Shortwave listening and everything radio including reviews, broadcasting, ham radio, field operation, DXing, maker kits, travel, emergency gear, events, and more
Among the fascinating people I met at the Dayton Hamvention this year was Jeff Murray, K1NSS. Though Jeff and I have communicated online, our paths had not yet crossed in real life; I was very pleased to finally meet him in person.
SWLing Post readers will have seen Jeff’s name before: he’s a talented graphic artist (and ham, obviously) whose work focuses on the radio community and culture.
You may recall that Jeff created the art for the the Shortwaveology website, not to mention the cool retro graphic you’ll find on the Shortwave Shindig tee.
If Jeff designed a spaceship based on the aesthetics of the Hallicrafters S-38, it would not surprise me in the least.
Do yourself a favor and check out Jeff’s website at Dashtoon.com. It is chock-full of radio wackiness and whimsy. You can lose yourself there and thoroughly enjoy the scenery.
Jeff Murray (K1NSS), left, and me (K4SWL), right among the Dayton Hamvention tailgaters.
When I lived in the UK, I would often fall asleep and/or wake up to the Shipping Forecast: a BBC Radio broadcast of weather reports and forecasts for the seas around the coasts of the British Isles.
Though I had, of course, no real need of the Forecast, on many occasions it lured me like the voice of a hypnotic siren (especially, I must admit, when read by a woman). When I moved back to the US in 2003, I missed hearing the Forecast on the radio, but thankfully one can listen to it at Radio 4 online. Although the online stream lacks the delectable sonic texture of long wave radio, the Forecast still has the power can still reel in its listeners.
Last December, I followed a brilliant series on NPR which highlighted the BBC Shipping Forecast. I intended to publish it here on the SWLing Post at the time, but somehow lost it in the shuffle of a busy travel season. Fortunately, NPR has archived audio from the series online. I love their introduction:
“It is a bizarre nightly ritual that is deeply embedded in the British way of life.
You switch off the TV, lock up the house, slip into bed, turn on your radio, and begin to listen to a mantra, delivered by a soothing, soporific voice.
“Viking, North Utsire, South Utsire, Forties, Cromarty, Forth, Tyne, Dogger ….” says the voice.
You are aware — vaguely — that these delicious words are names, and that those names refer to big blocks of sea around your island nation, stretching all the way up to Iceland and down to North Africa.
The BBC’s beloved Shipping Forecast bulletin covers 31 sea areas, the names of which have inspired poets, artists and singers and become embedded into the national psyche.
Your mind begins to swoop across the landscape, sleepily checking the shorelines, from the gray waters of the English Channel to the steely turbulence of the Atlantic.
Somewhere, deep in your memory, stir echoes of British history — of invasions from across the sea by Vikings, Romans and Normans; of battles with Napoleon’s galleons and Hitler’s U-boats.
Finally, as the BBC’s Shipping Forecast bulletin draws to a close, you nod off, complacent in the knowledge that whatever storms are blasting away on the oceans out there, you’re in your pajamas, sensibly tucked up at home”
You can listen to the series on NPR, or via the embedded player below:
While looking through a number of photos Flickr user vency1 posted, I noticed an interesting story behind his trusty Panasonic RF-2200. He describes his radio thus:
“A very good performing receiver. I’ve had great listening adventures with this on AM and shortwave. This once served as an RDF (radio direction finder) on a speedboat to find our way home in heavy rainstorm in the middle of the sea with zero visibility. A station located in the hometown was tuned in and we steered the boat in the direction of the strongest signal. The RF gain was set so that the slightest signal fluctuation would show on the meter. At home, the sound on FM is very good when connected to a high-fidelity speaker system.”
“I found this web page that my be of interest to your blog readers. A guy named Drew Durigan has saved CB radio audio of himself talking to his friends when he was a teenager in the 1970’s. Its mostly kids talking smack about each other with CB radios, kind of like kids do today with text messages and facebook. The web page is called Radio Geek Heaven.”
A federal agent who shows up unannounced at a building along a Texas highway might be looking for any number of things: illicit drugs or immigration violations, say, or illegal firearms.
Or fluorescent lights.
Which was what the agent had in mind who walked into the Perfect Cuts salon in San Antonio last July. The lights were violating communications regulations.
The agent had used signal-tracking equipment to home in on the offenders and told the owner, Ronald Bethany, that his lights emitted radio signals that interfered with an AT&T cellphone tower.
[…]The mixed signals aren’t always so weighty. In recent years, the FCC has issued warning letters directing people to stop operating cordless phones, television sets and wireless cameras.
[…]The FCC can demand fines up to $16,000 a day or $112,500 an incident from people who aren’t FCC licensees. Offenders usually rectify problems, the FCC says, often working them out with whomever is complaining.
Managing the radio spectrum “has been part of our core mission since the inception of the FCC in 1934,” says Julius Knapp, head of the agency’s Office of Engineering and Technology.
[…]The government doesn’t much care why interference happens. To the FCC, noise is noise.
In a 2013 letter, the FCC wrote to the owner of a plasma TV set after a ham-radio operator complained to the agency of interference. “Continued operation of the television,” warned the letter, from which the TV owner’s identification is redacted, “is not legal under FCC rules.”
[…]Ham-radio operators are a frequent source of complaints. A 2012 FCC letter told a Pomona Park, Fla., resident to stop using a well pump that conflicted with amateur-radio frequencies.
[…]Radio hobbyist Tom Thompson of Boulder, Colo., last year tracked a signal using a homemade contraption. After knocking on the suspect’s door, he traced it to ballasts on marijuana grow-room lights. He says he built a filter that the grower agreed to use.
Ballasts are frequent offenders. Makers of the components, which regulate electricity to bulbs, test them for FCC compliance. Some interfere anyway.[…]
“I see a great You Tube file (it’s in 2 parts) of a WRNO Worldwide broadcast “off air” recording made on Dec 14, 1983.
Ah yes the memories[…] You can hear the very start of a Radio Earth program along with some on channel interference before (until they made the frequency change to 6185 khz) which was common.”
If Jeff designed a spaceship based on the aesthetics of the Hallicrafters S-38, it would not surprise me in the least.
