Category Archives: Funny

Yes, there is a shortwave…!

Dear Editor—

I am 8 years old. Some of my little friends say there is no shortwave. Uncle DX Dash! says, “If you see it on the SWLing Post, it’s so.” Please tell me the truth, is there a shortwave?

Virginia E. Layer
330 Independence Ave., S.W.

Virginia, your little friends are wrong. They have been affected by the skepticism of a digital age. They do not believe what can’t be heard or seen on their smart phone. They think that nothing can be which is not comprehensible by Google. They seek credit cards, not QSL cards.

Yes, Virginia, there is a shortwave. It exists as certainly as sound and circuits and tubes exist, and you know that these abound and give to your life its highest beauty and joy. Alas! how dreary would be the world if there were no shortwave! It would be as dreary as if there were no Virginias. There would be no heterodynes, no band openings, no propagation to make tolerable this existence. It would be a world without London Calling.

Not believe in shortwave! You might as well not believe in the ionosphere. You might get your papa to hire men to listen to all of the wi-fi radios of the world, but even if you did not hear shortwave, what would that prove? The most real things in the world are those that neither children nor men can see. Did you ever see ground waves dancing on the lawn? Of course not, but that’s no proof that they are not there. Nobody can casually conceive or imagine all the wonders there are heard and unheard in the listening world. For that, you must wear headphones.

No shortwave! Thank goodness! It lives, and lives forever. A thousand years from now, Virginia, nay 10 times 10,000 years from now, shortwave will continue to make glad the hearts of listeners.

Happy Holidays from your friends at Dashtoons and the SWLing Post!

With apologies to The New York Sun. Our tongue-in-cheek editorial borrows from the timeless classic, “Is There a Santa Claus?” printed in the September 21, 1897, issue of The New York Sun. Click here to read the original.

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Dashtoons: Über cool radio art by Jeff K1NSS

Last Man Standing comments on FCC regulation

Bermuda…Missing?

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“Uh, Charlie, where did Bermuda go?”

My good buddy, David Goren, directed me to the VOLMET frequency for New York Sunday afternoon on 3,485 kHz.

VOMET, for those of you not familiar, is a worldwide network of radio stations that broadcast TAF, SIGMET and METAR aviation weather reports on shortwave radio, and in some countries on VHF, too. All of the reports are broadcast in upper sideband, using automated voice transmissions.

At any rate, they must have experienced a glitch which resulted in the loss of meteorological data for most of the United States. The broadcast preamble is as usual, but as soon as specific airport regions (mostly major US cities and some islands) are mentioned, the report takes a disturbing turn. It’s fodder for science fiction–one is not sure whether to be alarmed or amused by this eyebrow-raising data (or, lack thereof).

The end result becomes almost like a numbers station, sans numbers, of course. Take a listen for yourself by clicking here to download the recording, or listen via the embedded player below:

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Aldous Huxley, radio in The Age of Noise

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Aldous Huxley (1894-1963)

According to English satirist & humanist, Aldous Huxley, we live in the “Age of Noise.” When he wrote this, in 1945, he implicated radio:

“The twentieth century is, among other things, the Age of Noise. Physical noise, mental noise and noise of desire — we hold history’s record for all of them. And no wonder; for all the resources of our almost miraculous technology have been thrown into the current assault against silence. That most popular and influential of all recent inventions, the radio, is nothing but a conduit through which pre-fabricated din can flow into our homes. And this din goes far deeper, of course, than the ear-drums. It penetrates the mind, filling it with a babel of distractions – news items, mutually irrelevant bits of information, blasts of corybantic or sentimental music, continually repeated doses of drama that bring no catharsis, but merely create a craving for daily or even hourly emotional enemas. And where, as in most countries, the broadcasting stations support themselves by selling time to advertisers, the noise is carried from the ears, through the realms of phantasy, knowledge and feeling to the ego’s central core of wish and desire.”

In many ways, this is still true–but not necessarily of radio. I daresay if Mr. Huxley were still around, radio would be the least of his concerns. Radio has gradually become the least invasive of the media that surrounds us, for the “noise” is now primarily visual: unless we make an effort to “quiet” them, images bombard us from all sides….Ironically, radio now requires turning down the volume on these and everything else, in order to experience the same world of noise that Huxley once found so overwhelming.

(He obviously never listened to pirate radio.)

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