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Many thanks to Jonathan Marks–former host of RNW’s Media Network and curator of the Media Network Vintage Vault–who kindly shares a collection of photos he took in 2001 and 2002 at RNW’s headquarters in Hilversum.
Click on the images below to enlarge:
The RNW Newsroom in August 2002
The BVN Television Crew in 2001
Amazing photos–thank you for sharing these, Jonathan! You’ve done such an amazing service to the community by curating, archiving and sharing RNW media. Thank you.
The Australian government is considering the findings of a long-awaited report reviewing broadcasting to the Asia Pacific but it hasn’t revealed when they might be made public.
One of the key questions under consideration is whether to reinstate the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s shortwave service, which was cut in early 2017.
The ABC says it’s technology that’s out of date, but some experts say it’s still the best way to reach remote audiences and with the will, could be back up and running in just a few months.
Member for Nuku Joseph Sungi has called in the National Broadcasting Corporation to reintroduce the short wave band to reach the rural people.
Mr Sungi in a series of questions to Minister for Communication and Information Technology Sam Basil said in the late 1980s, the NBC at the time through the provincial radio stations was using the shortwave band.
He said Radio Sandaun in West Sepik could reach districts like Nuku and parts of Telefomin but that was not the case anymore.
“Does the minister and the department have any plans to make sure that same service under short wave band can be replaced by a new one or improvement can be made so that provincial radio stations can be revived and broadcasted straight so that remote parts of PNG can use to get news and update on what is happening around the country?” Mr Sungi said.
Mr Basil, who is also responsible for Energy, said a lot of people in the rural areas were asking the same question because they could no longer have access to NBC radio.
[…]“I have had discussions with the managing director of NBC and I told them that we want that service to return. We are now moving the system at NBC from analogue to digital so I asked them how we can fit in the short wave system when we do the migration.
“They came up with a few ideas. For some places like Bougainville shortwave is available.
“But I asked them how can we asked the shops to start selling shortwave 1 and 2 transistor radios that receive this wireless signal, a lot of shops are not selling, In places like Bougainville we want to import some radios to distribute so that they carry out the awareness.”
“We are now talking about bringing back these services and improvement.
“We will start in Port Moresby first and roll out to provinces, We are trying our very best to bring the service back because most of our people are in rural areas, A lot of our radio stations now invest into FM band which signals of often blocked by barriers like mountains that is why we want to bring back the shortwave band,” Mr Basil said.
Many thanks to SWLing Post contributor, Nigel Holmes, who writes:
Here are a couple of interesting url following the joint Australian DFAT & DCA Review of Broadcasting Services in the Asia Pacific. [One] gives a good overview and the [other] is a concise assessment of HF and Radio Australia in the role of broadcasting to remote areas. Have a look. Former RA Head Jean-Gabriel Manguy made a submission, I did not this time. The submissions are in the public domain.
International broadcasting: the ABC vs the wisdom of the crowd
The findings of two related government reviews – on international broadcasting, and soft power – should offer an incoming Australian government the potential of a substantial policy reset following the general election in May. Specifically, they may help clarify the purpose and place of state-funded international broadcasting/digital media in Australia’s foreign relations, following a decades-long cycle of investment and dis-investment.
Shortly before Christmas, the Department of Communications published most of the 433 submissions (92 private individuals, 31 organisations or groups, and 310 signatories to a pro-forma submission) made to the first of those reviews, Australian Broadcasting Services in the Asia Pacific, excluding those whose authors wished them to remain confidential. Finalisation of the broadcasting report precedes the related Soft Power Review, being undertaken by the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, which has proposed a completion date of around March.
So it is timely to take note of the wisdom of the crowd, as expressed through the more discursive submissions to the broadcasting review, and to compare them with the institutional perspective of the ABC as the responsible agency for international broadcasting.[…]
Public broadcaster Prasar Bharati has decided to close down All India Radio’s national channel and its regional training academies in five cities as part of “cost-cutting measures” and to “rationalise” services.
The programme, technical, ministerial and other staff posted at the national channel in Todapur and Nagpur, etc., apart from those working at the Regional Academies of Broadcasting and Multimedia (RABMs) in five cities, may be posted as per the requirement of the organisation, said the order issued by the Directorate General, All India Radio (AIR).
In order to “rationalise AIR services and keeping in view of the cost-cutting measures”, it has been decided by Prasar Bharati and communicated to DG AIR on December 24, 2018, to close down the national channel of AIR and RABMs located at Ahmedabad, Hyderabad, Lucknow, Shillong and Thiruvananthapuram with immediate effect, it said.
The order, dated January 3, stated that the programmes of archival value maintained by the national channel should be sent to the central archives in Delhi for digitisation and preservation for posterity.
The national channel, which broadcasts from 6pm to 6am, started airing in 1987 and played an important role in keeping people abreast of national issues, an AIR source said.
“National channel has a huge repository of programmes and the personnel will now be redeployed,” the source said.
It is understood that certain sections within AIR are not happy with the decision as they believe the national channel was an important part of the broadcasts and there were other ways to cut costs than shutting it down altogether.
“These days you can livestream, you can make it an application-based service, there are many other ways of cost cutting. The effort should have been to strengthen the national channel and not close it down,” a source said.
Many thanks to SWLing Post contributor, Dan Robinson, shares an image of the letter (mentioned above) which was originally posted by Jawahar, on the Gary Cohen Facebook page:
Many thanks to SWLing Post contributor, Richard Langley, who shares this excellent article by our friend Jonathan Marks in Medium:
Jonathan Marks, Director of Programmes, Radio Netherlands, Hilversum, June 1995 (Source: Medium.com)
Every country claims to have invented radio. In the Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision in Hilversum they have so far focused on the radio pioneer Hanso Idzerda. He set up a business to make and sell his radios. And he realised that no-one would buy his radios if there was nothing to listen to. I think the evidence shows that he was one of the first, if not the first person to make regular broadcasts following a pre-announced schedule. But I would like to suggest he started off a chain of Dutch “firsts”, many of which are now in danger of being forgotten.
First, Idzerda started international broadcasting. From a rooftop antenna in the Hague, his low power mediumwave signal could be heard in the Southern part of the UK. And he capitalised on that by broadcasting an hour of concert music between 4 and 5 on a Sunday afternoon, responding to listeners correspondence. And he managed to get the programme paid for by the Daily Mail newspaper in London. So, the first international broadcasts were commercial. They were also the world’s first broadcasts using what today we would call narrow band frequency modulation. It wasn’t until 1933 that American engineer Edwin Armstrong, discovered this technique was capable of transmitting much better audio fidelity if you used much higher frequencies and more sensitive receivers.
In 1920’s, no-one understood radio propagation
But in 1919 no-one really understood how radio waves worked and the influence the sun has on the way they propagate. I’m guessing that Idzerda would have had most of his UK listeners in mid-winter when it was starting to get dark.
By 1925, various things were happening in parallel. Physicists like Edward Appelton were showing that there was a layer in the earth’s atmosphere which they later called the ionosphere. It acted like a mirror to radio waves. And the path of the signal followed was dependent on frequency.
So while Radio Kootwijk was using a high-power long-wave transmitter to try and send Morse code messages to the Dutch colony of the East Indies, now Indonesia, engineers at Philips in Eindhoven realised that shorter wavelengths were best suited to long distance communication using much less power than the 400kW being used in Kootwijk. They ran experiments in 1925 which were received in Malabar Indonesia. A certain Dr de Groot is listed is some accounts as a radio enthusiast. It’s just that he happened to be the head of the Dutch telegraph station in Sitoebondo, East Java and had been busy since 1916 trying to establish a reliable, direct connection between The Netherlands and its colonies. The Dutch were making use of long-distance phone cables owned by the British who were listening in to all the communications.[…]
Many thanks to SWLing Post contributor, Dan Robinson, who shares the following guest post:
In these days of declining activity on the shortwave bands, we don’t often enjoy the experience of hearing what we might still call “rare” stations. The new year brought an exception.
On January 1st, 2019 I was tuning around the 48 meter band, which is largely populated by European pirate stations, utilities, and weather stations, when I heard a station on 6,210.20 khz. It was very distinct in that it sounded like an African station — music, with a male DJ/MC and religious songs.
What immediately came to mind was the religious station calling itself Radio Kahuzi, which is in Bukavu, Democratic Republic of Congo.
The station has been heard by DX’ers in a number of countries since the mid-2000’s and because it’s management is based in the U.S. it is possible to obtain a QSL verification.
On January 1st, RK was heard from about 1730 to 1747 UTC when it shut down, playing what Richard McDonald, one of the station’s founders, says were musical pieces that are specific to RK.
On January 2nd, 2019 the station was heard again via Europe-based SDRs, signing off at approximately 1811 UTC.
Here is McDonald’s response to my report (which included an mp3) from January 1st, in which he notes that he even went so far as to give the main station announcer, Gregoire, my name and asked him to mention me in the station’s broadcast:
“I just shared with Gregoire that you had sent a recording of the last minutes of his closing musical sign-off if Radio Kahuzi and he agreed to greet you by name this evening and several days in several languages including English.
You got him saying his name at 5:54 into your recording yesterday,and the ID sign off Mountain Blue-Grass Music was unique to Best Radio Kahuzi in Bukavu!
Barbara Smith will be happy to send the QSL Card and info about us and our National Director and his family situation in case you have any suggestions
Powering off here! Our power cuts off with SNEL often — I just lost a longer reply to you !
But Keep Looking UP ! And Keep On Keeping ON !
Richard & Kathy McDonald”
By the way, according to Wikipedia, SNEL stands for Société nationale d’électricité “the national electricity company of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Its head office building is located in the district of La Gombe in the capital city, Kinshasa. SNEL operates the Inga Dam facility on the Congo River, and also operates thermal power plants.”
A very interesting page containing the history of Radio Kahuzi, with information about the McDonalds, is at: http://www.besi.org/
As of the time of this writing, it’s unclear to me whether the extended broadcast times of Radio Kahuzi will be continued or if this was a one shot deal linked to the new year — we may have some clarification on this in coming days.
Here’s a video of my January 1st, 2019 reception of Radio Kahuzi:
For now, I am quite pleased to join the group of about 63 DX’ers around the world (that number comes from a link on the RK website called “Shortwave Listeners” that lists SWLs who have heard and contacted the station).
Though it is highly unlikely that Radio Kahuzi will be heard anytime soon in the United States (the station’s schedules shows it being active from 8 AM to 8 PM Bukavu time) at least using U.S.-based radios, whether SDR or traditional receivers, it’s nice to know that there is still a station out there (with 800 watts!) that is a real DX target!
Wow! What a fantastic catch, Dan! Thank you for sharing your catch and, especially, shedding light on this rare DX.
Post Readers: Please comment if you’ve logged and/or confirmed Radio Kahuzi.
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