Category Archives: Travel

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 →

Mark shares some sights and sounds from South Korea

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Many thanks to SWLing Post contributor Mark Hirst, who recently returned from a trip to South Korea and, at my request, is sharing some sights and sounds with us. Mark writes:

Thomas,

I’ve been catching up on cataloguing pictures and videos from my Korea trip.

I’ve enclosed a picture taken through the Seoul North Tower observation window of an adjacent radio mast.

You can also see a view of Seoul along with its dubious air quality !

I’ve posted these radio-related YouTube videos:

AFN Korea – War in Iran:

MBC FM4U – Reporting on a fire at a ‘capsule’ hotel in Myeong-dong
I embedded English translations generated by the Korean language app, NAVER Papago:

Mark

Thank you, Mark! Wow–I can’t imagine being a guest in a capsule hotel during a fire–that sounds terrifying. And thank you for that photo of the Seoul North Tower–great shot!

A Radio Postcard from Seoul

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Many thanks to SWLing Post contributor Mark Hirst, who shares the following guest post:

A Radio Postcard from Seoul

Hechi is a mascot for the Seoul Metropolitan Government

by Mark Hirst

I recently spent a very memorable week in Seoul, motivated to travel there by Hallyu or the Korean Wave, a cultural phenomena exemplified by the TV show Squid Game, animated movie K-Pop Demon Hunters, boy band BTS, and girl group Blackpink.

While I can credit Netflix and its huge library of Korean TV and film content for introducing me to K-drama, it was KBS World Radio and its Weekend Playlist programme on shortwave that led me to K-pop.

Early on in my holiday planning, I discovered that KBS has a public exhibition called KBS ON located in their headquarters building. Later during the trip, radio would appear unplanned in one of the other museums I hoped to explore.

Travelling to Seoul of course was a unique radio listening opportunity to hear and record stations that would otherwise require a Web SDR or internet streaming. Armed with a relatively recent copy of WRTH, I was able to compile a list of radio stations with the intention of making some short audio and video recordings.

What follows is a description of my experiences at KBS ON, some historical references to radio at the National Museum of Korean Contemporary History, and notes about the radio stations I was able to hear during my stay.

All photos are my own.

The Korean Broadcasting System

The Korean Broadcasting System or KBS is the national broadcaster of Korea, providing radio, TV, and internet based content to its national audience. KBS World is the outward facing arm of the organisation providing similar services to an international audience.

The headquarter buildings of KBS are located in Yeouido, an area of Seoul that also hosts Korea’s National Assembly Building. Technically a river island, Yeouido is bordered by the Han River, offering spectacular views of central Seoul and a skyline familiar to K-drama fans everywhere.

The main KBS building is a short walk from Yeouido station on Line 5 and Line 9 of the Seoul metro system. Your route takes you through Yeouido Park where you can see a preserved Douglas C-47 cargo plane dating from the Korean War.

The main building sits along side several other KBS related areas including the KBS Hall and KBS Art Hall. Even to the untrained eye, it’s obvious that the facility is communications related with a prominent red and white antenna tower on the main building, with red scaffolding on an adjacent block housing another tower and communication dishes.

Other notable locations at the site include a roadway and building entrance where K-pop idol groups arrive every Friday to record Music Bank, a programme that showcases the latest hits of the music genre. This photo opportunity is so popular with fans that it has a dedicated playlist on the KBS World English YouTube channel.

KBS ON Exhibition Hall

The KBS ON Mural featuring the mascot Kong

The KBS ON exhibition is part of a range of locations promoted by the official visitor guide to Seoul, details of which can be found here.

Accessing the exhibition is through distinctive blue bordered doors into a large reception area. The exhibition proper then begins at the top of a short flight of stairs.

Although all sections of the tour are in Korean, section overviews are also provided in other languages. QR codes link to audio commentaries to provide the remaining explanations for non-Korean visitors.

The audio commentary supports the following languages:

  • Korean
  • English
  • Simplified Chinese
  • Japanese
  • Bahasa Indonesia
  • Vietnamese
  • Spanish

The tour proceeds through a series of linked sections and topics which are described below.

KBS History

This section is comprised of information panels outlining the origins of KBS. Originally known as the Gyeongseong Broadcasting Station (callsign JODK) beginning in 1927, the name KBS emerges in 1945 following the liberation of Korea from Japan. KBS was established as a public broadcaster in 1973.

On Air

Through a series of large screens, this section describes the various channels KBS provides including terrestrial TV, international radio, cable, and Digital Multimedia Broadcasting, a radio transmission technology developed in South Korea.

Current Affairs / Culture programme

As a public broadcaster, this section highlights the current affairs and educational output of KBS.

Virtual Studio

This interactive section demonstrates the familiar ‘blue screen’ or chroma key technology used in news and weather forecasts. Visitors are encouraged to present their own Korean weather forecast!

Drama

The visitor is treated to a display of props and magnificent costumes from Korean period dramas, with panels and displays highlighting the role of KBS in driving growth in the K-drama industry.

Props and Costumes

Entertainment programme

Supported by large screens, this area showcases a range of local programming including talent and variety shows.

Music Bank

While the shows in the previous sections will be unfamiliar to most, Music Bank is more well known to overseas fans of K-pop. This high profile programme features live performances every Friday evening from the big names of the genre with a lottery system for fans to attend recordings.

Vertigo

This section demonstrates AI based technology developed by KBS to allow a single fixed camera to track individual members of an idol group simultaneously as they sing and dance on stage. Previously, these so-called ‘fancam’ shots required a separate camera for each performer incurring extra costs and logistics problems.

Examples of Vertigo in action are shown on large screens, featuring performances by girl groups STAYC and Illit.

Visitors can step on to a virtual stage adjacent to the displays where a single camera will automatically track your face and body without physically moving. Continue reading →

Don Moore’s Photo Album: Guatemala (Part Seven) – Radio Maya de Barillas

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Image: Radio Maya via Facebook

Don Moore’s Photo Album:
Guatemala (Part Seven) – Radio Maya de Barillas

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.

Given the subject of this final part you might assume that I eventually did make it to Barillas and get to visit Radio Maya. I wish it were so, but no. When writing part six of this series I tried to find a few interesting links about Radio Maya to include. I came across a 38-minute video about the history of the station issued on its 50th anniversary in 2012. The video is a series of still photos (most very old) narrated in Kanjobal.

Actually I’m assuming that it’s Kanjobal as that is the Mayan language spoken in Barillas. I don’t speak Kanjobal, but the Mayan languages use Spanish for numbers, dates, and modern ideas such as technical terms. Between the Spanish words and the context provided by the photographs, I was able to somewhat understand the video. Instead of expecting you to watch the 38-minute video, I’ve copied the most interesting pictures below. (I don’t think you want to see pictures of all the people involved over the years.)

Beginnings

There had been an Evangelical mission in Barillas since the mid-1950s. The name of whoever decided to put a radio station in Barillas is lost to history. But, like Father John Rompa of the Catholic station La Voz de Nahualá, they realized that radio was the best way to reach the Mayan people scattered across remote mountain towns and villages. Also lost to history is why they picked a place as remote as Barillas. Not only was the town at the end of the road, but in the early 1960s the last stretch of road wasn’t even drivable. Hauling in equipment for the new broadcaster was a challenge.

Here a man carries part of the transmitter on his back:

The transmitter eventually arrived in Barillas on an oxcart:

In these next two pictures about two dozen men haul the generator over a rough stretch of road:

The original building in 1962:

The next step was putting up the antenna. Here villagers prepare to erect a wooden pole as a center support for the antenna wires:

One of two shorter poles to hold up the lower ends of the wire:

When the pole was in place a very brave (or foolhardy?) man climbed to the top to attach the wires:

The finished tower. The antenna wires, attached at the top, aren’t visible. The lower wires are for support:

From its beginnings until the late 1970s, Radio Maya de Barillas only broadcast on 2360 kHz with this 250-watt transmitter. Later a one-kilowatt transmitter was added for 3325 kHz.

Installing the generator:

The Radio Maya studio in the 1960s:

Getting Bigger

In 1969 a plot of land was purchased on the edge of town and over the next three years a new building was constructed with help from American missionaries. Continue reading →

Don Moore’s Photo Album: Guatemala (Part Six) – Huehuetenango

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Many thanks to SWLing Post contributor Don Moore–noted author, traveler, and DXer–for the latest installment of his Photo Album guest post series:

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Don Moore’s Photo Album:
Guatemala (Part Six) – Huehuetenango

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 first heard of Huehuetenango in February 1974. I had gotten my first serious receiver, a Barlow-Wadley XCR-30, a few weeks earlier. Now I could try for stations in the 120-meter band. The first one I heard was Radio Maya de Barillas on 2360 kHz from a place named Barillas in Guatemala. And Santa Cruz de Barillas (the town’s full official name) was in a department named Huehuetenango. The name sounded exotic and magical.

In my mind, Radio Maya de Barillas was the ultimate DX target. The Evangelical Protestant station used a tiny amount of power in 120-meters, the shortwave band that provided the most challenge to DXers. The programs were in Mayan languages with mostly hard-to-pronounce names. And my map showed that Barillas was literally at the end of the road. There was nowhere to go beyond Barillas.

That sense of Huehuetenango being on the edge of civilization was totally correct. The department contains the rugged Cuchumatanes mountains, the highest non-volcanic mountains in Central America. It’s the only place in Central America where it’s too cold to grow corn. Instead, people get by raising sheep and planting potatoes. The mountains explain why eight different Mayan languages (belonging to three different language families) are spoken in this one department. Steep rugged mountains are a barrier to communication. A lack of communication causes a common language to diverge into multiple languages over just a few centuries.

The Mam, numbering about half a million, are the fourth largest Mayan group in Guatemala and their homeland extends into other departments in the south. But the other seven languages are only found in Huehuetenango with maybe a little spillover across the borders. The largest of those is Kanjobal, spoken by about 80,000 people today. The Tectiteco (Tektik) number just a little over two thousand.

As noted on the back of my QSL from Radio Maya de Barillas, that station broadcast in six of the region’s languages, including Mam and Kanjobal, the language spoken in and around the town of Barillas. For about a decade Radio Maya was the only radio station to broadcast in the region’s languages. Then in 1975 the Roman Catholic church opened an educational station, Radio Mam, in Cabricán to the south in Quetzaltenango department. But Radio Mam only broadcast in the Mam language. (And, unfortunately, I never got to visit the station.)

Visiting Huehuetenango (or not)

When I was traveling to Guatemala while living in Honduras in the early 1980s, one of my goals was to visit as many Guatemalan shortwave stations as possible. Yet I never once considered going to Barillas. Sure, I knew that the dirt road from the town of Huehuetenango to Barillas was one of the worst in Central America and that the bus ride took twelve hours. That wasn’t going to stop me.

 What stopped me from visiting Radio Maya was that Barillas was right in the middle of the area of the heaviest fighting between the government and the guerrillas. This may surprise you if you’ve read the previous parts of this series, but there really were some things back then that I knew better than to do. Going into the worst part of a war zone was one. The closest I came to Barillas was passing through the southern part of the department on the Pan-American Highway on my way to Mexico in December 1984. That was just a few weeks after a guerilla band had ventured south and blown up four bridges on the road. Continue reading →

Don Moore’s Photo Album: Guatemala (Part Five) – Visiting Nahualá

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Many thanks to SWLing Post contributor Don Moore–noted author, traveler, and DXer–for the latest installment of his Photo Album guest post series:

Santo Tomas Church, Chichicastenango, Guatemala (by Lucía García González via Wikimedia Commons)

Don Moore’s Photo Album: 
Guatemala (Part Five) – Visiting Nahualá

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.

After my first attempt to visit La Voz de Atitlán failed in June 1983, I turned my sights northward. The next morning in Panajachel I boarded a bus bound for Guatemala City but got off when the bus reached the main highway at the Los Encuentros intersection. A few minutes later I caught a ride on a ‘chicken bus’ headed north to my first destination of the day – Chichicastenango.

Chichicastenango is not a town that DXers would be familiar with but anyone who has seriously traveled around Guatemala has surely been there at least once. The outdoor markets held on Thursday and Sunday are among the largest in all of Central America. Guatemala has dozens of towns with long names ending in …tenango, meaning “place of.” Chichicastenango is the place of the chichicaste plant, in reference to a thorny bush that grows in the area. Most of the time people just call the town Chichi as it’s common to drop the tenango part from names when speaking.

For over five hundred years, Quiché Mayans from the surrounding area have been coming here twice weekly for the market held in the plaza in front of the Santo Tomás church. The steps to the church are always filled with flower vendors and men swinging containers of incense.

In the early days of the Spanish conquest, Catholic churches were often built on the sites already holy to the Indians. It was a clever way to get the newly forced converts to come to mass. In the case of Santo Tomás, however, they unknowingly picked a location of major spiritual importance in the Mayan religion. As a result many Mayan ceremonies involving nature and natural gods have survived in this area. Some became intertwined with Catholic practices while others were practiced in secret for centuries until it finally became safe to bring them out into the open again.

It was only June but I did my Christmas shopping that day and mailed everything home from Guatemala City a few days later. Guatemala’s post office was very reliable. Everything arrived safely in less than two weeks.

On to Nahualá

With my purchases packed in my now very heavy bag, I got on the next bus heading south and once again got out at Los Encuentros. This time I was looking for any bus heading west. I wasn’t going too far. A few minutes later a bus bound for Quetzaltenango stopped and I got on, telling the driver’s assistant that I wanted to get off at Nahualá.

I knew Nahualá was in the northwest corner of Sololá department a little way off the Pan-American Highway but I was surprised when about an hour later the bus stopped next to a cornfield in the middle of nowhere. I gave the driver’s assistant a puzzled look when he told me this was my stop. He explained that they could leave me off further down the highway where the road to Nahualá branched off. But it would be a long walk from there. From here, the walk was only about ten minutes. There was a well-worn path leading upwards through the cornfield, so I took him at his word. Continue reading →

Don Moore’s Photo Album:  Guatemala (Part Four) – To the Western Highlands

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Many thanks to SWLing Post contributor Don Moore–noted author, traveler, and DXer–for the latest installment of his Photo Album guest post series:

Lago de Atitlán con el pueblo de Panajachel de fondo (Photo by Larissa Gomez via Wikimedia Commons)

Don Moore’s Photo Album:
Guatemala (Part Four) – To the Western Highlands

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.

If anyone deserves recognition as the first tourists to visit western Guatemala it would be the American John Lloyd Stephens and Englishman Frederick Catherwood. In the 1820s and 1830s, Stephens traveled extensively in Europe and the Middle East and published several books about his journeys. On one of those trips he met Catherwood, an accomplished artist who traveled around the Mediterranean making drawings of archaeological sites.

The pair decided to visit Central America after coming across accounts of ruins in the region by the Honduran explorer Juan Galindo. Their trip received official support when U.S. President Martin van Buren appointed Stephens as a special ambassador to Central America.  The two men wandered the region for several months in 1839-40 visiting known Mayan sites and rediscovering many others. Stephens wrote two books about their travels, Incidents of Travel in Central America, Chiapas and Yucatán and Incidents of Travel in Yucatán while Catherwood published a book of his drawings, Views of Ancient Monuments in Central America, Chiapas and Yucatan. All three books became immediate bestsellers.

Frederick Catherwood’s 1840 lithograph of the central plaza in Quetzaltenango, Guatemala. 

The three books introduced the Mayan civilization to the rest of the world for the first time, bringing new visitors to the region. Some came to do serious research. Others were just curious adventurers. But the numbers that came were small as only a few wealthy people had the time and money to journey to exotic places.

Then the 1960s brought a new kind of tourist – the hippie. Many young people in Europe and North America saw flaws in the materialism of their own societies and became interested in experiencing non-western cultures. The Mayan region of Guatemala was a perfect destination. It was exotic, relatively easy to get to, and cheap.

That qualification of cheap was especially important. The hippies weren’t big spenders staying in classy hotels and eating at pricey restaurants. They found rooms in basic hospedajes and ate everyday local food cooked by indigenous women at roadside comedores. In many ways that was better. The money went directly to local working people instead of to the wealthy owners of fancy establishments.

The 1960s and 1970s became the era of hippie tourism in Guatemala. Most of visitors went to the area around Lake Atitlán, drawn by the lake’s natural beauty and the region’s year-round springlike climate. The epicenter of it all was the little lakeshore village of Panajachel.

Clouds of War

To anyone wandering the shoreline of Lake Atitlán in the mid-1970s, Guatemala seemed to be a peaceful place. In reality, a guerilla war was raging just a hundred kilometers away. In 1954, a CIA-sponsored coup overthrew Guatemala’s elected government and ushered in a long period of repressive military regimes. With the military showing no signs of relinquishing power, around 1965 a few leftist activists went into the remote mountains of northern Huehuetenango and Quiché departments with hopes of repeating Fidel Castro’s success in Cuba.

By all appearances, this should have been a minor footnote in Guatemala’s history. The would-be revolutionaries, after all, were city people without the skills to survive in the remote mountain highlands. But they recruited a few Mayans to their movement and then a few more until the Mayans dominated the guerilla movement. Yet the Mayans were never guided by ideology. The guerilla movement was a way of fighting back against centuries of repression, discrimination, and poverty. As one observer put it, “They’re Communists because of their stomachs, not because of their heads.”

As the guerilla movement grew the combat zone gradually moved south and into other regions. And the war became less a political revolution than an ethnic conflict. The military was dominated by Spanish-speaking ladinos who knew nothing of Mayan culture or the Mayan languages. All Mayans were seen as potential enemies, as was anyone who attempted to improve the Mayans’ lives. That lead to the formation of military-run death squads which targeted small town mayors, teachers, social workers, church leaders, and anyone else who dared to speak up. By 1981 over two hundred non-combatants were being kidnapped, killed, and dumped by the side of the road every month.

In 1976 the Lake Atitlán region had been seen as a peaceful place. A few years later the combination of active military death squads in the villages along the lake and a widening guerilla war elsewhere had put an end to that image. The era of hippie tourism in Guatemala was over. Continue reading →