Klaus’ magnetic loop antenna in “urban camouflage”

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Many thanks to SWLing Post reader, Klaus Boecker, who originally posted these images of his homebrew magnetic loop antenna on the Shortwave Radio Station Listening Facebook page.

I love the design of his mag loop which easily allows for a vertical or horizontal orientation.  Kaus has discovered, in certain cases, places the loop in a horizontal position dramatically decreases the noise level.

Having a little fun with what I call “urban camouflage” Klaus recently decorated his antennas to match the neighborhood flower boxes!

I’m sure more than one neighbor may be wondering what sort of creative floral arrangement Klaus has planted! 

Klaus notes that the vertical to the left of the loop is a a 2m / 70cm J-Antenna.

Thank you again, Kalus, for allowing me to share your images here on the SWLing Post.  I imagine your modest home-grown antenna farm works some serious DX on occasion!

Thanks again for sharing!

Readers: Have you camouflaged or decorated your antenna(s)?  Please share your photos!

Caversham Park featured on The Fifth Floor

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Many thanks to several SWLing Post readers who shared this excellent radio documentary on the BBC World Service website:

The Fifth Floor: Watching the World

Caversham Park is the home of BBC Monitoring which for over 70 years has been the eyes and ears of the BBC, watching, translating and analysing the world’s media and social media. David Amanor visits the former stately home to meet some of the journalists who’ve witnessed history unfold in their own countries, from the Cold War to the Syrian conflict.

Senior Editors Simona Kralova and Chris Greenway take us back in time to tell the story of how this grand house become a hub for information gathering, from the era of morse code and typewriters to satellites and social media.

Sifting information from misinformation has always been part of the service’s DNA. Ukrainian Vitaliy Shevchenko, Iraqi Mina al-Alami, and Source Manager and morse code man Al Bolton discuss the challenges of sourcing reliable information in the past, and today.

Watching distressing news from home is part of daily life for many journalists. Vesna Stancic from Bosnia, Syrian Lina Shaikhouni and Pinar Sevinclidir from Turkey discuss the personal impact of living the story.

There are also lighter moments to be enjoyed at Caversham, particularly for the musical, including Co-ordinating Editor Tom Mulligan, and Iranians Arash Ahmadi and Mahtab Nikpour, who do a good turn on the guitar, jaws harp and drums when not analysing Iranian politics and tales of chubby Chinese squirrels.

Click here to listen to the radio documentary on the BBC website.

Vatican Radio being absorbed into new Secretariat for Communications

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Many thanks to SWLing Post contributor Andrea Borgnino who shares this item from the National Catholic Register:

[O]n December 31, 2016, after more than 80 years of operation, Vatican Radio is being absorbed into the new Secretariat for Communications. The move is part of Pope Francis’ reorganization of Curial offices, and is intended to make better use of the Vatican’s limited financial resources. According to Catholic World News, broadcasting programs will continue—at least for the near-term future—but Vatican Radio will no longer have its own corporate identity.

Today, Vatican Radio employs a staff of 355 representing 59 nationalities, mostly lay people, who together produce more than 66 hours of daily programming (24,117 hours annually). There are currently 45 languages used on air, and 38 languages on the website. Programs are broadcast via short wave, medium wave, FM and satellite.

In recent years, Vatican Radio has experimented with digital transmission technologies (DRM, T-DAB, T-DMB). Their news reports and bulletins have been widely distributed through newsletters, podcasts, audio and video, paving the way to a Web TV. Vatican Radio and CTV began their own YouTube channel in 2010, operating in four languages, and on Twitter (6 channels).

Today with the reform of Vatican communications operations, Vatican Radio director Msgr. Dario Vigano has indicated that he plans to pare down short-wave radio operations. Other broadcasts will continue, but with an eye to controlling costs: Vatican Radio has been losing between €20 and €30 million ($21 – $31.5 million) annually.[…]

Click here to read the full article.

Chris’ 2016 Pirate Radio Year in Review

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Many thanks to Chris Smolinski who has, once again, crunched the numbers to give us a look at HF pirate radio activity in 2016.

[…]To gauge shortwave pirate radio activity in 2016, I analyzed the Shortwave Pirate loggings forum of the HF Underground (http://www.hfunderground.com). A computer script parsed the message thread titles, as well as the timestamps of the messages. This information was used to produce some statistics about the level of pirate radio activity. Of course, as Mark Twain has written: “There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.” Still, let’s see what we can learn.

There were 13,860 messages posted to 2,398 unique threads, compared to 13,944 messages posted to 2,183 unique threads in 2015. Activity levels are essentially flat, but still at historically high levels. Back in the 1990s, it was not uncommon for an entire month to go by with only a handful of pirate stations logged. If you want to know when the “golden age” of shortwave pirate radio was, I would say it is right now.[…]

Chris has posted his full analysis on RadioHobbyist.org.

As you can tell from Chris table at the top of this page, January is a very active month for HF pirates. If you’ve never chased pirate radio stations, check out our pirate radio primer. Pirate radio DXing is incredibly fun!

DSWCI archives now online

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Many thanks to SWLing Post contributor, Harald Kuhl, who shares the following message sent by Anker Petersen of the The Danish Shortwave Club International (DSWCI):

Dear DSWCI members.

In a few hours the DSWCI exists no longer.

But our webmaster Rolf Wernli has done a tremendous job between Christmas and New Year by changing our wellknown website to an electronic archive with good reading for all members !

If our former website appears, it is because it has been saved in your computer.

Please type www.dswci.org, press Enter and the new website should appear.

Enjoy and have a Happy New Year!

Best 73,

Anker

What a brilliant resource! Thank you, Harald, for passing this information along and many thanks to the fine folks at the DSWCI for sharing their archives with the radio community!

Click here to browse the archives at the DSWCI website.

The SWLing Post: 3,000 posts and counting!

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SWLingPost-DXFiend-Vintage-FrontA couple of weeks ago, I noticed that we had crossed a small milestone here on the SWLing Post: as of this post, there are now 3,067 (!!!) published posts in our archives.

I simply can’t believe we’ve surpassed 3,000 posts–especially knowing we only passed 2,000 posts September of 2015.

People can say what they will about our shortwave hobby’s future, but I’m here to tell you that  interest in is far from dead. Indeed, it is dynamic, alive and well!

This morning, I took a look at our web statistics via Google Analytics for the month of December 2016 (not including today).

It’s hard for me to believe we’re averaging about 6,790 daily pageviews!

And the secret sauce in surpassing 3,000 posts and healthy numbers? Our amazing contributors!

Thank you so very much!

As I’ve mentioned before, I had no aspirations for the SWLing Post to become a popular destination for shortwave and amateur radio enthusiasts; it was mainly a site where I could jot down things I found of interest to me and keep tabs on the radio and international broadcasting industry. I was simply making my bookmarks and thoughts public, perhaps a little in advance of the social media outlets that now exist for shortwave radio and related topics.

As we move into 2017, I’d like to thank you all for reading and contributing to the SWLing Post community!

Happy New Year, radio friends!

Looking at HF OTH RADAR

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Many thanks to SWLing Post contributor, Trevor, who shares this link to a blog post from Daniel Estevez describing the characteristics of HF OTH RADAR:

Most amateur operators are familiar with over-the-horizon radars in the HF bands. They sometimes pop up in the Amateur bands, rendering several tens of kilohertzs unusable. Inspired by Balint Seeber’s talk in GRCon16, I’ve decided to learn more about radars. Here I look at a typical OTH radar, presumably of Russian origin. It was recorded at my station around 20:00UTC on 8 December at a frequency around 6860kHz. This radar sometimes appears inside the 40m Amateur band as well.

Above this post you can see a waterfall plot of the radar signal. It’s the wide red signal. It is 15kHz wide and pretty strong, but severely affected by frequency-selective fading. Looking at the IQ recording in Audacity, it is clear that the radar uses pulses with a 50Hz repetition rate. This explains the characteristic sound of this radar when received with a conventional SSB radio. It sounds similar to AC hum (here in Europe, of course).

Continue reading on Daniel’s blog…