Category Archives: Art

Radio exhibit at the Tate Modern

Photo credit: Rebecca Crysdale

Many thanks to SWLing Post contributor, Ed, who writes:

An old friend of mine just emailed me from London after seeing an extraordinary modern art exhibit at Tate Modern. The exhibit, according to my friend Rebecca Crysdale, “is about how we are being overload by communications, particularly digital communications.” She says, “It was a very thought provoking exhibit.”

Photo Credit: Rebecca Crysdale

[H]ere’s a link to Tate Modern’s web page for the exhibit. There appears to be lots of shortwave and other radios in these large sculptures, and SWLing Blog readers might enjoy trying to identify them. http://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/meireles-babel-t14041

Many thanks Ed and Rebecca for sharing! I just checked out the Tate Modern site–brilliant installations! I love the Tate Modern, but have never had the fortune of seeing a radio-centric exhibition. Amazing!

Shadows of the State: a photobook about numbers stations

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RAF Akrotiri, Cyprus (Source: Lewis Bush)

Many thanks to SWLing Post contributor, James Jordan, who shares a link to this article in Wired magazine:

IF YOU TUNED into just the right shortwave radio frequency in the 1970s, you might hear a creepy computerized voice reading out a string of numbers. It was the Cold War, and the coded messages were rumored to be secret intelligence broadcasts from “number stations” located around the globe.

Photographer Lewis Bush is obsessed with these stations to “an almost irrational degree” and hunts them down in Shadows of the State, featuring 30 composite satellite images of alleged number stations from Germany to Australia. The series took two years and endless research. “It’s a difficult project to quantify in terms of man hours wasted on it,” he says.[…]

When Bush finds what he believes to be a station, he takes up to 50 close-up screen grabs and stitches them together in Photoshop to create one high-resolution image. He also listens to frequencies where broadcasts supposedly still happen on radio listening software, taking screen shots of the software’s spectrograms, graphics depicting the sound spectrum.

The final images try to visualize something largely intangible. No government has ever confirmed the existence of numbers stations, and Bush himself isn’t completely certain of their locations. No one can be sure what these scratchy codes really are. And that’s precisely what makes them so intriguing.

Shadows of the State will be published by Brave Books in December 2017. Bush is also raising funds on Kickstarterfor an interactive companion website.

Read the full article at Wired.

TW Communicator spotted in “The Avengers” TV series

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Many thanks to SWLing Post contributor, Andy Howlett, who writes:

Some while back I spotted an elderly ‘TW Communivator’ in use the a late episode of The Avengers TV series. The episode in question is called ‘All done with Mirrors’.

Studio Canal are a bit touchy about people nicking stills from their videos, but I sent my screen-grab to the website ‘TW Radio’ which is a site dedicated to Tom Withers and his products. The owner got permission for a one-off reproduction.

You can see the photo by going to http://www.twradio.uk/page98.html

Thanks, Andy! The Avengers is one of my favorite action/adventure TV shows of the 1960s. Lately, I’ve been waiting for a used DVD box set of the series to appear at a local retailer. The fact that I’ve always had a crush on Diana Rigg (a.k.a. Emma Peel) has nothing to do with this. 🙂

Check out other radios spotted in film and TV series by clicking here.

Click here to read more about The Avengers.

Radios in Games: This War of Mine

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Many thanks to SWLing Post contributor, Aaron Kuhn, who writes:

Another “Radio in Popular Culture” tidbit for you since they seem so popular:

2014 war survival game “This War of Mine“, released on multiple platforms, features a simulated shortwave radio you can build and use as part of the game.

After building the radio from components/parts you find, it allows you to use the radio on a daily basis to gather intelligence about what’s going on out in the streets around you.

This video capture I took shows what in-game tuning of this “Rad” brand radio looks like:

Click here to view on YouTube.

Thank you Aaron. How very cool! I wonder if this is where The Man in the High Castle got the idea for the virtual resistance radio.

Radios spotted in the Netflix movie “Spectral”

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Last week, I watched the Netflix movie, Spectral, and couldn’t help but notice a couple of radios on set.

I spotted the first rig at the beginning of the film while the camera was panning a military communications center. It’s a dark screen shot, but I believe this may be a Kenwood TS-940S:

Click to enlarge.

The second radio appeared to be a 1950s-60s era Grundig tabletop. Perhaps someone can identify the model?

Click to enlarge

I’ve noticed that many of the radios we’ve spotted in film and TV lately have been in Netflix original productions. I assume the art/set designers appreciate the radio aesthetic. I certainly do!

The Yaesu FRG-7700 in TV series iZombie

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Many thanks to SWLing Post contributor, Mark Hirst, who adds the following to our growing archive of radios in film.

Mark writes:

Another radio spotted in a TV show, this time in the Netflix show iZombie.

Having been gifted a Yaesu FRG-7700 recently, it was an easy spot.

Click to enlarge

This FRG-7700 appears to be a ‘special’ model however, with a microphone plugged into the headphone socket and able to act as a transceiver!!

You have sharp eyes, Mark! Yes, indeed, it looks like they’ve turned that ‘7700 into a transceiver by plugging a mic into the headphone jack. Now why didn’t we think of that?!? 🙂

Thanks again for sharing!

Video: Requiem for Radio broadcast via four frequencies, four receivers

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The Requiem For Radio QSL Card (Source: RFR Facebook)

I received a number of messages from Post readers who logged one or more of the simultaneous Requiem For Radio broadcasts. Many discovered that each frequency of the broadcast was actually a separate track of the piece.

Indeed, SWLing Post contributor, Shelby Brant, posted the following comment yesterday:

Listening right now, 11580, 9690, 9620, and 5130 are on, but nothing on 6850. To get the most out of this you really ought to have a receiver on all the frequencies at the same time, because each station is broadcasting something slightly different, but if you listen to all at the same time, they go together.

Later, Shelby added:

Here’s a link to a very impromptu video I put together of how I was listening to the broadcast, I managed to gather up 4 receivers (this was after I posted earlier) and tuned them to the 4 active frequencies. Part way through I turn the other three receivers down and tune to the individual stations one at a time to give an idea of what the 4 sounded like on their own, then it goes back to all 4 together again for the end of the video

Enjoy

Click here to view on YouTube.

Very –VERY- cool, Shelby! Amazing! Thank you for sharing!

And what a unique listening opportunity this presents us (thank you, Amanda Dawn Christie!).

If you missed the last on-air performance, you still have two more chances to catch it.

Remaining dates/times:

26th May 2017 2300-2400 UTC
27th May 2017 2300-2400 UTC

Schedule:

WRMI : Radio Miami International 11580 kHz
WBCQ : Free Speech Radio 5130 kHz
Nauen: Shortwaveservice 9690 kHz
Moosbrunn: Shortwaveservice 9620 kHz
Boston Pirate Radio 6850 kHz