Category Archives: FM

Pedro’s Report from Madrid During the Blackout

In the comments section of this recent post about the massive blackout in Europe, SWLing Post contributor Pedro Moreno shared an insightful firsthand account from Madrid. He captured the value of radio during a communications outage so effectively that I wanted to give it more visibility by highlighting it in its own post:

Listener Report from Madrid During the Blackout

By Pedro Moreno

I live in Madrid, and yesterday, after the blackout started, I began to wonder if this was due to a problem with my home electrical installation. Then I expanded my research outside my home to the community premises and discovered that there was a mains shortage as well. So I went further afar and came out to the street to note that there were no noises of electrical tools, and most of the people walking in the street were absorbed looking at their phone screens—only to see there was no data connection.

So I came back home and took my Tecsun H501x radio to scan, first on the FM band, just to find out there were some missing stations—for instance, RNE1, RN2, RN3, and Radio Clásica, also a Spanish government broadcaster. Then I knew there was something really bad going on.

Next, I switched to the 7100 kHz band in LSB/USB, where some Spanish radio enthusiasts were commenting on the blackout. There, I found out the blackout was going on in Portugal, Spain, and France. Also, a German radio amateur was commenting on his station about a “blackout in Spain, Portugal, and France as well.” So then, I knew what was going on.

Then I began to search for more information, scanning up and down all the shortwave spectrum looking for more information regarding what was causing the blackout—alas, without finding any specific information about the causes or the expected time for the restoration of the power supply. But I noticed something really new and surprising: the shortwave noise across all the bands was gone, and I could tune into a large number of commercial and amateur stations without noise and quite clearly. That was amazing.

Thank you, Pedro, for sharing this firsthand account. Yes, the only positive in a blackout situation like this is the complete lack of radio interference on portions of the radio spectrum.

I’ll add that in the immediate aftermath of Hurricane Helene, my experience was very similar: the only widely available forms of communication in our region were AM/FM radio and amateur radio.

As SWLing Post contributor qwertymax so perfectly put it:

“In such situations, there are two crucial things needed to get the info delivered, namely: a capability to cover vast distances and the possibility of receiving the signal with a device that uses as low energy as possible – and these are the main traits of analogue radio.”

Blackout in Europe: Portable Radios Deliver News — REE Falls Silent During Outage

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Today, parts of Spain, Portugal, and France experienced widespread power outages, knocking out electricity, internet, and mobile networks for hours.

One BBC article captured a personal account of how radio became a vital lifeline. SWLing Post contributor Balázs Kovács shared this note from the BBC Live Update:

Meanwhile, a friend of our family living in Barcelona reported that her Sony ICF-SW100 proved invaluable during the blackout.

While phone and internet services were unavailable, her SW100 kept her connected to critical news and updates.

In another update, our friend Carlos Latuff noted that Radio Exterior de España — Spain’s external broadcaster — was off the air on shortwave frequencies, likely due to the blackout.

Carlos shared this video from Porto Alegre at 20:26 UTC:

Click here to view on YouTube.

Closing Thoughts…

I’ll keep this simple: When the grid goes down and the internet disappears, local radio often endures.

Millions of us have experienced this first hand.

Don Moore’s Photo Album: Guatemala (Part Five) – Visiting Nahualá

Don Moore’s Photo Album:
Guatemala (Part Five) – Visiting Nahualá

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.

After my first attempt to visit La Voz de Atitlán failed in June 1983, I turned my sights northward. The next morning in Panajachel I boarded a bus bound for Guatemala City but got off when the bus reached the main highway at the Los Encuentros intersection. A few minutes later I caught a ride on a ‘chicken bus’ headed north to my first destination of the day – Chichicastenango.

Chichicastenango is not a town that DXers would be familiar with but anyone who has seriously traveled around Guatemala has surely been there at least once. The outdoor markets held on Thursday and Sunday are among the largest in all of Central America. Guatemala has dozens of towns with long names ending in …tenango, meaning “place of.” Chichicastenango is the place of the chichicaste plant, in reference to a thorny bush that grows in the area. Most of the time people just call the town Chichi as it’s common to drop the tenango part from names when speaking.

For over five hundred years, Quiché Mayans from the surrounding area have been coming here twice weekly for the market held in the plaza in front of the Santo Tomás church. The steps to the church are always filled with flower vendors and men swinging containers of incense.

In the early days of the Spanish conquest, Catholic churches were often built on the sites already holy to the Indians. It was a clever way to get the newly forced converts to come to mass. In the case of Santo Tomás, however, they unknowingly picked a location of major spiritual importance in the Mayan religion. As a result many Mayan ceremonies involving nature and natural gods have survived in this area. Some became intertwined with Catholic practices while others were practiced in secret for centuries until it finally became safe to bring them out into the open again.

It was only June but I did my Christmas shopping that day and mailed everything home from Guatemala City a few days later. Guatemala’s post office was very reliable. Everything arrived safely in less than two weeks.

On to Nahualá

With my purchases packed in my now very heavy bag, I got on the next bus heading south and once again got out at Los Encuentros. This time I was looking for any bus heading west. I wasn’t going too far. A few minutes later a bus bound for Quetzaltenango stopped and I got on, telling the driver’s assistant that I wanted to get off at Nahualá.

I knew Nahualá was in the northwest corner of Sololá department a little way off the Pan-American Highway but I was surprised when about an hour later the bus stopped next to a cornfield in the middle of nowhere. I gave the driver’s assistant a puzzled look when he told me this was my stop. He explained that they could leave me off further down the highway where the road to Nahualá branched off. But it would be a long walk from there. From here, the walk was only about ten minutes. There was a well-worn path leading upwards through the cornfield, so I took him at his word. Continue reading →

The Great ATS Radio Challenge

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By Jock Elliott, KB2GOM

Here is an idea thought up by a radio pal of mine, Andy, W2SRA.

It’s an exercise to get us operating our portable mutliband radios from manufacturers such as Grundig, Sony, XHDATA, Tecsun, Sangean, and so on. If you own a digital multiband radio that has an ‘ATS’ search function, that being a function where the radio will scan the selected band and store stations to memory automatically, this challenge is designed to see what your radio can hear from your location.

Here’s your task: During daylight hours (preferably around midday or as close it to as possible) we would like you to scan the AM broadcast band, the FM broadcast band, and the shortwave band, and record how many stations your radio finds and stores to memory for each band.

Rules:

No external antennas! No loops. No anything.
For FM & SW, the whip antenna will be fully extended, and fixed vertically.
For AM –you will use the internal ferrite rod antenna, and do two scans. One with the radio facing East-West, and one facing North-South. Duplicated stations between the two scans will count as one station. (i.e. 660 is received in both directions, that will count as one station reception. 770 is received in one direction but not the other, that is one station reception.)
Radios that use the telescopic whip antenna for AM reception will follow the same rule for FM & SW, fully extended vertically.
You must do this challenge from your residence! Indoors or outdoors is your preference, but it must be with 100 feet of your residence.

This is not a contest, no prizes will be awarded. This is an experiment to see how many strong signals are received in different locations around the region. You may use any radio of your choice so long as it meets the above criteria.

For even more fun, try it at roughly the same time in the same location with two or more different radios that have ATS capability. Do not, however, combine the scores from the different radios.

Report your results in the comments below.

Bob’s Radio Corner: Buttons, Knobs, and Switches

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Source: The Great International Math on Keys Book, Texas Instruments Inc., Dallas, Texas, p. 4-7, 1976.

Pressing Buttons. Twirling Knobs and Throwing Switches

By Bob Colegrove

Move along. Nothing informative to read here, just the wandering of an idle mind scheming with meandering fingers on a keyboard. On the other hand, if your curiosity can’t be controlled, consider that a significant amount of enjoyment in this hobby is the mere operation of the radio – seeing what all the buttons, knobs, and switches do, both separately and in combination. It’s always been this way. Beginning in the Amplifiozoic Epoch there was continual rotation of the knobs. This occurred before the discovery of ganged capacitors, when each circuit had to be tuned independently to resonate at the proper frequency. Otherwise, nothing.

It could be quite confounding for a non-radiofile trying to break into the sport. Just getting some sound out of a two-knob radio could be a challenge. My late mother solved this problem on all our radios by painting a dab of red nail polish at the points on the dial where each local station came in.

The Complexities of Shortwave

Later, with the humble entry-level shortwave “set” there was conundrum in the way the bandspread interacted with the main tuning control, and the curious effect of the BFO switch. Even the venerable Hallicrafters Company, which catered to the hams and SWLs of the time, recognized the problem. They tried to solve this by prescribing a default setting in installation and operating procedures for model S-40 receiver, The Hallicrafters Company, Chicago, USA, p. 4, 1946:

“NOTE. – Some of the control markings are in RED. This is an added feature incorporated for the convenience of the listener who is not familiar with radio terminology as an aid in setting the controls most used for the reception of standard broadcast stations.”

That was the nice way of saying it. After many years, I still chuckle to myself thinking of an old ham radio mentor of mine who insensitively explained that the purpose of these markings was for certain members of the household who could not otherwise make the radio work. On my S-40B, the “convenience” markings are white dots.

Modern Radios

Modern radios have many buttons, which can work in different ways. A short press will do one thing while a long press will do something else. Some buttons do one thing with the radio turned off and another thing with the radio turned on. On many radios you can lock the buttons and knobs, in which case they won’t do anything. You must get it right.

Hidden Features

Today, the possibilities with all these variables are boundless, even beyond the control of the manufacturers who incorporate the complex TEF6686 30-pin IC chips in their designs. Qodosen has set the bar high by making a plethora of user-adjustable functions available on the DX-286. An uncommonly informative 40-page manual has been included with each radio and is highly recommended as an essential tool to assist with its operation.

In recent years, Tecsun has capitalized on this by incorporating “hidden features” in some of their models; that is, their operation and even their very existence are not revealed in the manual. In computer gaming parlance, these features are called “Easter eggs” for which one must hunt. Originally, the inclusion of hidden features may not have been intentional, but with the introduction of the PL-880 in 2013 they became a veritable sensation, as testified by the countless owner postings on the PL-880 Yahoo users’ group of that time. A prize of unbounded esteem and self-satisfaction went to the intrepid listener who discovered and solved a hidden feature. This interest went on for several months as Tecsun tweaked the firmware and the “features” migrated somewhat. But unfortunately, a spoiler has been introduced. Hidden feature data sheets are now packaged with current models. In case you are missing any, here is a sampling.

For the Tecsun PL-368 see https://swling.com/blog/2021/08/troys-tecsun-pl-368-hidden-features-quick-reference-sheet/

For the Tecsun PL-990 see https://swling.com/blog/2020/10/johns-pl-990-hidden-features-quick-reference-sheet/

For the Tecsun PL-880 see https://swling.com/blog/2019/10/40072/

For the Tecsun S-8800 see https://swling.com/blog/2018/08/bill-discovers-a-number-of-tecsun-s-8800-hidden-features/

SDR

The complexity of radio operation is compounded still further by the advent of SDR, wherein combinations of various hardware and software components result in a host of possibilities. Features and their placement seem endless as they are distributed on multiple menus. As my personal experience is limited to WebSDR, I leave the pursuit of this point to others.

Manual Power Generation

Finally, the inclusion of some elementary form of leverage and dexterity is present in some radios. Isn’t the hand-powered crank on today’s emergency radio akin to the vintage treadle-operated transcription machine pictured at the beginning of this posting? Perhaps we have come full circle.

Conclusion

Today’s radios are a sort of Rubik’s cube which can continually be manipulated to provide many hours of discovery and complement the listening and DXing experiences. So, the next time you crawl underneath the headset and unconsciously tune to the object frequency, zero beat on the necessary sideband, and adjust the proper bandwidth and volume, reflect on all the time and practice it took you to develop this useful skill.

Eye On America: NC radio station becomes voice of recovery after Hurricane Helene

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From CBS Evening News:

After Hurricane Helene devastated western North Carolina, a couple of radio broadcasters played a critical role in keeping residents informed. Now, six months later, they have taken on a new role in the recovery. Skyler Henry reports.

Click here to view on YouTube.

Having experienced the devastation of Hurricane Helene firsthand, I can confirm that this radio station, along with its FM relay, delivered crucial community updates when both internet and mobile phone services failed.?Never underestimate the power of local radio. — Thomas

Geerling Engineering’s Take on the FCC’s “DELETE, DELETE, DELETE” Docket

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Jeff and Joe Geerling provide a quick but insightful overview of the FCC’s “DELETE, DELETE, DELETE” docket, offering their thoughts on its implications—especially from Joe’s perspective as a broadcast engineer. Their discussion is a great starting point for understanding how these regulatory changes could impact radio and wireless communications.

Click here to view on YouTube.

I should note that a couple weeks ago I submitted a public comment on the FCC site regarding the importance of the amateur radio service—while this isn’t specifically about deregulating the amateur radio service, I believe it’s always worth reinforcing the value of maintaining our spectrum allocations. Click here for more information on the FCC website.