Shortwave listening and everything radio including reviews, broadcasting, ham radio, field operation, DXing, maker kits, travel, emergency gear, events, and more
For your listening pleasure: the Voice of Turkey English language service.
This program was recorded on June 7, 2015, starting around 2205 UTC on 9830 kHz. I started recording the program a few minutes after the top of the hour when a digital transmission on the same frequency finally went off air. I made this recording with the TitanSDR Pro hooked up to my horizontal delta loop antenna.
You will actually hear a few seconds of the digital broadcast at the very beginning of the recording. Click here to download the recording as an MP3, or simply listen via the embedded player below:
“Hello friends: Long time no see. I’ve finally posted the final 21 tracks from our 2013 season on Socotra Island: transmissions from Eritrea, China, Iran, and Tajikistan. Enjoy.”
For more information about Myke’s on-going project, ShortWaveMusic, check out his website. Great to see a new post from you, Myke!
Residents of Nigeria’s north-east have lived in isolation for two years. Terrorists frequently target phone lines in order to cut off communication. Traders avoid the region. Journalists live under threat.
But a new radio programme is now bringing important information to three states – Borno, Adamawa and Yobe – which have been under a state of emergency since May 2013 and turned by the army into a battleground against Islamist terrorist group Boko Haram.
[…]Most radio stations in north-eastern Nigeria are government-owned and broadcast in Hausa or English. For the tens of thousands of Kanuri-speaking people, there is no independent source of information, only state-sanctioned news and Boko Haram propaganda.
“Boko Haram controls people by inducing fear. Without alternatives, people are very much under the influence of Boko Haram’s propaganda,” says Wada. “Through Dandal Kura, we try to work against the propaganda by giving listeners objective information.”
Dandal Kura, which means “the big hall” in Kanuri, was initially set up in January as a three-month pilot project funded by United States development agency USAID. Since April, the programme is managed and run by Freedom Radio, a private broadcaster based in Kano.
[…]What is special about Dandal Kura is not only the language. The programme is transmitted by shortwave, on 9940 kHz, instead of the commonly used FM frequency band.
Shortwave is especially important in rural areas across Africa where FM waves hardly reach, but shortwave radios are easily available for an affordable price. In northern Nigeria they can be bought at any marketplace for about 600 Naira (3 dollars).
There is another key advantage: The shortwave transmission system is located hundreds of kilometres away – on the Atlantic island of Ascension – which means it cannot be destroyed by Boko Haram.
An FM transmitter, in contrast, would have to be installed on the ground in northern Nigeria.
“If we had set up FM transmitters, there would have been a high chance that Boko Haram would take them out,” says Smith, who has experience in setting up radio stations in African conflict zones, including Somalia and Central African Republic.
I was and still am a regular listener to the podcast but I was home on a Tuesday afternoon stranded by a snow storm and tuned to one of the frequencies used by the World Service for west and central Africa, which usually come in reasonably well in eastern North America. To my disappointment, another program was aired at the time “Click” was going out on the real-time online streamed service. I kept listening but “Click” didn’t appear on shortwave later that afternoon either. In general, the programs going out shortwave were not the ones being streamed over the Internet.
I made enquiries to Bill Thompson, the knowledgeable co-host of “Click” and to others about when “Click” aired on shortwave but came up empty.
Fast forward to a couple of weeks ago. I got an e-mail from Bill asking me if I’d heard back from the BBC about the airing of “Click” on shortwave as he’d passed on my request for information. Unfortunately, I hadn’t, but his e-mail reminded me of my effort and so I did some more digging.
I once again scoured the BBC website and eventually found the World Service FAQ page. And, on that page, we find the answer to the question “Where can I find a schedule and frequency for BBC World Service programmes?”with the online program schedule as well as the program schedules for radio transmissions to the various world regions, including local AM and FM radio, DAB radio, satellite radio, and, for some regions, shortwave radio.
I noticed that, according to these schedules, “Click” is broadcast by radio at various times on Tuesdays and Wednesdays, depending on the target region, including some broadcasts by shortwave.
So, on Tuesday afternoon this week, I took one of my portable shortwave receivers (a Tecsun PL-880) to work and operated it from the back of my SUV in the parking lock of my building with a short wire antenna fed out through the rear window and recorded the audio.
Low and behold, I heard “Click” at 19:32 UTC on 15400 kHz from one of the transmitters on Ascension Island. Reception was not bad given the fact that the signal is beamed in the opposite direction to us and there’s a fair degree of radio-frequency interference (RFI) from various electrical and electronic devices in and around my building. The signal would have been much stronger in the African target zone. A short audio clip of the start of the program is [below] (lasts one minute).
I’m sure I could find a quieter location RFI-wise like one of the university’s playing fields and might try that next week.
After confirming that “Click” is indeed still on shortwave, I decided to make a chart of all the “Click” broadcast times including those via shortwave as the “Click” website only gives the times of the online streamed broadcasts. [Click here to download a] PDF-version of the chart. A “bullet” indicates a broadcast of “Click” by any transmission method for each target region. If, in addition to other types of radio broadcast, shortwave is used, then the frequencies (in kHz) and transmitter locations are listed. I think all the information is correct but I’m happy to receive corrections. The schedule should be good until October and I’ll try to produce an updated version after that.
It is good to see that the BBC technology program is still available via shortwave – a still-useful technology in many parts of the world. And, although I’ll still listen to “Click” via the podcast, it’s nice to know that I can still catch it on a Tuesday afternoon with a shortwave receiver.”
I’ve heard Click a number of times via the BBC World Service on shortwave, but never noted the times and frequencies. Thank you so much for compiling this info for us, Richard, and happy listening!
Readers: Note that if Click’s shortwave schedule doesn’t work for you, you can always subscribe to Click’s podcast, or listen online.
Note: This post was updated December 3, 2015 with current broadcast schedule.
For your listening pleasure: 1.5 hours of Radio Romania International, starting with RRI’s English language service.
This recording was made on May 25, 2015 starting around 00:00 UTC on 9730 kHz. I used the TitanSDR Pro software defined receiver and skyloop external antenna to make this off-air recording. In truth, this is one of the few remaining broadcasters that targets eastern North America; even a simple portable radio would have sufficed.
Some of you may recall this recent post about listening to the BBC World Service program, Click, via shortwave radio.
