Source: NASA

Where are the Broadcasters?

As posed by Bob Colegrove

Whenever I ask myself that question, I can’t help thinking of a couple analogies.  Let me explain one.  In the mid-80s, there were three contenders for the home computing market: IBM, Apple, and Commodore.  There were others, but those were the main ones.  It was not uncommon for entrepreneurs to rent out halls and host fairs at which vendors for all three platforms would display the latest peripherals and software.  The IBM PC was incompatible with the Apple IIe; each, in turn, was incompatible with the Commodore 64.  Most of the software came at premium prices.  Why?  I was told that developers had to recoup their cost from the existing group of owners of each specific platform.  Being the early days of home computing, these groups were relatively small, and consequently, this determined the cost of software.  This situation was euphemistically known as the “installed base” ? an existing population of users who owned computers for the targeted software.

Applying this to radio, is there an installed base to warrant more international shortwave broadcasting?  From all appearances, there are more shortwave radios being marketed now than I can ever recall.  I searched for “shortwave radios” on Amazon, hoping to get a reasonable model count, but soon gave up.

Without getting into the politics of the issue, the Chinese are the dominant player in shortwave use today.  They are making most of the shortwave radios and doing most of the shortwave broadcasting.  The targeted audience is both domestic and international.  The radios they make are marketed around the world, apparently quite successfully.  An AI inquiry on the Internet can’t put a number on it, but states that there has been a resurgence of interest in shortwave, particularly since the COVID-19 pandemic and subsequent global conflicts.  Isn’t it reasonable to assume there is now a sizeable installed base of potential shortwave listeners?

If I may be allowed one more analogy, in 1950 the physicist Enrico Fermi asked the cosmic question, “But where is everybody?”  He was referring to the scope of the universe, the real probability that there are enough other habitable planets such that some others should support life.  His paradox is that we have not yet heard from anyone else.

Again, translating this to radio, given the proliferation of shortwave radios and listeners, where are all the broadcasters?  Hasn’t the quality, performance, reasonable cost, and availability of shortwave radios been the seed to start the resurgence of shortwave broadcasting?

The well-worn argument is that times have changed.  We now have the Internet and cell phones to instantaneously bring us an incomparable mass of information and entertainment, all of this on demand. Why contend with noise, interference and weak signals?  Why wait for desired content to be available on a certain day at a certain hour?  Further, and just as important, public broadcasting is costly in terms of production and delivery.  To put a face on it, shortwave radio does not permit one to fasten a $200 GoPro to the front of his bicycle, video his ride, post it on YouTube, and garner thousands of likes.

All of that is strong poison.  On the other hand, radio waves are an immutable form of electromagnetic radiation.  The medium is not going away.  With a high degree of certainty, it will eventually be repurposed, possibly in digital form or with some method of modulation which is yet unknown.  The content may be commercial, military, private, or public.  Someone is going to figure out a way to use it.

In the meantime, why can’t we use it just the way it is?  One advantage of radio is real-time broadcasting – talk radio, spontaneous news reporting, and emergency information.  While this is possible on the Internet, its implementation has been tangential.  For example, I can go for a live cab ride with a truck driver, watch trains run around Horseshoe Curve, or listen to a techno-specialist field viewer questions – all live it’s true, but still not quite the same thing.  Perhaps it is just a matter of time for the Internet to catch up.

The Internet is better for drawing maps and ordering products for home delivery.  Ultimately, however, it fails to engage the imagination.  Instead, the world is presented to us in vivid color leaving no detail in question.  With radio, the listener’s faculties are permitted much wider freedom.  One is allowed to color between the lines, “a fiery horse with the speed of light, a cloud of dust…”  Even the fading or hollow aural echo of a distant shortwave signal can stimulate further vision. That is radio’s ace in the hole.  It just needs the initiative of one visionary to give the ball a push and start it rolling.