Category Archives: Nostalgia

Shortwave Shindig Interval Signal Sign On

Broadcasting a live performance of the Shortwave Shindig at the 2015 Winter SWL Fest.

Many thanks to SWling Post contributor David Goren, who recently uploaded the Shortwave Shindig interval signal slideshow to his YouTube channel. David notes:

For the past 22 years or so, I’ve helmed the Shortwave Shindig, a long form listening session celebrating the art, history and culture of Shortwave Radio. This takes place in suburban Philadelphia at the annual Shortwave Listener’s Fest (which just marked it’s 39th year), sponsored by the North American Shortwave Association (NASWA). Our opening gambit for the evening is to play an Interval Signal medley. Interval Signals are short samples of music often incorporating a country’s national anthem, folkloric music, even bird calls…as an aid for tuning in the station prior to the official sign-on. Our resident musical genius Chris Johnson takes the Shindig’s anthem, the country gospel tune “Turn Your Radio On” and morphs it into classic Interval Signals from the golden era of Shortwave Radio broadcasting (including The Voice of America, Radio Tehran, Radio Kiev, Radio Norway, Radio Canada, Radio Australia and many more.) This year I added a slide show with a smattering of Shortwave Radio related graphics. I present it here for your listening and viewing pleasure. Kudos also to Jeff Murray for designing the ultra-snazzy Shortwave Shindig logo.

Click here to view/listen via YouTube.

WKRP Returns: FM Fiction Becomes FM Reality in Cincinnati!

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Many thanks to SWLing Post contributor, Dennis Dura, who shares this bit of radio nostalgia made real. Nearly 50 years after the iconic TV series WKRP in Cincinnati first aired, the call letters have officially returned—this time on a real FM station in Cincinnati. The new WKRP(FM) launched on 97.7 MHz, even featuring a familiar voice from the original show to mark its debut.

Read the full story at Radio World.

Winter SWL Fest 2026: “Meet the Archivist” Recording

Don Moore’s Photo Album: Old Radios in Salamanca

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By Don Moore

More of Don’s traveling DX stories can be found in his book Tales of a Vagabond DXer [SWLing Post affiliate link]. If you’ve already read his book and enjoyed it, do Don a favor and leave a review on Amazon.

I’m spending April and May wandering around northern Spain and northern Portugal. My goal is to visit places I haven’t been to before, but I also have to return to Salamanca. I had been there twice before, but Salamanca is the kind of place that draws a person back. I love to wander the back streets of the old city. I also wanted to find some things I hadn’t done before, and that’s how I came across the Museo del Comercio (Commerce Museum) in a modern neighborhood east of downtown. That may not sound very interesting, but I knew immediately that I would have to go. One of the two main permanent exhibits is a collection of old radios.

Most of the items on display came from the collection of Agustín De Castro. Agustín was born in Salamanca in 1928 and began building radios when he was eight years old. Here’s one of his early radios.

As a young man, he went into electronics and eventually operated his own radio store and radio repair business in Salamanca. He donated his vast collection to the city in 2002, and in 2006, it became part of the new Museo del Comercio, which was opened in Salamanca’s old underground brick water cistern.

I might only DX on modern SDRs these days, but I still love looking at old radios. Everything here is in excellent condition and is kept in glass display cases to keep it that way. Unfortunately, that does make it harder to get good photos without getting glare or reflections. But I think these came out pretty well.

Let’s start with a closer look at a few of the more usual pieces.

The Gram Model 157 was built in Spain in 1947. I liked this one for the fancy logo on the dial. Note that while the medium wave band at the top is marked in kilocycles, the shortwave band at the bottom still used meters.

The Fono model 140 was also made in Spain in 1945. Again, the dial used kilocycles for medium wave and meters for shortwave.

This 1940 RCA radio/phonograph is one of the few items that didn’t belong to Agustín De Castro. What caught my eye was the original station list inside.

The LAK Radio was a small set made in Spain in 1950. It’s also medium wave and shortwave, but now the shortwave dial has frequencies instead of wavelengths. Likewise, the 1960 Vanguard Atlas from Spain uses only kilocycles.

Two Unusual Designs

The next two sets will show that there were some rather unusual designs coming out of France. This first set is a Philips A-48-U made in France in 1942. The dial is on a panel that folds down when the radio is being used and then snaps back up when it’s not in use. I think the idea is to give the user a way to put the radio away without having to move it. Notice that the knobs are also mostly hidden. The tuning knob just barely sticks out from the front of the fold-down panel. Two other knobs are at the bottom of the speaker grill on either side.

I wish I could have gotten a better picture of the dial markings on this, but there was too much glare at other angles. The A-48-U was only produced in 1941-42 in Paris, which would have been under Nazi occupation at the time. Nevertheless, the dial still lists Daventry, London, and Droitwich, although it would have been illegal to listen to those British stations in occupied France. The dial also shows New York, Boston, and Moscow, but it’s possible the plates were made before the USA and USSR were part of the war. Continue reading →

Shortwave Memories — Go Go Radio Moscow

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by Karl D. Forth

Radio Moscow didn’t seem confrontational. We’re here, their attitude seemed to be, and we’re going to offer our opinion on things, which you may or may not like.

Looking at the World Radio-TV Handbook in the early 1970s, Radio Moscow was on dozens of frequencies from many different transmitters thousands of miles apart. The Far Eastern transmitters were 5,000 miles from Moscow.

In 1974, Radio Moscow offered programs in 64 languages, along with Russian by Radio, and a transcription service. U.S.S.R. was one of the largest broadcasters, with shortwave transmissions in many languages, from Bambara to Urdu.

“If you’d like first-hand information about the Soviet Union, its developed socialist society, the Soviet way of life and the Soviet view on major international issues tune in to Radio Moscow,” an ad for the broadcaster stated.

I thought that Radio Moscow offered a straightforward outlook, and they tried to make the programs truthful but were sometimes selective in what was covered. Their job was to promote progress that was being achieved in the Soviet Union, and to criticize the West.

(If you’re interested in the Soviet viewpoint from that time, an interesting book to read is Parting With Illusions, by Vladimir Pozner.)

One subject that got under Radio Moscow’s skin was NATO’s deployment of short-range cruise missiles in the early 1980s.

Later, there was Vasily’s Weekend, broadcast about 1990 and 1991, in the last days of the Soviet Union. The show, hosted by one Vasily Strelnikov, a Russian who had grown up mostly in America, was an informal English-language program of popular music and listener requests, a segment that must have stood in contrast to the station’s other programs.

Moscow’s exit from shortwave was sudden. It was renamed the Voice of Russia in 1993, after the breakup of the Soviet Union. The shortwave radio broadcasts were ended completely by Vladimir Putin in 2014.

Go Go Radio Moscow was an actual 45 single by Nikita the K, probably the only 45 record about a shortwave station. It was an American record and was not, as far as we know, ever played on Radio Moscow. (For the record, there is a rock band called Radio Moscow based in Iowa, not the Russian capital.)

Karl D. Forth has been interested in radio and DXing for more than 50 years. This story was included in the book Radio Nights and Distant Signals.

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Ethiopia on Shortwave – Then and Now

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by Dan Greenall

Back in the early 1970’s, Radio Voice of the Gospel, station ETLF, in Addis Ababa was the best way to hear this country, though it was by no means an everyday occurrence here in southern Ontario, Canada. Their distinctive drum interval signal was the first 4 notes of “A Mighty Fortress.” Or perhaps you would be lucky to hear “Elizabethan Serenade” being played prior to the start of their broadcast. Two recordings I have managed to save can be found at the Internet Archive here: https://archive.org/details/etlf-ethiopia-1971

In 1977, the station was nationalized by the Provisional Military Governing Council of Ethiopia and renamed the Radio Voice of Revolutionary Ethiopia.

Later, in the late 1990’s, a couple of Ethiopian stations could readily be heard thanks to their out of band frequencies. The Voice of Tigray Revolution used 5500 kHz and I recorded their signal on February 21, 1999 while at a DX Camp in Coe Hill, Ontario.

Radio Fana used 6940 kHz and I made a recording of them signing on just prior to 0330 UTC also on February 21, 1999 while at the same DX Camp.

Today, a few stations are still listed as broadcasting on shortwave from Ethiopia, namely Radio Oromiya on 6030, Amhara State Radio on 6090, and Radio Fana on 6110 kHz.

When active, they all seem to suffer from low modulation levels and co-channel interference (primarily from Chinese stations). Recently, I was able to discover that Radio Fana is still using the same interval signal as they did in 1999, by listening on a Kiwi SDR in Mombasa, Kenya.
Here is a recording of their sign on at 0300 UTC on April 26, 2026 on 6110 kHz.

They now seem to ID as Fana Media Corporation, even though programming is not in English.

Listen at the 3:05 mark for this. Also, the modulation level jumps up significantly about the 3:28 mark.

Additionally, I have included a recording of their sign off on April 1, 2026 beginning at 2053 UTC and concluding with the Ethiopian national anthem.

How Shortwave Sparked Ralph’s Lifetime of Adventure

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Many thanks to SWLing Post contributor Ralph Perry, who shares, in his latest Substack post, a look back at how shortwave radio helped shape his life—sparking a lifelong curiosity about the wider world, influencing his career path, and ultimately leading to experiences far beyond the radio dial. As he notes, it’s his “how I got here” story and, in many ways, an ode to the power of radio to connect us with places, people, and possibilities we might never have imagined.