Category Archives: Guest Posts

Harping on about biscuits again

Hi to all SWLing Post community, FastRadioBurst 23 here with news of what’s on shortwave via Imaginary Stations this week.

From the transmitters of Shortwave Gold on Saturday November 16th 2024 at 1200 hrs UTC on 6160 kHz and on Sunday November 17th 2024 at 1000/1200 hrs UTC on 6160 kHz and then at 2100 UTC on 3975 kHz we bring you the sound of strings with HARP. Expect some Harpo Marx of course, some French Harp as in the harmonica and possibly a bit of a chat about the High-frequency Active Auroral Research Program (* Subject to ionospheric conditions). So tune in and enjoy some happy harpology via the shortwaves.

Then on Wednesday November 20th 2024 at 0300 UTC pack up all your troubles in your old tea bag and tune into 9395 kHz via WRMI. Pour yourself a nice cup of “Rosie Lee” and open up that biscuit tin and choose yourself a nice treat or two and listen to the sounds of WTBR – Tea and Biscuits Radio and ponder the important questions in life like “Are Jaffa Cakes really biscuits?”

We will be playing all sorts of tunes for tea breaks, songs about cheese and crackers, digestives and fig rolls for your sipping, slurping and munching pleasure. Tune in and enjoy WTBR! To dunk or not to dunk that is the question.

For more information on all our shows, please send  to imaginarystations@gmail.com and check out our old shows at our Mixcloud page here.

Spread the radio love

Channel 6 FM Radio Stations

Many thanks to SWLing Post contributor, Bob Colegrove, who shares the following guest post:


Channel 6 Radio Stations

By Bob Colegrove

Even after all these years, I still find occasional surprises while playing with radios.  How did I miss this one?  I recently did what I thought was a definitive audit of the available FM stations in my area.  Then, just the other day I happened to tune down below 88.1 (FM Channel 201).  At 87.7 MHz I came across some delightful Latin music in clear stereo and proceeded to park the tuning knob there for a listen.  At first, I thought I might simply have some intermodulation from a strong local station, but the stereo signal was much too clear.  So, I resorted to the internet to determine what was going on.  Turns out, according to their website, I was listening to DC 88.7FM in Fairfax, Virginia – no call letters, just “DC 88.7FM.”

Further investigation indicated that the station is officially WDCN-LD a low-power operator, but you won’t find it listed on the FCC FM Query site.  That’s because it is something of a legacy station, a carryover from analog TV days when the audio for Channel 6 was broadcast with the carrier centered on 87.75 MHz, within the range of most FM receivers.  Having discovered this, I retuned the radio slightly to 87.75 MHz and found the signal strength peaked.  Wikipedia describes the history of WDCN-LD at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WDCN-LD.

Of further interest is the history of so-called “Channel 6 FM radio stations.”  The evolution of present-day stations is long and involved.  Over several years, the FCC formed committees, requested comments, held hearings, wrote reports, published proposals, rendered rulings, and ultimately granted waivers.  For the full story, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Channel_6_radio_stations_in_the_United_States.  What resulted are legacy stations dating back to analog TV days which continue to operate sans video as de facto FM stations.  For all practical purposes, we have a modest extension of the FM band.  There are, in fact, 14 such stations currently spread across the lower 48 states.  It is unlikely that the circumstances which created these stations will ever result in more stations being added.  As of July 20, 2023, an FCC report and order restricted these stations to those already licensed and current licenses untransferable.

Do you live near a Channel 6 FM radio station?

Just to complete the picture, there is also officially an FM Channel 200 at 87.9 MHz, which was established in 1978, but to my knowledge is not used.  Does anyone have any information on FM Channel 200?

As an historical aside, the present-day FM band, 88 to 108 MHz, is located directly between analog TV Channels 6 and 7.  In 1958, to foster FM use, Regency Electronics, Inc. marketed a converter, Model RC-103, in a handsome Bakelite case, which could be attached between the antenna (generally “rabbit ears”) and the TV set.  The converter contained a single transistor and was powered by three AA batteries.  By tuning the TV to Channel 6, turning on the TeleVerter to FM, and rotating its dial, one effectively detuned the Channel 6 audio frequency upward, and could listen to the entire FM band.  As this converter was manufactured prior to the advent of stereo broadcasting, the sound was in mono, and fidelity was limited to the audio quality of the TV.  My dad bought one of these.  It was connected to our Arvin 12”, B/W tabletop TV, and it served as our first FM radio for a few years.  There were only a few stations at that time, mostly classical as I recall.  Thus “FM” came to stand for “fine music.”

Source: Sams Photofact Folder, Set 397, Folder 11, Regency Model RC-103, May, 1958.

Spread the radio love

Secret agents hanging on the telephone

Hi to all SWLing Post community. FastRadioBurst 23 here letting you know about what Imaginary Stations have coming to the shortwaves this coming week.

The first show is brought to you via the services of Shortwave Gold on Saturday November 9th 2024 at 1200 hrs UTC on 6160 kHz and on Sunday November 10th 2024 at 1000/1200 hrs UTC on 6160 kHz and then at 2100 UTC on 3975 kHz.

Imagine you’ve dialled a number on your phone and hear in high treble quality: “At Imaginary stations, we offer a wide range of services on the shortwave bands including a show called On-Hold Radio. If you love hanging on the end of a telephone and listening to music do join us for the show. We’ll have classic call waiting messages and music and lots of telephonic themed tunes. Please stay on the line as your call is very important to us…” (cue distorted music played slightly too slow).

Then on Wednesday November 13th 2024 at 0300 UTC on 9395 kHz we have another secret transmission from KSPY via WRMI. There’ll be lots of spy related tunes, songs about heels of shoes with radios in them and coded messages. Get those sunglasses on, clip a pretend secret microphone to your lapel, get your one-time pad out of your bar of soap and tune into the sound of spies on shortwave. Remember if anyone asks, you didn’t read it here, ok?

For more information on all our shows, please send  to imaginarystations@gmail.com and check out our old shows at our Mixcloud page here.

Spread the radio love

Sleeping in thanks to the ionosphere

Good morning/afternoon/evening to all SWLing Post community. FastRadioBurst 23 here in a dressing gown drinking a coffee as I’ve just woken up, but I am awake enough to let you know about what Imaginary Stations have coming to the shortwaves this coming week.

There’ll be a couple of episodes of a show called WREM which is all about that pastime/necessity called Sleep. The moniker can be also be translated as “Witnessing Rapid Eye Movement” or even as “Willderness Response Escape Monitor”. The show may even be Michael Stipe related too, who knows what dreams may envoke.

The first show is brought to you via the services of Shortwave Gold on Saturday November 2nd 2024 at 1200 hrs UTC on 6160 kHz and on Sunday November 3rd 2024 at 1000/1200 hrs UTC on 6160 kHz and then at 2100 UTC on 3975 kHz.

Then on Wednesday November 6th 2024 at 0200 UTC on 9395 kHz there’s WREM 2 via WRMI for more slumber inducing programming in the best way! Enjoy your hot sleepy beverage and then drop off with us!

For more information on all our shows, please send  to imaginarystations@gmail.com and check out our old shows at our Mixcloud page here.

Spread the radio love

SolderSmoke: Monitoring Maritime Radio Messages with YADD

Many thanks to SWLing Post contributor, Bill Meara who shares the following article from the excellent SolderSmoke Podcast blog:


Monitoring Maritime Radio Messages with YADD

This is really cool and very easy.  Easy nerd thrills.

On Friday, Steve VE7SL, put up a blog post on how we can relive the glories of our youth by monitoring HF long-distance maritime traffic.  In the old days the ships were on CW and many report that it was great fun to listen to the various “fists” in action from coastal stations, and from ships on the high seas.  While the CW is long gone, this maritime traffic is still on the air.  Today they are using a SEL call system called Digital Selective Calling or DSC.  

Happily, it is very easy to decode these transmissions.  Steve recommends a program called YADD (Yet Another DSC Decoder).  I downloaded it in seconds and had it installed on my computer in minutes.  Next I had to find a general coverage receiver.  I thought about pressing my old HQ-100 into service, or maybe even the S-38E, but a cooler head prevailed.  I remembered that Farhan had given us a general coverage receiver in his uBITX transceiver.  So it came off the shelf and got powered up.  Around dawn on October 14, 2024 I put the receiver on 8.415 MHz LSB.  I didn’t even have to do a real connection to the computer — I just put the speaker close to the mic and that was sufficient.

Boom.  Soon I was getting signals from ships afloat and from coastal stations.  I heard Shanghai, New Zealand, and Australia.   See above.   From the U.S., I heard Miami, but the most emotional for me was hearing the station at Pt. Reyes, in California.  This is the station that Dick Dilman W6AWO has volunteered at for many years.  FB.

Back in 2017, Steve had another post on DSC and YADD:
https://ve7sl.blogspot.com/2017/08/yadd.html

Thanks Steve!

This site explains very well what DSC is.  From this I think we can see that there is nothing illegal about using YADD to monitor the DSC alerts (that are all emergency-related):  https://infoshipping.tripod.com/gmdss_dsc.html

Spread the radio love

Using the imagination again

Hi SWLing Post community, FastRadioBurst 23 here with news of the Imaginary Stations radio shows  bouncing off the ionosphere this week. This weekend we have another of those “name that theme” shows of WMMR.

Like the last WMMR show, it has a mystery theme running throughout and we ask our listeners to guess what that theme was, once the show is aired. There will be a special eQSL for the first correct winner. Tune in to find out more details on how to enter. This show is brought to you via the services of Shortwave Gold on Saturday October 26th 2024 at 1200 hrs UTC on 6160 kHz and on Sunday October 27th 2024 at 1000/1200 hrs UTC on 6160 kHz and then at 2100 UTC on 3975 kHz.

Then on Wednesday October 30th 2024 at 0200 UTC on 9395 kHz there’s Radio Ace via WRMI for all lovers of radio themed shows everywhere. If you are keen on radio you’ll love this episode of Radio Ace. Tune in.

For more information on all our shows, please send  to imaginarystations@gmail.com and check out our old shows at our Mixcloud page here.

Spread the radio love

Bob asks: “What’s Your Favorite Corner of the Dial?”

Many thanks to SWLing Post contributor, Bob Colegrove, who shares the following guest post:


What’s Your Favorite Corner of the Dial?

As asked by Bob Colegrove

Let’s suppose you’ve been listening to radio for a while.  Consciously or not, you’ve probably favored a range of AM, SW, or FM frequencies.  These are areas where you go to DX or just listen to your favorite stations.  One area I seem to keep returning to is the very bottom of the medium wave band, roughly 530 kHz to 600 kHz.  With the convenience of today’s digital radios, I have consciously pushed the envelope somewhat lower.

The main reason for specializing in that frequency range is the challenge.  In the very beginning there didn’t seem to be much at the extreme lower end of the AM broadcast band.  Growing up in Indianapolis in the ‘50s, the local stations were all at the upper end of the mediumwave dial.  WXLW held down 950 kHz – lower than that nothing.  I would say the stator plates on the variable capacitor got very dusty, never being closed any further than that on many radios.

Another challenge was sensitivity.  In analog times, the sensitivity of a tuned circuit had some falloff as the inductance/capacitance (L/C) ratio decreased.  Sensitivity is highest with the variable cap open at the high end of the band.  As you tune lower by increasing capacitance (inductance remaining constant), the Q and consequently sensitivity drop off – not dramatically, but somewhat.

Finally, not all old analog radios tuned to 530 kHz; some were even challenged to tune 540 kHz.  By performing a little mischief with the alignment, I could sometimes venture into unknown territory.

This was all part of the challenge.  So, what could I do to coax some activity out of the bottom of the band?  I spent many hours poring over Bill Orr’s Better Shortwave Reception (Radio Publications, Inc., Wilton, CT, First Edition, 1957) and tweaking caps and coils trying to squeeze the last few kilohertz and microvolts out of my radios.  This exercise fascinated me and became a hobby within a hobby.  If I may be allowed a self-deprecating aside here, the first time I took a radio out of the cabinet, I just assumed that all these alignment screws were loose, and dutifully torqued them down.  The alignment problem is not comparatively complex with today’s digital receivers.  Note, I didn’t say it was unimportant.

I still tend to favor the bottom of the medium wave band.  Below is a list of my catches over the past couple of years.  It’s just a sample of what one might hear by casual listening over time.  Highlighted stations are heard during daylight hours.  This is NOT intended to impress anyone, rather it is hopefully a stimulus for your own efforts.

As another attraction of the lower mediumwave band, you will find a potpourri of stations.  Besides regular North American broadcasting stations, one might possibly hear an occasional high-powered trans-Atlantic station which is not synchronized with the 10 kHz spacing.  530 kHz is interesting.  It is not used in the US by commercial broadcast stations.  Instead, stations from Canada and Cuba at roughly orthogonal directions from me are regularly audible at night on this frequency.  Thus, the radio is tuned by simply rotating the antenna.  530 kHz is also home to several Travelers’ Information Stations (TIS) throughout the country.  Question:  How will this long-time service fare if travelers don’t have AM radios in their new cars?  Finally, the very bottom of the frequency range still contains a few holdouts of non-directional beacons.

Frequencies below 530 kHz probably put a strain on the medium wave bands of old radios, but they are likely no problem on most digital radios having both LW and MW coverage.  As mentioned, there are a few non-directional beacons down there.  They are Morse coded using amplitude modulation.  I have found placing the receiver in SSB mode makes detection much easier, as the heterodyne from the carrier can be heard well before the signal is strong enough to produce any audio.  These beacons generally fade in for brief periods of time and then fade out like passing comets.

My most recent catch was experimental station WI2XLQ, 486 kHz, during its annual Fessenden Event on Christmas Day and again on New Year’s Day.  See https://swling.com/blog/?s=Fessenden+ .  The experience was not the armchair listening quality one might expect from FM or the Internet.  Instead, it was weak and fraught with atmospheric noise.  The station came in periodically, then disappeared, in short, DXing to its highest degree of satisfaction.

The antenna is the key to good reception, and there is no exception to this rule at the lower end of the AM band.  Many years ago, I switched to an indoor, resonant loop antenna.  The selectivity, directional properties, and noise rejection of a loop antenna in this frequency range are superb.  The figure below shows my 40-year-old loop antenna, which is still used in its original form.  It tunes from ~485 kHz through ~1710 kHz in two bands.  The antenna can rotate 360 degrees horizontally and 90 degrees vertically.  Further, it is mechanically balanced to remain in any position without locking.  For those not inclined to construction projects, the Tecsun AN-100, AN-200, and Terk Advantage will perform quite well through inductive coupling with a portable radio’s ferrite bar antenna.

As all experienced medium wave DXers know, for success you need to have patience, “set a spell,” and let the radio do its thing.  Radios are living organisms, kind of like cats, very independent at times, and will let you hear only what they want you to hear.  On many channels, stations will come and go over time.  If you’re lucky, you might catch an ID; lacking that, you might be able to identify it by the format or network.  You might try to compare the contents you hear on the radio with what you can hear online either over the station’s website or via streaming sites such as TuneIn, iHeart, or Radio Garden.  There may be a delay between the Internet stream and the live signal.

When you feel you’ve exhausted the possibilities, there’s still more.  Turn the antenna 90 degrees and start over.  You’re only half finished with that frequency.  Don’t forget a headset or earbuds.

What’s the next challenging rung on the limbo bar?  Well, possibly the 633-meter ham band, 472 to 479 kHz.  I’ll have to pad the old loop with a small capacitor to tune down there.

What’s your favorite corner of the dial?  Why?

Spread the radio love