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Recently, I started posting Colin’s recordings on a schedule so that each recording is being published exactly 40 years from the original broadcast date. Check out the Shortwave Radio Audio Archive each day (or subscribe via iTunes) to listen to the recordings.
Below, I’ve embedded the recording from New Year’s Day 1978 where we learned that Yuri Romanenko and Georgi Grechko toasted the New Year with fruit juice (for obvious reasons, champagne was not allowed on the station!).
One of the joys of running the Shortwave Radio Audio Archive (SRAA) is that, over time, more and more people have become aware of it and submit recordings they’ve had in their private collections for decades.
Quite often, SRAA off-air recordings were originally made on reel-to-reel or cassette tapes which degrade with time. When SRAA contributors take the time to digitize these recordings, and share them via the SRAA, they put these collections in the hands of hundreds of archivists. We’re grateful each time we receive one of these shortwave or mediumwave/AM recordings.
You can imagine my excitement when I received the following message from one of our newest contributors, Colin Anderton:
“As a space flight nut, I have many recordings from the 1970s from Radio Moscow. They used to broadcast on the medium wave, and I used to record the news bulletins during some of the space flights. In particular, there was a period between December 1977 and March 1978 when Soviet cosmonauts first lived aboard the Salyut 6 space station. I recorded each days’ news reports on the flights, and also some additional items about them.”
Colin’s recordings are amazing. Here’s a sample from December 10, 1977:
We’ve started publishing Colin’s recordings on the archive at regular intervals.
Interestingly, I discovered that Colin also has a website dedicated to NASA highlight recordings from the space age. Several months ago, he spent a considerable amount of time making the public domain series more listenable–removing voice-actuated recorder noises, tape clicks, etc.
Colin has made his collection of re-engineered NASA recordings free to download on his website. If you download and enjoy his recordings, consider dropping him a donation. If you’re into spaceflight like I am, you’ll certainly enjoy this collection: