Many thanks to SWLing Post contributor, Jerome van der Linden, who shares the following announcement from the DRM Consortium on Instagram:
“Claudius Obrecht’s broadcast in DRM on 22 April 2023, 14.00 UTC on 21,580 MHz”
Many thanks to SWLing Post contributor, Alan Roe, who shares his A-23 (version 1.1) season guide to music on shortwave. Alan provides this amazing resource as a free PDF download:
Click here to download Music on Shortwave A-23 v1.1 (PDF)
Thank you for sharing your excellent guide, Alan!
This dedicated page will always have the latest version of Alan’s guide available for download.
I asked the AI image-generator DALL-E 2 to create a an image based on this song title.
For those of you who attended David Goren’s Shortwave Shindig at the virtual Winter SWL Fest were treated to a song called Tea With The Queen. This was no ordinary song–as David notes:
This is what happened when I asked ChatGPT to write a country song about a trucker who has tea with Queen Elizabeth whilst they listen to BBC on shortwave radio. Then I got Chris Johnson, an extremely talented and savvy musician, to set it to music.
You can listen to “Tea With The Queen” via the embedded player below, or directly on David Goren’s Soundcloud Page.
Note that David has many more audio goodies on his website Shortwaveology.net.
Thanks for sharing this, David. I think it’s absolutely brilliant!
Welcome to the SWLing Post’s Radio Waves, a collection of links to interesting stories making waves in the world of radio. Enjoy!
Many thanks to SWLing Post contributors Trevor Robbins and Dennis Dura for the following tips:
Having a big bookshelf of ham radio books and magazines used to be a point of bragging right for hams. These days, you are more likely to just browse the internet for information. But you can still have, virtually, that big shelf of old ham books, thanks to the DLARC — the digital library of Amateur Radio and Communications.
A grant from a private foundation has enable the Internet Archive to scan and index a trove of ham radio publications, including the old Callbooks, 73 Magazine, several ham radio group’s newsletters from around the globe, Radio Craft, and manuals from Icom, Kenwood, Yaesu, and others.
There are some old QST magazines and the index to newer ones. You can find catalogs and military documents. We miss a lot of these old magazines and newsletters. For example, RCA’s “Ham Tips” is something you won’t find anything like anymore. Most of the material is in English, but there are some other languages represented. For example, the Dutch version of Popular Electronics is available. There’s also material in Afrikaans, Japanese, German, and Spanish. [Continue reading at Hackaday…]
Ham Radio operators, we’re calling you! Members of the Ham Radio Science Citizen Investigation (HamSCI) will be making radio contacts during the 2023 and 2024 North American eclipses, probing the Earth’s ionosphere. It will be a fun, friendly event with a competitive element—and you’re invited to participate.
Both amateur and professional broadcasters have been sending and receiving radio signals around the Earth for over a century. Such communication is possible due to interactions between our Sun and the ionosphere, the ionized region of the Earth’s atmosphere located roughly 80 to 1000 km overhead. The upcoming eclipses (October 14, 2023, and April 8, 2024) provide unique opportunities to study these interactions. As you and other HamSCI members transmit, receive, and record signals across the radio spectrum during the eclipse, you will create valuable data to test computer models of the ionosphere.
For more information, go to https://hamsci.org/festivals-eclipse-ionospheric-science
The Canadian pop music station PopShopRadio in British Columbia has just announced that they will use the DRM standard to broadcast their best pop music towards Europe on the 5th March 2023 at 2000-2100 CET (GMT+1) on 5875 kHz (85kW) from Wooferton in the UK.
This radio station is specialised in transmissions of well-known pop music from the 60s and 70s or even before that. They are collecting the best tunes from various countries and offer them to the world using shortwave. This time round they wish to also use the DRM standard in SW to be able to reach distant parts of the globe in much better sound quality.
For more details please click here and here.
Air raid sirens broadcast in a dozen cities
Radio stations in several Russian cities were disrupted on Feb. 22 by the sound of air raid sirens and a warning of imminent missile strikes.
The broadcasts were reportedly heard in Belgorod, Chelyabinsk, Kazan, Magnitogorsk, Nizhny Novgorod, Novouralsk, Pyatigorsk, Stary Oskol, Syktyvkar, Tyumen, Ufa, and Voronezh, among other cities. Recordings of the broadcast were shared on the social media network Telegram and reported on by Meduza.
Meduza, an independent news agency now based in Latvia, was forced to move its operations out of Russia during the media crackdown that followed Russia’s February 2022 invasion of Ukraine. [Continue reading at Radio World…]
Only 223 stations remain on air 18 months after Taliban regained control of the country
In the 18 months since the Taliban retook full control of Afghanistan, 177 radio stations have gone off the air in the country, displacing about 1,900 journalists and other employees.
In a statement released on World Radio Day 2023, the Afghan Independent Journalists Association noted that during the Islamic Republic period from 2004–2021, there were as many as 401 radio stations operating in Afghanistan. As the Taliban Insurgency increased its control of the country, about 56 stations went off the air before the Taliban took control and reinstated the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan in August 2021.
Since then, around 120 stations have ceased broadcasting due to economic pressures. The AIJA stated that only 223 stations currently operate in the country.
With these stations going dark, more than 1,900 journalists and media workers are now unemployed in the country, include 1,075 women. [Continue reading at Radio World…]
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Many thanks to SWLing Post contributor, Gary (G0CUQ), who writes:
Hi Thomas,
I remember a while ago some posts relating to music with short wave/radio leanings (Wilco & Quindar come to mind).
I found a fairly new English group, The Random Earth Project, who have subtly slipped a numbers station in at the beginning of their track called ‘Airwaves’. It pops up later in the track too (a seven minute progressive rock epic!). I’ll leave a YouTube link here:
Quite a surprise to hear that, although I don’t know the origin of the station.
Thanks for bringing us the SWLing Post – it’s one of the first things I check online. It’s a go-to for me as a ham who hasn’t lost the SWL bug!
Cheers,
Gary G0CUQ
Thank you so much, Gary, for the tip about The Random Earth Project! I love how they’ve implemented numbers station audio.
Thank you for the kind comments about the SWLing Post, too. I truly appreciate that!
The Junglinster RTL longwave transmitter (via Wikimedia Commons)
Welcome to the SWLing Post’s Radio Waves, a collection of links to interesting stories making waves in the world of radio. Enjoy!
On 234 kHz, the new year rang in with static, not bells or fireworks. As had been announced in October, French broadcaster RTL switched off its longwave broadcasts on January 1, 2023.
Long-time RTL presenter Georges Lang marked the occasion with a bittersweet tweet: “Voilà, c’est fini… Goodbye good old Long Waves, you did a good job for a so long time. You belong now to the history of Radio-Luxembourg and RTL.”
Groupe M6, which owns the station, noted that maintaining longwave broadcasts from the Beidweiler, Luxembourg, transmission site consumed about 6,000 megawatt-hours of electricity each year, roughly equal to the average annual energy consumption of 3,000 French people. [Continue reading…]
SWLing Post contributor, Ed, shares this story and notes:
Some SWLing Post readers might be interested to learn that one of the few spies ever caught in the U.S. using shortwave numbers station transmissions to receive instructions is Ana Belén Montes, who was just released from prison after serving 20 years of her 25-year sentence.
One of the highest-ranking US officials ever proven to have spied for Cuba has been released from prison early after spending more than two decades behind bars.
Ana Belén Montes pleaded guilty in 2002 to conspiracy to commit espionage after she was accused of using her leading position as a Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) official to leak information, including the identities of some US spies, to Havana. She was sentenced to 25 years in prison at the age of 45. Continue reading
