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Don Moore’s Photo Album: Guatemala (Part One) – The East

Many thanks to SWLing Post contributor Don Moore–noted author, traveler, and DXer–for the latest installment of his Photo Album guest post series:


Don Moore’s Photo Album: Guatemala (Part One) – The East

by Don Moore

More of Don’s traveling DX stories can be found in his book Tales of a Vagabond DXer [SWLing Post affiliate link]. If you’ve already read his book and enjoyed it, do Don a favor and leave a review on Amazon.

I’ve wanted to do a feature on Guatemala ever since starting this series a few years ago. From a cultural perspective it’s one of the most fascinating countries in Latin America. About half the population are indigenous, primarily Mayan, and most of them still speak their own languages. For several decades Guatemala’s religious broadcasters – Roman Catholic and Evangelical Protestant – used many of those languages on shortwave where we DXers were able to hear them.

I made five visits to Guatemala from 1982 to 1984 while in the Peace Corps in Honduras and returned in December 1987 while in graduate school. I spent enough time in Guatemala that there’s an entire section of my Vagabond DXer book filled with stories of my travels and station visits. In this seven-part series you get to see the pictures.

The map below shows the country, minus the sparsely populated northern department of Petén. We’re going to start in the least interesting part of Guatemala, the east. There’s very little indigenous culture left in that region nor much else of interest to the visitor. But you do have to pass through it to get from Honduras to the rest of Guatemala … and there were some radio stations to visit.

The main border crossing between Honduras and Guatemala has always been near Esquipulas in southern Chiquimula department. (That’s where the header photo comes from). But about 40 kilometers to the north is a secondary crossing near the town of Jocotán. In the 1980s, the road was rough and unpaved and the best mode of transportation was hitching a ride in the back of a passing pickup truck. The border consisted of just two wooden shacks, one on each side, minded by bored soldiers. That’s where I entered Guatemala on my second visit in June 1983. Jocotán had a radio station that I wanted to visit.

Eastern Guatemala may not have had much of interest, but the large Mayan ruins of Copán are just across the border in Honduras. The most direct route there from Guatemala City is via Jocotán so typically a few backpackers pass through town every day. I found a room at the Pension Ramirez. At $1.50 a night it was the perfect place for Peace Corps Volunteers, backpackers, and others at the very bottom end of the budget travel scale. I got a bed with sheets that may have been washed within the past week, a table, a chair, and a dim light bulb hanging from the ceiling. The shared bathroom was down the hall. Cold water only. But the Pension Ramirez had one thing that I never encountered at any other such lodging. The owner had a business card.

Jocotán was home to Radio Chortís, a Roman Catholic broadcaster that mostly ministered to the Chortí Indians who lives in the region. As most of the Chortí had assimilated into the dominant Spanish culture the station primarily broadcast in Spanish with just a few hours in the Chortí language each week. Radio Chortís used to put a strong signal into North America on 3380 kHz. The station was part of a mission funded by donations from Belgian and West German Catholics. The studios and offices were in a large complex that also included vocational training facilities and a print shop for the church. That explained why the back of their QSL letters always had a colorful station graphic.

Radio Chortís, 3380 kHz, as heard in Pennsylvania 30 December 1979 at 1152 UTC:

On to Cobán

Early the next morning, I took a bus to Chiquimula, the departmental capital. DXers may recognize the town as the location of Radio Verdad, the last active shortwave broadcast station in Central America. It came on the air long after my time there so I never got to visit the station. In Chiquimula I switched to a bus bound for Guatemala City, but that wasn’t my final destination. I got off at a little crossroads just before the town of El Progreso and then boarded the next bus heading north to Cobán, capital of Alta Verapaz.

In Cobán I planned to visit another Catholic broadcaster, but one with a rather unusual name for a religious station. In the 1520s, the Spanish conquistadores quickly overran most of Guatemala but the Kekchi Indians in their mountainous homeland proved impossible to defeat. The Spanish dubbed the region Tezulutlán from an archaic Spanish phrase that meant “Land of War.”

In the 1540s, the Spanish tried another method to subdue the region, this time allowing Dominican friars under Bartolomé de las Casas to attempt to convert the Kekchi to Catholicism. Where the soldiers had failed the padres succeeded and the newly pacified region was renamed Verapaz, or Land of True Peace. Bartolomé de las Casas was a good man who left a legacy of trying to protect the rights of the Indians in a time of brutal conquest. But he was just one man in a time of boundless greed. He left the region a few years later and the Kekchi were forced into peonage just as the Mayans elsewhere in Guatemala had been.

And so four centuries later when the Roman Catholic diocese in Verapaz, the land of true peace, set up a radio station they named it Radio Tezulutlán, after the land of war. Someone had a keen sense of irony. But maybe there is something symbolic there as well. The Kekchi, after all, have survived as a people with their own language intact. Today they number over half-a-million, or almost eight percent of the Guatemalan people. That Radio Tezulutlán broadcasts primarily in Kekchi, not Spanish, might just be a final victory for the Kekchi.

The next few pictures show the Radio Tezulutlán building and studio from 1983 and the QSL card and pennant that I picked up on my visit. The QSL was for their little-used frequency of 3370 kHz. They mostly used 4835 kHz.

Radio Tezulutlán, 4835 kHz, as heard in Pennsylvania on 24 December 1979 at 1153 UTC:

More Broadcasters in Verapaz

In Santa Bárbara, Honduras, where I was living in 1983, one of the best heard Guatemalan medium wave stations was Cobán’s Radio Norte on 680 kHz. I stopped by in the evening hoping to pick up a QSL but the only person there was a lone announcer who was too busy to help me. I may not have gotten the QSL but I did pick up something that I’ve since come to see as even more valuable.

In my book, I explain how one of the primary sources of income for small town radio stations in that era was reading personal announcements and greetings on the air. The Radio Norte announcer had a stack of forms that listeners had filled out with messages to be read on the air. He was throwing away some that had already been read, so I took one.

The form could be either mailed to the station or hand-delivered, as this one apparently was. The message is a birthday greeting from Imelda to her son Mario Agusto. At the top, the date the message is to be read is listed and the place is listed as San Juan Chamelco. This is important as the announcer would first say something like “Atención! San Juan Chamelco!” to get the attention of listeners in that town. At the bottom are instructions as to when the announcement should be read – the 18:30 marimba music show. The form is a very unique radio station souvenir. I only wish I had taken the entire pile out of the trashcan.

Radio Norte, 680 kHz, recorded in Cobán during my June 1983 visit:

I also made a side trip to the neighboring town of San Pedro Carchá where I got a sort-of-QSL from Radio Imperial on 925 kHz. If you’ve read my book you know that a picture of the secretary would be a lot more interesting than this one of the front door.

A New Shortwave Station

For thirteen years the Roman Catholic church and Radio Tezulutlán had the Kekchi language airwaves all to themselves. But Evangelical Protestantism had been gaining ground in Guatemala for several decades and in 1988 the Evangelical station Radio Kekchi began broadcasting on the shortwave frequency of 4845 kHz. Radio Kekchi must have had friends at the Ministry of Communication as that assigned frequency was just 10 kHz above Radio Tezulutlán’s 4835 kHz. That certainly made it easier to poach listeners from the competition.

In one more bit of strangeness, Radio Kekchi was located sixty-five kilometers northeast of Cobán in the town of Fray Bartolomé de las Casas. So the Evangelical radio station was put in a place named after the priest who originally converted the Kekchi to Catholicism. Maybe the region should be renamed The Land of Irony.

Radio Kekchí, 4845 kHz, as heard in Ohio on 5 September 1988:

Language or Dialect?

In much of the common literature about Guatemala it says that the indigenous people speak Mayan dialects. And back in the day when these stations were active on shortwave, DXers’ loggings often referred to hearing Mayan dialects. But I called Chortí and Kekchi languages, not dialects. What’s the difference?

Linguistically, a dialect is a regional variation of a language. The different dialects of a language are always mutually intelligible. American and Britons speak different dialects of English but have no trouble understanding one another except for the occasional confusion over a word or phrase. Speakers of Spanish and Portuguese can understand one another a little bit but not enough to have a real conversation. Those are distinct languages.

On the other hand, Danes, Norwegians, and Swedes have no trouble carrying on a conversation with each speaking their own language. That’s because linguistically they are speaking dialects of the same language. So why are Danish, Norwegian, and Swedish considered different languages? Linguist Max Weinrich once explained “a language is a dialect with an army and a navy.” He might have added an economy, a government, and international respect.

Languages spoken by people who are held in low prestige are often called dialects not for any linguistic reason but simply out of prejudice. It’s a subtle way of indicating these people and their culture are of less importance. This is true not only of Guatemala’s indigenous languages but of many others around the world. Chortí, Kekchi, Quiché, Cakchiquel, and all the other two dozen indigenous languages of Guatemala are just as distinct from one another as are Spanish, French, and Italian. So show them some respect. Call them languages, not dialects.

A DX Oddity

Let’s end part one of this series with an unusual bit of radio history. Aeronautical beacons are stations that broadcast a short morse code identifier over and over. Pilots use them for direction finding in lining up with the runway during bad weather. Today these are only found in the longwave band but there used to be a handful of Latin American beacons on frequencies just above the old top of the medium wave band. One of those was RAB on 1613 kHz at Rabinal, about 45 kilometers south of Cobán. It used to be an easy catch all over North America, but here’s a recording I made of it in nearby Honduras.

Beacon RAB, 1613 kHz, as heard in Santa Bárbara, Honduras, on 12 November 1982 at 0508 UTC:

Next: Part Two – Guatemala City

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Don Moore’s Photo Album: Museum Findings – World War II

Along US Highway 550 in southwest Colorado

Don Moore’s Photo Album
Museum Findings: World War II

by Don Moore

More of Don’s traveling DX stories can be found in his book Tales of a Vagabond DXer

Learning should be a life-long pursuit for all of us. One of my ways of doing that is by visiting museums while traveling, whether in the USA or abroad. Cultural, historical, and science museums are my favorites. And if a museum’s theme includes the 20th century, there is a good chance that something related to radio will be found in the collection. In this edition of the Photo Album I want to share some findings related to radio and World War II that I’ve recently found in museums here in the USA.

Do A-Bombs QSL? 

I’m based in Pennsylvania but my daughter lives in western Colorado and my son in Texas. So in September and October of 2024 I made a 45-day road trip to visit them both and see sites along the way. One stop was Santa Fe, New Mexico. The New Mexico History Museum downtown has an excellent exhibit on the development of the Atomic Bomb and the effect on the local area. The real place to learn about this, however, is an hour north of the city at Los Alamos, where the project actually happened.

In addition to the historical sites, Los Alamos has one of the best science museums I’ve been to anywhere. That’s not surprising considering that not many places have as many scientists per capita as Los Alamos does. And there I learned that radio was closely involved in dropping the first A-Bomb on Hiroshima.

The scientists at Los Alamos developed two types of atomic bombs. The bomb dropped on Hiroshima used a uranium-gun to initiate the explosion. The scientists were certain this would work so this was not tested beforehand. The bomb dropped on Nagasaki used the second method with a with a plutonium-implosion as the trigger. But they were uncertain as to whether or not this would actually work so it had already been tested in the New Mexico desert in July 1945. That was the first atomic explosion and the scientists collected lots of useful measurements.

But the developers had no such measurements for the uranium-gun bomb as it hadn’t been tested. But how to get them? They obviously couldn’t place monitors on the ground at Hiroshima beforehand. Physicist Luis Alvarez was tasked with finding a solution. Alvarez’s team built three canisters filled with monitoring equipment and VHF transmitters to be carried by The Great Artiste, the observation plane that would accompany the Enola Gay to Hiroshima. The three canisters were to be dropped by parachute at the same moment that the Enola Gay dropped the bomb.

The signals from the canisters were to be picked up by a bank of Hallicrafters S-36 VHF receivers on the plane and then feed to oscillographs to record the results, which would simultaneously be recorded by movie cameras.

It all worked according to plan and data was received from two of the three canisters before they were engulfed by the explosion. But, to the best of my knowledge, no QSLs were issued for the receptions.

The WASP Museum

My next destination after Santa Fe was San Antonio, Texas, 700 miles (1100 kilometers) away. To make the road trip more interesting I wanted to find some things to see along the way. While perusing Google Maps I came across the National WASP World War II Museum in Sweetwater, Texas. The museum has nothing to do with insects. The acronym stands for Women’s Airforce Service Pilots.

The use of women pilots in support roles to the US Army Air Force began in 1942 with the Women’s Flying Training Detachment (WFTD) and Women’s Auxiliary Ferrying Squadron (WAFS). In 1943 the two programs were merged to form the WASP program and the airfield at Sweetwater was chosen for the four-month training program. In total, 1,830 women started WASP training and 1,074 finished, about the same success rate as with male military pilots of the era. Continue reading

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Carlos Explores Japan’s Radio Nikkei: A Unique Shortwave Listening Experience from Brazil

Many thanks to SWLing Post contributor Carlos Latuff, who shares the following guest post:


Exploring Radio Radio Nikkei

by Carlos Latuff

It’s been a while since I listened to Nikkei Radio, a Japanese commercial broadcaster that operates on shortwave for a domestic audience. If I remember well, the signal was very weak and, since I don’t speak Japanese, I didn’t know what the content of its broadcasts was about. But today, with the possibility of recording the audio, transcribing it and translating it, it has become more interesting to follow its programs on shortwave here in Brazil, more specifically in Porto Alegre (distance between Nikkei’s transmitter in Chiba, Japan, and Porto Alegre, Brazil: 18779 km).

Nikkei Radio 1 was founded in 1954 and Nikkei 2 in 1963, and at the time it was called Nihon Shortwave Broadcasting Co., better known by the acronym “NSB”. Some Japanese electronics manufacturers have in the past released receivers dedicated to receiving the signal from these stations (see below).

Today, the Japanese company Audiocomm has radio models whose packaging states that this receiver is compatible with Nikkei Radio; note the image alluding to horse racing (see below).

I haven’t been able to acquire any of these devices (yet), since they were basically produced for the Japanese public. But any receiver with shortwave bands can tune into Radio Nikkei. I use my good old XHDATA D-808 with a long wire antenna. In Porto Alegre, the best propagation is between 08:45 AM and 06:15 AM (UTC). In the late afternoon, the signal also arrives, but with a fair amount of static.

Both Radio Nikkei 1 and Radio Nikkei 2 operate on the following frequencies:

Radio Nikkei 1:

  • 3.925 MHz (in case of emergency)
  • 6.055 MHz
  • 9.595 MHz (in case of emergency)

Radio Nikkei 2:

  • 3.945 MHz (in case of emergency)
  • 6.115 MHz
  • 9.76 MHz: (in case of emergency)

On the station’s website https://www.radionikkei.jp/ you can find details of its programming, as well as broadcast times, including a table (in Japanese) with this information, which can be translated with the help of Google Lens.

Radio Nikkei also broadcasts its programming via streaming, however the platform used (radiko) is inaccessible to me here in Brazil (see message below).

Nikkei Radio is majority-owned by the business newspaper Nihon Keizai Shimbun and the Tokyo Stock Exchange, which means the station focuses mainly on the financial market. However, much of its programming, especially on weekends, is dedicated to horse racing, a popular sport in Japan. In addition to news, talk shows and music, the radio station also broadcasts evangelical preaching (!). One of these religious programs is called “True Salvation” and is sponsored by The Japan Gospel Mission, a Christian Protestant organization.

This heterogeneous mix of business, horses and Jesus Christ makes Nikkei Radio an interesting station to tune into, to say the least.

The radio listening sessions published here were made in the central Porto Alegre, Brazil, between January 15th and 19th, 2025.

(Domo arigato gozai masu Mr. Tagawa Shigeru for helping me with translation).

Click here to view on YouTube.


Click here to view on YouTube.


Click here to view on YouTube.


Click here to view on YouTube.


Video Short: Tuning In Radio Nikkei 1

Part of Radio Nikkei 1 program “Health Network”, in Japanese. Topic: Winter diet and health. Listened in Porto Alegre, Brazil.

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HF Signal Enhancer for SDR: A Hands-On Build by Steve Allen (KZ4TN)

Many thanks to SWLing Post contributor Steve Allen (KZ4TN), who shares the following guest post:


SDR Signal Enhancer

by Steve Allen

I came across this HF Signal Enhancer for SDR on the RTL-SDR.com website. It was designed and built by Peter Parker, VK3YE from Melbourne, Australia. Below is the link to the video of the signal enhancer in action using an RTL-SDR V4 Software Designed Radio;

www.youtube.com/watch?v=W6OXc_wZTXU

It was very easy to see and listen to the improvement to the signal reception the signal enhancer made. Having been a life-long shortwave listener and current SDR user, I had to build one.

I did a screen capture of the schematic, re-drew it using MS Word, and built the bill of materials. In Peter’s original design he included a T-R relay so you could use the SDR along with a transmitter, which I opted to leave out. I had the passive components in my “junk box” but had to source the enclosure, controls, and antenna connectors. I have used these clam shell extruded enclosures with previous projects and love the build quality and the fact that they incorporate a slot in the sides which let me insert a sheet of PCB material on which I can do the assembly.

Referring to the schematic drawing in Peter’s video, you can see that the variable capacitor “floats” above ground, which is not the usual application for these devices. To do that I mounted the vari-cap on a piece of non-plated PCB material that I cut to the width of the enclosure and it fit nicely within the slot. The vari-cap had three pins on the side of the frame that allowed me to force fit it into three holes I drilled in the PCB material. I was very careful to drill the holes undersize and then slowly open them up until the vari-cap press fit on to the board. For good measure I ran UV curing adhesive down into each hole, letting it flow all the way through before I set it with a UV light source.

I then drilled an oversized hole in the front panel for the vari-cap shaft to pass through.

I then mounted the RF gain and band switch. The next step was the assembly of the AM broadcast filter. As SDRs can be overpowered by local AM radio stations Peter choose to include an internal band pass filter that is configured for around 3.5 MHz. The intent of this filter is to attenuate the signals below 3.5 MHz. Strong AM stations will still be heard but there is much less chance of them bleeding through on the higher frequencies.

I assembled the filter on a piece of perf board and connected the component leads on the bottom. I passed leads back up through the perf board for the signal path and ground. I mounted it on the main board with a standoff.

The next step was the wiring of the inductors to the rotary switch. Simple, and I tied them to the vari-cap frame.

For the back panel I chose an SO-239 and a BNC for the antenna input, and for the radio connection an SMA and another BNC. I sanded off the coating on the enclosure at the antenna mounts as well as the four corners where the back panel screws into the top and bottom of the clam shell enclosure to provide good grounding of the enclosure. I wired the 1N4148 diodes on the antenna connectors, and attached the RG-174 coax. As Peter suggested, I grounded the long (relatively speaking) runs to and from the back panel with coax and grounded it at the back panel.

The last step was to apply a bit of epoxy adhesive to the fiberglass board and the slot it runs in to hold it in place. Once the epoxy set, I did the final wiring of the front and rear panel components. You can see how I sanded the corners of the back panel in the above photo.

I connected it to my inverted L antenna and an SDR Play RSP2 and gave it a test run. I like the fact that I can visually see the changes to the signal strength on the SDR software as well as audibly. It makes a noticeable improvement to the reception.

Thank you Peter. I enjoyed the build.

Steve Allen, KZ4TN

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Parker Solar Spacecraft

Flying Into the Sun

On Christmas Eve the Parker Solar Probe is going to enter the Sun’s atmosphere for the first time to study Solar Wind. For radio hobbists of all ilks, this will hopefully help us understand more about the origins of Solar Wind, and thereby help us understand more fully the effects this has on radio signals (and other space weather issues).

The following is an exerpt from an article on ARS Technica by Eric Berger

Almost no one ever writes about the Parker Solar Probe anymore.

Sure, the spacecraft got some attention when it launched.  It is, after all, the fastest moving object that humans have ever built. At its maximum speed, goosed by the gravitational pull of the Sun, the probe reaches a velocity of 430,000 miles per hour, or more than one-sixth of 1 percent the speed of light. That kind of speed would get you from New York City to Tokyo in less than a minute.

And the Parker Solar Probe also has the distinction of being the first NASA spacecraft named after a living person. At the time of its launch, in August 2018, physicist Eugene Parker was 91 years old.

But in the six years since the probe has been zipping through outer space and flying by the Sun? Not so much. Let’s face it, the astrophysical properties of the Sun and its complicated structure are not something that most people think about on a daily basis.

However, the smallish probe—it masses less than a metric ton, and its scientific payload is only about 110 pounds (50 kg)—is about to make its star turn. Quite literally. On Christmas Eve, the Parker Solar Probe will make its closest approach yet to the Sun. It will come within just 3.8 million miles (6.1 million km) of the solar surface, flying into the solar atmosphere for the first time.

Read the whole article here

Posted by Robert Gulley K4PKM

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Don Moore’s Photo Album: Albania – Part Two

Many thanks to SWLing Post contributor, Don Moore–noted author, traveler, and DXer–for the latest installment of his Photo Album guest post series:


Façade of the National Museum of Albania on Skanderbeg Square

Don Moore’s Photo Album: Albania – Part Two

Bunkers and Bugs

Click here to read Part One: Finding Radio Tirana

More of Don’s traveling DX stories can be found in his book Tales of a Vagabond DXer. Don visited Albania in March 2024.

Albania has a lot to offer foreign visitors. The country has coastal beaches, beautiful mountains and historical sites hundreds and thousands of years old. Tirana is a fascinating city filled with good restaurants and friendly people. It’s inexpensive. The central city is easy to get around on foot. I’m already planning my next visit.

But the number one reason to visit Albania is to see the sites related to the Communist era and the Enver Hoxha dictatorship. I don’t think there is anywhere else where you can get such close insight into what real life was like inside a brutal police state. Indeed, after visiting Tirana, I can’t imagine how anyone could praise dictatorships or say that their own country would be better off under a dictatorship. In Tirana three sites in particular stand out in this regard. And each of them has some interesting displays involving the use of radio.

The House of Leaves

The House of Leaves … the name sounds peaceful and innocent. That was once true. Constructed in 1931, the two-story villa originally served as the first obstetrics clinic in Albania. Then when the Nazis moved in after the Italian surrender in 1943, it was chosen as headquarters for the Gestapo. That might have been a minor blip in the structure’s history, but the Gestapo had remade the building into just what Enver Hoxha’s new government needed: a headquarters for their secret police.

The dreaded Sigurimi would occupy the building for nearly five decades. But that was supposed to be a secret, so no one could say what the villa really was, even though everyone knew. So it became known as The House of Leaves from the vines that covered the outer walls. Even then, the name was mostly whispered among the closest friends. It wasn’t safe to pay much attention to the building.

After the Communist regime fell in 1991, The House of Leaves mostly sat unused. Then, in 2014 the Albanian Ministry of Culture announced it would be turned into a museum telling the story of Sigurimi and its operations. The Museum of Secret Surveillance opened in 2017 and three years later was awarded the European Museum of the Year award by the Council of Europe.

The museum has many rooms focusing on various aspects of Sigurimi’s work. My favorite was one filled with electronics used to monitor and record conversations by suspected malcontents.

The key to monitoring someone was placing a radio transmitter bug in the suspect’s home. The Sigurimi made their own bugs in a workshop in The House of Leaves. They were particularly proud of the tiniest ones, which could very easily be hidden.

The bugs were usually placed inside a small piece of wood that could be placed under a table or chair. The effective range was only about two hundred meters, so monitoring posts had to be in the same building or nearby. The Sigurimi would either recruit a neighbor or persuade a neighbor to host a Sigurimi agent to monitor the recordings. Rinia brand transistor radios made in Romania were the preferred receiver. They were inexpensive and could easily be modified to receive the desired frequency. And they were common enough that possession of one didn’t mark a person as a government agent. Agents usually listened in on headphones while also making a recording of the conversation.

In some cases, homemade amplifiers were used to boost the weak signals produced by the tiny bugs.

Recordings of conversations of interest were taken back to The House of Leaves for further investigation at monitoring posts such as this one.

The Bunkers

Enver Hoxha knew that tiny Albania could never support an army large enough to repel an outside invasion. His experience as a guerilla in World War II, on the other hand, had convinced him that an armed hostile populace could do the job. Albania was, after all, the only occupied country to retake its own capital without any outside help. So Hoxha based Albania’s national defense on making sure that invading the country would be so difficult and painful that no one would dare attempt it.

A key part of that policy was constructing concrete bunkers. Hoxha’s goal was to construct 750,000 of them – approximately one for every four Albanians at the time. Just how many were actually constructed is not known, but the number was in the hundreds of thousands. And they were built everywhere – in farms, in forests, in villages, and in cities.

Most were the three-meter-wide Qender Zjarri type, just large enough to give two or three combatants a concealed firing position. Depending on the location these were built individually or else in small clusters. Today, a fun activity while traveling by bus through Albania is seeing how many you can spot. Occasionally these bunkers are used for storage but there are so many that most are abandoned other than the occasional visit by local teenagers. Evidently, they’re the cool place for losing one’s virginity.

The second type of bunker was the eight-meter-wide Pike Zjarri, intended to serve as local command centers. Being larger, many of these have been put to other uses. And then there were the big bunkers, huge complexes of underground rooms and tunnels where officials would take refuge and continue to run Albania’s government. But today’s Albania is not concerned with repelling foreign invaders. Instead it welcomes them in the form of tourists. And so two of the biggest bunker complexes in Tirana have been turned into museums. And both of them contain some interesting radio memorabilia.

Enver’s Refuge

The biggest bunker was a vast underground complex built in the 1970s inside the base of a mountain on the eastern outskirts of Tirana. Construction was so secret that this bunker’s existence wasn’t even known publicly until the 1990s. This was where Enver Hoxha and other top officials would have gone in the event of an invasion or nuclear attack. It had over one hundred rooms on five levels with its own power and water systems. The entrance passed through a decontamination station where anyone entering could wash off the fallout if a nuclear bomb had already been dropped. (Or so they hoped.)

The inside is a labyrinth of hallways and small rooms used for everything from communication centers to support services. There is even a small auditorium where the Albanian legislature could meet. Enver Hoxha and the prime minister had small spartan private apartments. Other officials, guards, technicians, and servants slept in dormitories. Of course, the facility was never used. It’s believed that Enver Hoxha only visited three times – once when it was completed in 1978 and then two more times for drills.

One of many hallways in the Enver Hoxha’s refuge. 

Enver Hoxha’s office in the big bunker. The desk has the same Chinese-made Red Lantern Model 269 receiver that I saw at the Radio Bar Tirana.

The Albanian military continued to use the facility for several years after the Communist government fell in 1991. After that it was locked up. Then in 2014 a pair of journalists came up with the idea of making it into a museum which was named Bunk Art. But it’s a history museum, not an art museum. Some rooms were left unchanged to show the structure’s original purpose. Others were filled with exhibits on Albanian history, the Italian invasion, the Communist period, and life under Communism. And those exhibits include a few interesting radio items.

According to the display, this was one of two portable transceivers in possession of Xhevdet Mustafa when he was killed by the Sigurimi on the beach south of Tirana in 1982. The display didn’t make clear who Mustafa was working for.

On several occasions in the early 1950s the CIA tried to insert small bands of Albanian agents into the country, mostly without success. This Russian-made transceiver was part of the gear that came with a small group of agents parachuted into Albania in 1953. The group were all killed or captured when they landed. With help coerced from the prisoners, the Sigurimi used this radio for several months to trick the CIA into continuing to air-drop supplies into the mountains.

This black-and-white Albanian-made TV was configured at the factory to only receive Albanian channels. However, clever Albanians figured out ways to use small electronic circuits (called kanoce) that overrode those limits. Albanians along the coast were able to receive TV from Italy while those in border areas could receive Yugoslav or Greek TV.

The Downtown Bunker

The original Bunk Art proved so popular with Albanians and foreign visitors that in 2016 it was renamed Bunk Art 1 and a second location, Bunk Art 2, was opened in the city center. This bunker had been built under the city streets near The House of Leaves and had been intended for use by the Ministry of Internal Affairs. It consisted of a single level with several branching hallways lined with small rooms. Today, it’s a museum telling the story of the Ministry (of which the Sigurimi was just one part) until its dissolution in 1991.

This bunker was also configured for a long-term stay. The Minister of Internal Affairs had this private bedroom.

Some Chinese-made radio equipment used by the ministry.

The Broom Bug

On 12 December 1985, the streets of Tirana were crowded with people out to watch a large patriotic parade which just happened to pass by the Italian embassy. Two women and four men dressed in fashionable western clothes and chatting in Italian among themselves snaked their way through the crowd to the door of the embassy. The Albanian police monitoring the door didn’t try to stop them. Obviously, they were Italian tourists or embassy workers. Except they weren’t. The sisters and brothers of the Popa family had long been persecuted by the Albanian government as their parents had collaborated with the Italians during the war. And now the six children wanted political asylum.

The Italians were willing to resettle the family in Italy but the Albanian government refused to give them permission to leave. Instead Albania demanded that the siblings be turned over to its police, which the Italians refused to do. The family would live in the embassy for 4 ½ years until the Albanian government finally agreed to let them go. In the meantime the Albanians kept a strong police and military presence in the neighborhood surrounding the embassy.

The Sigurimi wanted to know what was going on inside so they recruited an Albanian maid who worked at the embassy to help them. She was given five bugs and instructions to hide them in the usual places like behind paintings and under tables. They knew the Italians would find these and that was fine. It would give the Italians false confidence that they had found all the bugs. The real bug was concealed in a special new broom that the maid brought in and left in a closet next to where the Popa siblings stayed. Each day she was given a freshly charged battery to swap with the depleted one inside the broom. The Italians never discovered the bug-in-a-broom. The Popa siblings were finally allowed to leave the embassy for Italy on 3 May 1990.

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Bob talks ergonomics and radio buttons…

XHDATA D-808 on a 5” × 9” neoprene pad.

Ergonomics and Radio Buttons

By Bob Colegrove

Am I being too picky?  Are the buttons on some newer portable radios hard to press?  I’ve read many reviews and watched as many videos, but haven’t encountered many complaints about this.  Perhaps it’s an age-related affliction.

The most succinct description of the problem was expressed in the review of the Tecsun PL-660 way back in the 2012 edition of the WRTH.  In referring to the buttons, “All are in our view rather too small for comfort and have breakout forces which are out of all proportion to their size; the combination of this with excessively long travel and weak tactile feedback does not give much pleasure to the user.”  The problem has only gotten worse with some newer portable radios.

I see two problems here.  First, too much pressure is required; what the WRTH called “breakout force.”  Designers may say, “that’s so you won’t accidentally turn the radio on and run down the battery.”  Well, I reply, “isn’t that what the ubiquitous lock button is for?  They all have one.”

If you’ve ever taken one of these radios apart, you’ve likely seen a pliable membrane between the buttons and the switches or traces on the PC board.  This provides some spring action necessary to return the buttons to the upright position.  Couldn’t this be thinner or more elastic?

Second, some radios have flat buttons that don’t protrude very far above the case.  By the time the fleshy part of your finger bottoms out on the surface of the case, still more pressure and button travel is required to activate the function.  Couldn’t the buttons be slightly higher?

The result, if you operate the radio on a desk or table and apply the requisite walnut-cracking pressure on a button, the radio might well rocket off its foundation.

Pads for Portables

A partial solution without violating the integrity of the radio is a stable foundation.  In today’s euphemistic world the term counterpoise is use when referring to what we used to simply call an electrical ground.  It seems some sort of mechanical counterpoise would be useful to better anchor a portable radio for operation.

Neoprene is a synthetic rubber developed by a DuPont scientist in 1930.  It is tougher than natural rubber and relatively impervious to solvents.  This stuff is virtually skidproof.  There are perhaps other materials suitable for this application, which is simply to get the radio to stand its ground while you operate it.  After some thought and experimentation, I bought a 1/16”-thick neoprene pad.  A 12” × 12” pad is more than enough.  Mine came from https://amzn.to/3XsmQDe [Note Affiliate link supports the SWLing Post].  I cut this into three smaller pads as follows:

7” × 12” for a Sony ICF-2010, which has nice easy-touch buttons and really doesn’t need a pad except to anchor the radio in place.

5” × 9” for a Tecsun PL-990 and many other similar size radios.

3” × 5”, the scrap piece can be used for a C.Crane Skywave, which already has nice raised buttons;  a Tecsun PL-330, which needs a pad most of all; and an XHDATA D-220, which doesn’t even have buttons.

A Tecsun PL-330 lying flat covers a 3” × 5” pad.  But that’s OK.

There are a couple of alternatives:

  1. You can leave a large pad uncut to accommodate various sizes of radios; or
  2. You can cut bits of neoprene and apply them as feet to the bottom rear corners of the radio and bottom of the stand.  There might be some difficulty getting them to stay in place or allowing the stand to fully collapse.  Some portables already have rubber feet.

It’s probably apparent that neoprene will adhere best to a smooth surface such as glass or Formica.  However, I have tested it on a cloth-covered, memory foam chair cushion, and it works just fine.  Pressing down the material will make it adhere to a surface even more.  I would estimate that a lateral force of at least 10 or 15 pounds is required to make a small radio break loose from three or four points of contact with the material.

Besides holding the radio in place while you operate it, much like a large table radio, neoprene offers the radio some cosmetic protection against abrasion from rough surfaces.  However, the material is so sticky it will pick up every bit of dust or dirt.  This can somewhat compromise its adherence requiring an occasional rinse in water.

Admittedly, the neoprene pad isn’t going to be very useful while you’re sitting in a beach chair using the radio in the handheld posture.  However, in the shack, a suitable pad has a purpose.

XHDATA D-220 sans buttons on a 3” × 5” pad.

Caps for Buttons

In the case of buttons which are too low, some additional help is desired.  On the Tecsun PL-330, I glued plastic caps on top of the STEP and ETM buttons, which raises them about 1/16” and helps considerably.  I am still looking for some transparent material to use as caps on the numbered buttons.

STEP and ETM buttons with caps on a Tecsun PL-330.

Further validated suggestions are solicited.

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