Category Archives: Mediumwave

Radio Venceremos: A Salvadoran Civil War underground station

Radio Venceremos (Image source: Biblioteca UTEC)

Many thanks to SWLing Post contributor, Bruce Atchison, who who shares this short video from the early 1980s showing a glimpse inside Radio Venceremos:

Click here to view on YouTube.

From Wikipedia:

Radio Venceremos (Spanish; in English, “‘We Shall Overcome’ Radio”) was an ‘underground’ radio network of the anti-government Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN) during the Salvadoran Civil War. The station “specialized in ideological propaganda, acerbic commentary, and pointed ridicule of the government”. The radio station was founded by Carlos Henríquez Consalvi (Santiago).

Despite the end of the war in 1992, the network continues to broadcast. The war years of the station and its national and international influence were documented in the Spanish-language book Las mil y una historias de radio Venceremos and its English translation, Rebel radio: the story of El Salvador’s Radio Venceremos, by the author José Ignacio López Vigil (translator: Mark Fried), a book recorded by the American Library of Congress. An exhibit honoring Radio Venceremos, including a studio room with original equipment, forms a prominent part of the Museum of the Revolution in Perquín, Morazán, El Salvador.

I also found this film on YouTube (The Radio Venceremos Story) which sheds a little more light on the station. The recording is low-resolution, but the subtitles are legible:

Click here to view on YouTube.

Have any DXers logged and confirmed Radio Venceremos? Please comment!

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The Guardian: The loss of rural radio leaves US communities with “another cultural and informational gap”

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(Source: The Guardian via BJ Leiderman and Kris Partridge)

America’s rural radio stations are vanishing – and taking the country’s soul with them

When I arrive at the radio station, Mark Lucke is standing in the doorway, looking out at the spitting, winter rain. He’s slim and stoic, with sad, almost haunted, eyes. The first thing he asks is if I’d like to see “the dungeon”. Who wouldn’t?

Lucke pulls on a Steeler’s jacket and a baseball cap over brown hair that falls halfway down his back, and leads me across the five-acre yard. Out here, 90 miles east of Tucson, the desert is a long sweep of brush the color of beach sand. Lucke seems to slip through the rainy day like a ghost.

The radio station, whose call letters are KHIL, has long been the daily soundtrack for this frontier town (population 3,500) that prides itself on its cowboy culture and quiet pace of life. But six decades after the founding of the station, the property is in foreclosure, with utility disconnect notices coming nearly every month.

Small-town radio is fizzling nationwide, as stations struggle to attract advertisement dollars. And as station owners are forced to sell, media conglomerates snap up rural frequencies for rock-bottom prices, for the sole purpose of relocating them to urban areas. In a more affluent market, they can be flipped for a higher price. With limited frequencies available, larger broadcasters purchase as many as possible – especially those higher on the dial – in a race not dissimilar to a real estate grab.[…]

Click here to read the full article at The Guardian.

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FEBC to blanket North Korea with 250,000 watt AM signal

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Many thanks to SWLing Post contributor, Tracy Wood, who notes:

New construction – a 250 kw FEBC medium wave outlet coming southwest of Seoul. BTW, FEBC currently leases at least one hour of VOA-Korean on FEBC 1188 khz Seoul.

An interview with the FEBC president on CBN News:

(Source: CBN NewsCBN News)

Communist North Korea is about to get hit with a massive new radio signal carrying the message of Christ’s love like never before.

“It’s an AM station, 250,000 watts, which will clearly cover North Korea,” said Ed Cannon, president of Far East Broadcasting Company, also known as FEBC.

For over 75 years, FEBC has been using radio signals to send the message of Jesus Christ around the world.

Cannon says this new “super station” will be erected close to the border of North and South Korea.

“We’ve secured a location on the western coast of South Korea just a few miles south of the Demilitarized Zone,” Cannon told CBN News. “It’s a perfect location because the signal goes across the ocean for a few miles and then goes right into North Korea.”

FEBC’s president says the radio signal will launch in a few months and will carry gospel programs produced from neighboring South Korea.

“The strategy of our organization is to use indigenous people in their native language to produce programming,” Cannon said. “We have a large segment of South Korean people broadcasting and we also have a number of escapees, refugees from North Korea, who’ve come to our organization.”

Cannon claims the signal will be “unblockable” by North Korea’s regime and will “reach far past the northern boundary of North Korea covering the entire country with the message of Jesus Christ.”

According to its website, FEBC’s broadcasts can be heard in 107 languages and 49 countries from 149 stations and transmitters.

“Our goal in North Korea is the same as it is in all of our other countries: to share the gospel through radio so that people will be inspired to follow Jesus Christ as their Savior,” Cannon told CBN News in an earlier interview.

North Korea is the most dangerous country in the world for Christians. Cannon says anyone caught listening to FEBC programs faces severe consequences.

“The {North Korean} refugees themselves say ‘pray for courage, pray for perseverance’ because the Christians are reaching out in ways to gather together in the Name of Christ, to pray together, to listen to the radio together, and they are willing to endure severe persecution,” Cannon told CBN News.

Each year, Open Doors USA releases their World Watch List, a ranking of the 50 countries where Christians face the most persecution.

North Korea has taken the top spot for 18 years in a row.

“If Christians are discovered, not only are they deported to labor camps as political criminals or even killed on the spot, their families will share their fate as well,” Open Doors asserted on their website. “Christians do not even have the slightest space in society, on the contrary, they are publicly warned against.”

Click here to read the full article art CBN News.

Thank you for sharing this, Tracy!

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“AM radio matters more than you might think”

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Many thanks to SWLing Post contributor, Mark Fahey, who shares the following piece from Politico:

The Lo-Fi Voices That Speak for America

For decades, AM radio has felt as commonplace as a utility, such a basic fact of life that it’s taken for granted. But that’s changing: Across America, AM radio stations are dwindling in number and profitability, as better-sounding FM signals become cheaper to broadcast and would-be listeners turn to the internet for entertainment.

Yet even in decline, it has a strength that politicians and media insiders who want to understand America would do well to heed. In 2019, thousands of AM stations remain on the air, many of them thriving—in part because they serve unique sets of people whose voices aren’t always heard loudly. For generations, it was considerably cheaper to buy or start an AM station than any other form of mass media, making ownership more accessible to people of color, immigrants, non-English speakers and those with political views outside the mainstream. Without the line-of-sight restrictions of FM radio, AM radio can also cover vast geographic areas, and so remains a staple of rural media. Even now, if you tune into the right frequency on a clear summer night, you can hear a broadcast from half a continent away—listening in on the kinds of conversations that shape identity and politics far outside the Beltway.[…]

Click here to read the full article and view photos at Politico.

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Radio Caroline North via Ross Revenge for Easter fundraiser

Radio Republik Indonesia plans to purchase DRM-capable MW transmitters

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(Source: Radio World via Michael Bird)

Radio Republik Indonesia has revealed that it plans to purchase four DRM-capable medium-wave transmitters. The public radio broadcaster says it intends to use the first pair to reach populated areas of the Southeast Asian archipelago, and the second pair for emergency warning in west Sumatra and West Java.

Freddy Ndolu, member of the RRI supervisory board, made the announcement during the Digital Radio Mondiale general assembly, which took place in March. RRI joined the DRM consortium in 2015.[…]

Click here to view the full article at Radio World.

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