Shortwave listening and everything radio including reviews, broadcasting, ham radio, field operation, DXing, maker kits, travel, emergency gear, events, and more
Many thanks to SWLing Post contributor Alan, who writes:
Thomas,
You have been reviewing radios on your site lately, which has prompted me to produce an up-to-date table of all frequencies allocated to radio and TV broadcasting.
Worldwide radios need to tune any frequency up to 240 MHz. DAB+ in the 1.452 – 1.492 GHz band has been a failure. TV is as indicated.
Some chip manufacturers are making FM reception for the CIS and Japanese markets, they need to tune down to 47 MHz to cover all of band 1 for DRM.
Please note that DRM and DAB+ can transmit coloured slide shows to the screen in DAB+ and DRM receivers provided they have a colour screen included.
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).
For DXers of Latin American stations, the period from about 1978-1998 was the golden age of DXing Peru. Those years saw an explosion of shortwave broadcasting from small towns, especially in northern Peru. Most of the stations were unlicensed and few lasted long. I tell the complete story of the period in Tales of a Vagabond DXer. However, the book doesn’t have many pictures as that would have made it much more expensive to produce and to buy. Fortunately, this blog is a perfect place to share photographs.
In those days one of the biggest radio hotspots in Peru was the department of Cajamarca. Over one hundred stations broadcast on shortwave, however briefly, just from that department. Cajamarca is a special place to me because I visited the region in 1985 during the height of the radio boom and visited over a dozen stations in the towns of Chota, Bambamarca, Cutervo and Celendín and the city of Cajamarca.
Chota is the largest town in the central part of Cajamarca department and played an important role in the development of broadcasting in small provincial towns. It’s about 140 kilometers north of Cajamarca but in between is cold barren Andean altiplano rising to over 4,000 meters elevation. In 1985 the bus ride took twelve hours and we encountered ice storms coming and going.
In 1985 Chota was a sleepy Andean town in a fertile river valley.
Radio Chota was already seven years old when I visited in March 1985. The station only had a medium wave license but also broadcast unlicensed on the out-of-band shortwave frequency of 6296 kHz where it was widely heard by DXers. Later they received a shortwave license and were assigned 4890 kHz but several years passed before they actually switched frequencies. Radio Chota was a success story and is still on the air today. Most of the stations I visited in 1985 were not so lucky.
QSL collection of Don Moore … www.DonMooreDXer.com …
Radio Chota as heard on 6296 kHz in 1982 via On the Shortwaves:
Radio Chota as I heard it in Quito, Ecuador on 4890 kHz in 1997:
Radio Acunta was a more typical broadcaster of the period. The station broadcast irregularly in 1984 and 1985 with a homemade 100-watt transmitter. The station didn’t survive but the transmitter with its crystal-controlled frequency of 5800 kHz was a good starter set. Over the next several years DXers followed its movements around northern Peru as it was sold from one would-be station to another.
This picture with the homemade posterboard signs really captures the transient nature of broadcasting in rural Peru in the 1980s. Radio San Juan de Chota was on 5274 kHz for a few months in late 1984 and early 1985. I doubt they ever had permanent signs made. They did, however, have professionally printed envelopes.
Recording of Radio San Juan de Chota via On the Shortwaves:
Bambamarca is a smaller farming town 20 kilometers south of Chota. It was also home to several shortwave stations over the years. Radio Bambamarca had a short appearance on 5657 kHz in the mid-1980s.
Return to Chota
I always expected to return to the Cajamarca area someday. Finally, in November and December 2017, I revisited all the places I had seen in 1985 and more while researching my historical travelogue Following Ghosts in Northern Peru. A few months later, in May 2018, I returned to the city of Cajamarca and Chota with my DX travel buddies, John Fisher and Karl Forth. Continue reading →
This article appearing in the Washington Business Journal reports that President Joe Biden signed legislation that orders the sale of the Wilbur Cohen Building at 330 Independence Avenue, which has been headquarters to the U.S. Agency for Global Media (ex-Broadcasting Board of Governors) and Voice of America for many decades.
Relocation of the agency and VOA has been in the planning stages for the last several years, with the USAGM CEO and other officials claiming that savings from standing down the Cohen Building, which was constructed between 1939 and 1940, in stages would more than pay for the relocation.
However, sources inside the agency have doubts. The new building selected by the now outgoing CEO, Amanda Bennett, at 1875 Pennsylvania Avenue, NW — just a couple blocks from the White House, is currently just office space with no production/broadcast facilities.
A report by the consulting firm Deloitte lays out a multi-year timeline for the agency through 2027. It contains the following description: “New facility was previously only office space and does not currently have the infrastructures to support Broadcast Technology needs. Facility will need to be retrofitted to do so.”
The article by Ben Peters of Washington Business Journal says:
“Congress has directed the General Services Administration to sell the storied Wilbur J. Cohen Federal Building as part of the government’s ongoing efforts to offload underutilized real estate assets. The Biden Administration last week signed off on the Thomas R. Carper Water Resources Development Act of 2024 that, among its many provisions, requires GSA to sell the 330 Independence Ave. SW, located a crosswalk away from the National Mall, “for fair market value at highest and best use” no later than two years following the vacancy of its last remaining federal agency.
It goes on to note that USAGM and VOA are believed to be the only occupant of the building. At 1.2 million square feet, the Cohen Building far exceeds the area of the planned new headquarters building, but agency officials have asserted that much of the Cohen Building space was not actually used.
Nevertheless, employees are wondering how agency staff at current levels will be able to fit at 1875 Pennsylvania Avenue, and this has been the subject of questions at recent internal Town Hall meetings.
Washington Business Journal continues: “If sold, the Cohen building would join a growing list of federally owned properties that have been or remain in the process of being offloaded as the GSA accelerates long-standing plans to cut back the federal real estate portfolio. That work is expected to accelerate under the incoming second Trump administration.”
“USAGM last year signed a 15-year deal to relocate and downsize its offices from 698,000 square feet at the Cohen building into 350,000 square feet at the EastBanc-owned 1875 Pennsylvania Ave. NW. The deal represented by far D.C.’s largest fourth-quarter lease transaction, helping to move the District’s office vacancy rate down ever so slightly for the first time in years.”
The article also quotes a 2024 report by the Public Buildings Reform Board, which found that USAGM’s offices at Cohen were just 2% full between January and September 2023. The large office space there has a capacity of 3,431 workers but saw, on average, just 72 people actually using it each day during that period, the report said.”
The low occupancy of the Cohen Building came to the attention of members of Congress preparing reports on the abuse of telework and remote work by federal employees, prominent among which is Senator Joni Ernst (R-IA).
One photo of VOA’s near-empty newsroom, taken by a tourist visiting VOA, appeared on the World of Radio group, directly contrasting with what once was a vibrant VOA central news operation.
As Government Executive detailed here, Senator Ernst proposed “a trio of bills targeting Washington, D.C.,-area federal employees that would mandate agencies move staff—or their entire headquarters—out of the region, as well as more closely track teleworkers’ activities.
The Decentralizing and Reorganizing Agency Infrastructure Nation-wide to Harness Efficient Services, Workforce Administration and Management Practices—or DRAIN THE SWAMP—Act (S. 23) would require all non-national security agencies to relocate 30% of their headquarters staff outside of the D.C. area within one year of the measure’s enactment.
The Requiring Effective Management and Oversight of Teleworking Employees Act (S. 21) would “require agencies to measure the login data and network traffic—that is, the amount and rate of data flow—from teleworking federal workers’ computers to ensure that they are doing their jobs while outside of traditional work sites.
Another bill, Strategic Withdrawal of Agencies for Meaningful Placement Act (S. 22), would bar agencies from undertaking renovations or renewing the leases of their D.C.-area headquarters and instead require them to solicit bids from other cities to relocate outside of the national capital region. It is worth noting that 85% of the federal workforce already lives and works outside of the D.C. area.
Ernst directly cites low occupancy rates at agencies’ D.C. headquarters, saying she was “already working hard on my top priorities—to drain the swamp, save tax dollars and get federal employees back to serving the American people,” Ernst said in a statement.
A lot of history took place in the Cohen Building, including President Ronald Reagan’s visit, during which this photo was taken. I was in the building in the early years of a 34-year career with VOA when this visit occurred.
It’s clear that VOA and USAGM itself face potential downsizing especially at a time when the focus of the incoming second Trump administration is on reducing waste of taxpayer funds by federal agencies. The extent to which the agency has its budget (which stood at about $950 million in 2025) reduced remains to be seen.
Radio Taiwan International (Rti) launched a new book Shortwave Era: From the Cold War to Democracy, From Intelligence Broadcasting to the Voice of Peace, Let the World Hear Taiwan’s Voice last month.
Shortwave Era chronicles Rti’s nearly century-long journey broadcasting Taiwan’s voice to the world in multilingual languages.
It provides a detailed account of how Rti has used multilingual broadcasting to build international communication bridges, witnessing Taiwan’s significant interactions with the global community. From World War II to the end of Cold War, Rti was not only an international radio station but also played a unique role on the special battleground, including executing intelligence missions through the “Teresa Teng Time” program and compiling “Communist Bandit Broadcasts” as part of classified intelligence operations.
Rti Chairperson Cheryl Lai remarked that today’s Rti is like a “mini United Nations,” with colleagues from around the world sharing “Taiwan’s story,” which is also “the world’s story,” fully reflecting Rti’s international character and cultural mission.
Many thanks to SWLing Post contributor Alan, who writes:
