will switch the tablet over to a WebSDR site to see how it is being received in Europe or along the East Coast of NA.

In summary, ready access to these Internet resources using a phone or tablet next to the radio has notable advantages:

The frequency-time-station listings provide quick, reliable signal identification in most cases.
The WebSDR sites confirm that my antennas are doing their job.

Am I done? I hesitate to stop here. The process of discovery is a marvelous human experience. The foregoing are merely starting points. Other applications might include sunrise-sunset calendars or maps or propagation forecasts. There are certainly other ways to do all this depending on your druthers. I know I am erring by omission and neglecting many other good resources. Let’s hear about yours.

“VLNY” (Waves): New Film Highlights Radio Prague’s Role During the 1968 Invasion

BBC Audio Access Abroad: Major Changes Coming Spring 2025

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Many thanks to SWLing Post contributor, Richard Cuff, who shares the following news via the BBC:

Upcoming changes for listening to BBC audio outside the UK

If you live outside the UK, how you listen to BBC radio will change, starting from spring 2025.

Instead of using BBC Sounds, you’ll be able to use a new service at BBC.com and on the BBC app. BBC Studios has launched these all-new audio environments, tailored to outside UK audiences. The BBC’s content will remain available on other international podcast platforms.

International listeners will no longer be able to use the BBC Sounds app and website from spring 2025.

You can find out more about these changes on the bbc.com website.

Advice for UK Listeners travelling abroad

For listeners who reside in the UK, you will still be able to use the BBC Sounds mobile app when you are abroad. Check our FAQ for further info: Can I use BBC Sounds when I travel outside the UK?

Why are we making these changes?

BBC Sounds is a UK licence fee funded service. To offer better value for our UK listeners, BBC Sounds will be repositioned and made available exclusively to UK audiences.

BBC Studios is a commercial subsidiary of the BBC and is focused on bringing our trusted, world class journalism and storytelling to international audiences. This includes BBC audio content on bbc.com and the BBC app, which will be focused to international listeners.

Support for listeners Outside the UK

If you live outside of the UK and have a query regarding listening to BBC radio and audio content, please visit the support page at bbc.com where you can find help and contact their support team.

Radio Free Europe: 30 Years in Prague

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Many thanks to SWLing Post contributor David Iurescia, who shares the following article from Radio Prague (in Spanish), which focuses on the history and relevance of Radio Free Europe. For the past 30 years, the station has been broadcasting from Prague, continuing its mission of providing uncensored news to regions where press freedom is severely restricted. The article explores the station’s enduring role in the fight against authoritarian censorship and the growing challenges it faces in today’s geopolitical landscape.

Read the full article on Radio Prague’s website (Google Translate can assist with translation).

SWL Contest 2025 Wrap-Up & New SSB SWL Contest

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Many thanks to SWLing Post contributor Frank, who shares the results of the SWL Contest 2025, which challenged shortwave and medium-wave listeners from around the world to log as many stations and transmitters as possible. A total of 34 participants from 17 countries participated, demonstrating the incredible reach and diversity of the SWL community.

Frank is now organizing an new challenge—the SSB SWL Contest 2025, running from March 1st to October 31st, 2025. This contest focuses on listening to amateur radio stations in SSB mode across the 10m to 40m bands, with the goal of logging the most DXCC entities over eight months. Both SWLs and licensed amateur radio operators are welcome to participate!

Check out the full results of the SWL Contest 2025 here.

For the new SSB SWL Contest 2025 Rules, visit: https://chinaradiosswl.blogspot.com/2025/02/ssb-swl-contest-2025-rules.html