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The Vietnam Wars – Connecting the Pieces Through Radio: A Personal Journey Part 2

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The Vietnam Wars

Connecting the Pieces Through Radio: A Personal Journey

by Don Moore

Part Two

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.

Except where noted otherwise, all photos are from the Vietnamese Military History Museum in Hanoi.

At the end of Part One I wrote how Vietnam became a single united independent country on 2 September 1945. That may have surprised you. It did me. But before we look at what happened, let’s consider what could have happened.

Ho Chi Minh was a nationalist with a desire to create a strong, independent Vietnam. Vietnam may have declared independence in 1945, but it needed help from a stronger nation to rebuild and to tell the French to keep out. Ho appealed to both the Soviet Union and the United States to support his new nation.

Ho Chi Minh had embraced Communism after living and studying in the Soviet Union for a few years in the 1920s. So, could modeling the Vietnamese Declaration of Independence after the US one have been part of a conspiracy with Moscow and a trick to cover Ho’s true intentions? Some claim so, but reality tells a different story. In 1945, the Soviet Union was devastated by World War II. Stalin’s focus was on rebuilding and on bringing the future satellites in Eastern Europe under his wing. He did not have the means, the interest, or the need to support an ally in a distant corner of Asia. Not only did Moscow ignore Ho’s requests, but the Soviet Union didn’t even recognize his government until 1950.

As a young man, Ho had also lived and traveled in the United States. He admired the country and its revolutionary heritage. He had good relationships with his OSS advisors. He believed that the American people were generally opposed to colonialism. Washington had already announced that the Philippines would become independent on 4 July 1946 and President Franklin Roosevelt was known to have opposed continued French rule of Vietnam. Ho Chi Minh had strong hopes that the United States would use its diplomatic might to tell the French to stay out. If that had happened, Vietnam would have been drawn closer to the United States. Then what? It would probably have developed into an Asian version of Tito’s Yugoslavia – a non-aligned country with an economy blending Communism and capitalism.

The French War

History took a different path. At the July 1945 Potsdam conference, Allied leaders had agreed that French troops would occupy and disarm the Japanese south of the 16th parallel and that Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist Chinese would do so in the north. By the end of August, the Vietnamese had already taken care of that for themselves. But the plans didn’t change. On 13 September 1945, a joint French and British force landed on the coast near Saigon and began to take control of population centers in the south. Meanwhile, two hundred thousand Nationalist Chinese troops crossed the border from the north, occupying all the major towns and cities, including Hanoi. Clearly outnumbered, the Viet Minh retreated to the countryside.

What happened over the next nine years is a long, complex story. It was brutal, and both sides committed atrocities. The British and Nationalist Chinese would soon be replaced by additional French troops. Unlike his predecessor, President Truman of the United States fully backed renewed French control of the region. The Viet Minh fought back. For the first few years, they were on their own and desperate for any help. They finally got that after Mao Tse-tung’s victory over the Nationalist Chinese in 1949. But what the Chinese supplied never matched the quality and quantity of what the French forces received from the United States. The Viet Minh countered that advantage through strong support of the populace, a well-developed intelligence-gathering network, and effective use of communication.

On 9 October 1947, Vietnamese forces shot down a French plane carrying Colonel Lambe, the Deputy Chief of Staff for French forces. This radio unit came from that plane. The make is not identified, but it appears to be from the American-made ARC-5 series.

This transceiver was captured by Vietnamese soldiers in 1950. The label on the bottom identifies it as a US Army Signal Corps RT-196/PRC-6

The American-made RPC-10 transceiver was used by Vietnamese forces in 1954 to coordinate the attack on the French position at Doc Lap in the early phases of the Dien Bien Phu campaign.

The Vietnamese forces also operated clandestine radio stations to broadcast their views to the general populace. The Voice of South Vietnam operated in the south with transmitting equipment built by Vietnamese engineers. It’s probable that the transmitters were still being used by clandestine stations into the 1960s and 1970s. (Photos from the Vietnam National Museum of History).

Another SSTR-1 set spy radio. This one was confiscated from French spies in Hanoi after the peace agreement had been signed. (Photo from the Vietnam National Museum of History).

By 1954, the war had turned into a sideshow of the Cold War. The Viet Minh were now firmly in the Communist camp, that being where their support came from. France had firm backing from the United States in the name of stopping Communism. Neither side was capable of decisively defeating the other. But the people of France were tiring of the endless war. The turning point came in May with the surrender of 11,000 French troops at Dien Bien Phu. The French people no longer had the stomach to continue the war. However, France still controlled much of the south. In 1949, they had created the quasi-independent State of Vietnam with its capital in the southern city of Saigon (now Ho Chi Minh City). The 1954 Geneva Conference resulted in Vietnam being divided into two countries at the 17th parallel. A few months later, the State of Vietnam became the fully independent Republic of Vietnam. France was done in Southeast Asia.

(However, the French government hadn’t learned a thing from their experiences in Vietnam. Before 1954 was over a rebellion broke out in Algeria. That led to another brutal colonial war until Algeria was granted its independence in 1962.)

The Vietnam era produced dozens of recognizable, memorable images. In my memories, the one that stands out above all others is of a Buddhist monk sitting calmly as he is engulfed in flames. What would cause a peaceful monk to pour gasoline over himself and then light a match? And it wasn’t just one person. At least seventy-six Buddhist monks and nuns are known to have self-immolated in the early 1960s.

It’s easy to think in black and white. The North was Communist, and that made them the bad guys. But what if the other side weren’t the good guys, either? The government of South Vietnam was never popular with its own citizens. The people who France put in charge of the south were, unsurprisingly, sympathetic to French interests. Many had collaborated with the Vichy French during World War Two. Some, including President Ngo Dinh Diem, had collaborated with the Japanese occupation forces. But the biggest reason for the government’s unpopularity was religion. The vast majority of the South Vietnamese people were Buddhists, but the government was almost wholly run by Roman Catholics. They represented only ten percent of the population. The corrupt Diem government gave preference to Catholics in every way and systematically discriminated against Buddhists. That led to growing Buddhist opposition, which in turn led to the government further oppressing Buddhists. By the early 1960s, the Saigon government had even begun outlawing public displays of some Buddhist religious symbols. And that is what led to the self-immolations that drew international attention to what was happening in South Vietnam.

The American War

The third section of the Vietnamese Military History Museum is about the American War. We call it the Vietnam War in the United States. Military historians refer to it as the Second Indochina War, the first being the one with France just before. Once again, what happened is a long, complex story. Some of you reading this were there. Others, like me, have been around long enough to remember those times.

In 1960, opposition to the Diem government led to the formation of the Viet Cong guerrilla movement. Hanoi would do all it could to fan the flames of the rebellion, but it was the policies of the Saigon government that provided the fuel to start the fire. If Saigon had had a Buddhist government, maybe the war would never have happened, and there would still be two Vietnams, as there are two Koreas.

What followed was a gradual escalation on both sides. Hanoi began by providing the Viet Cong with supplies and military advice. The United States did the same for the Saigon government. When one side increased its involvement, the other did the same. Within a few years, American forces were fighting alongside the South Vietnamese army, and the North Vietnamese Army was fighting alongside the Viet Cong. (Although they worked hand-in-hand, the VC and the NVA were not the same. The Viet Cong were an insurgent guerrilla force. The NVA was an army and fought in organized military units.)

This radio transmitter was used by the 84th Artillery Regiment of the North Vietnamese Army in Quang Tri province during the January 1968 Tet Offensive. The campaign was a surprise attack on over one hundred towns and cities in South Vietnam during the Lunar New Year celebrations. It was one of the bloodiest periods of the war.

According to the display, Company Five of the 205th Regiment of the North Vietnamese Army used this set to send 213,567 messages between 1965 and 1968. I doubt anyone really kept an exact count, but the radio clearly had a lot of use.

This unit was used by the First Battalion of the Tenth Division of the North Vietnamese Army from 1968 to 1975.

The Finale

It seems long ago, but there once was a time when my daily news arrived in the form of a printed newspaper and not on the screen of a cellphone. The number of newspapers that I’ve held in my hands must number over ten thousand. But there is only one headline that I remember. It was late October 1972. I went to the back door to get the morning paper, the Altoona Mirror, and opened it up. Blazoned across the top were the words “PEACE IS AT HAND!” I can still picture it clearly over fifty years later.

According to Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, the peace talks were on the verge of producing a cease-fire. The 1972 US presidential election was just days away, and the war was the most important issue. No one doubted that Richard Nixon would win reelection, but being able to declare he had ended the war would add to his margin of victory. But Kissinger had been ignoring the South Vietnamese government, and the next day they rejected the treaty on numerous points. That caused the North Vietnamese to walk out.

Both the North and the South were willing to continue the war, but their major backers wanted it over. Nixon had made historic visits to China and the Soviet Union earlier in the year, and all three were looking for improved relations. Neither China nor the Soviet Union supported the North walking out, other than making obligatory diplomatic statements.

In order to bring the North back to the negotiating table, the US launched Operation Linebacker II, the most controversial bombing campaign of the entire war. From the 18th to the 29th of December 1972, over two hundred B-52 bombers dropped over twenty thousand tons of bombs on Hanoi and Haiphong. Thousands were killed, and huge swaths of both cities were leveled, destroying everything from military installations to children’s hospitals. Continue reading →

The Vietnam Wars – Connecting the Pieces Through Radio: A Personal Journey Part 1

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The Vietnam Wars

Connecting the Pieces Through Radio: A Personal Journey

by Don Moore

Part One

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.

Except where noted otherwise, all photos are from the Vietnamese Military History Museum in Hanoi.

Last winter, I spent several months traveling through Southeast Asia. When I arrived in Hanoi I had the usual plans on my agenda. I wanted to learn more about Vietnamese culture and history. I wanted to sample authentic local food. I wanted to spend a few days outside the city to see some natural sites. And there was one more thing. I wanted to understand the Vietnam War better.

Understanding history is always at the top of my agenda when I travel. But this time was different, as it was also very personal. I was too young to have been in the Vietnam War, but the war was a constant presence throughout my childhood. It was on the front page of the daily newspaper. It was in the radio news reports. And it was on television. The Vietnam War is often called the first television war, as television brought the reality of the war directly into our living rooms. My family regularly watched the CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite and his calm, controlled manner in reporting the news. I remember videos of soldiers hacking their way through dense jungle foliage. I remember bombed-out buildings, helicopters crashing, and wounded soldiers being carried in stretchers. It wasn’t like the war stories in my history books.

Early in the war, around 1966, one of my mother’s cousins was drafted and sent to Vietnam. A few months later, he suffered a severe head wound and was sent home. I was nine years old, and I remember him watching me play with my toy soldiers in a corner at a family gathering. What did he think of my childish innocence? That was the last time I saw him. He left the area and lived a disturbed, difficult life until passing away several years ago.

Once a week, Walter Cronkite would report the official casualty counts from the Pentagon. Whatever the number of American dead was, our South Vietnamese allies generally had about twice that number. And our Viet Cong and North Vietnamese enemies? They always suffered about ten dead for every American killed. The pattern was very consistent, and the numbers said it all. We were winning. So why did the nightly news also carry reports of massive anti-war protests around the country?

The war and the protests against it continued. In 1970, I was in junior high school and still several years too young for the draft. That didn’t stop my mother from worrying that the war would last long enough to drag me into it. It certainly seemed possible. My parents and many of the adults around me didn’t think highly of the hippies doing the protesting. But those same adults were also questioning whether the war was worth the cost. I didn’t understand that. Shouldn’t we want to win the war, whatever the cost?

American history was my passion when I was a child. I read a steady stream of history books that always put my country and its great leaders in the best possible light. My heroes were people like Davy Crockett and Daniel Boone, perfect and admirable in every way. And John Wayne. I loved his western and World War II movies. I was becoming a flag-waving my-country-does-no-wrong super patriot. I believed that the Vietnam War was a good thing and that we were on the side of right. I saw the war as just one more chapter in our glorious history. My parents did not teach me to think that way. That wasn’t who they were. I had gotten that way by taking the books I chose to read and the movies I chose to watch too seriously.

In 1971, I discovered shortwave radio. I wasn’t surprised by the anti-American sentiment on stations like Radio Moscow and Radio Havana. They were on the side of evil. And some of the language they used was humorous. Imperialist running dogs? Really? What puzzled me was what I heard on stations like the BBC, Radio Canada, Radio Netherlands, and Deutsche Welle. They were good guys on our side. Why were our friends so strongly questioning what we were doing in Vietnam? Something didn’t add up.

Mark Twain famously said that travel is fatal to prejudice and narrow-minded thinking. With me, it started with shortwave radio. I expanded my reading list to include history and recent events from the rest of the world, especially Latin America. In the school library, I began critically reading the news reports from Time, Newsweek, and The New York Times. I began to understand that reality was different from what I had come to believe. Until 1971, the world was black and white. Good versus evil. Bad guys versus good guys. That’s how a child thinks. In 1971, I began to learn that reality has many shades of gray. Understanding the Vietnam War was a key part of that change.

The Vietnam War ended just before I graduated from high school in 1975. Soon other events and wars around the world filled the daily news cycle. The Vietnam War faded from memory. Then about twenty years ago, I came across bound copies of old Time and Newsweek magazines while browsing at the Penn State University library. I pulled out a volume from the late 1960s and began leafing through it. I spent the rest of the afternoon reading about the war as it happened. That rekindled my interest in the era that I grew up in, and since then I’ve read several books on the Vietnam War. But I always knew I was missing part of the story. That is what I was searching for when I landed at Hanoi airport.

Two Sculptures

One of the first places I sought out was the John McCain memorial. A young Navy pilot when his plane was shot down over Hanoi in late 1967, McCain spent over five years in Hanoi’s notorious Hoa Lo Prison. Later, he became a congressman and a senator, and in 2008 he ran for president against Barack Obama. McCain wasn’t perfect; heroes never are. But he was a highly principled, independently thinking man, and even those who disagreed with his politics respected him for that.

A river runs through Hanoi, and there are several small lakes within the central city. American forces launched over a million air sorties against the north during the war. When their planes were hit by enemy fire, American pilots attempted to direct their damaged aircraft towards water for a better chance of survival versus crashing into buildings. That’s what injured John McCain did. This picture from the Ho Loa Prison Museum shows Vietnamese civilians who went into the lake and pulled McCain from the water before he could drown. They did that for dozens of downed American pilots.

As I stood there looking over the now peaceful lake, I tried to picture the scene as a Vietnamese civilian at the time. Enemy planes are flying overhead, dropping bombs to destroy my city and kill my people. Shells are exploding above me as my side tries to shoot them down. And in front of me in the lake is an injured enemy pilot about to drown as his nearby plane sinks below the surface. Amidst all the chaos, would I risk my life by going into the lake to save his? I know that a part of me would want to let the $%#* drown. Would I save him? I don’t know the answer.

A few days later, I visited the Vietnam Military History Museum, the best place in Hanoi to learn about the war. This statue of Ho Chi Minh, flanked by a man with binoculars and another man with a field telephone, is more meaningful than you might think just by giving it a casual glance.

Ho Chi Minh understood that two essential components of winning a war are intelligence gathering and good communication. And that viewpoint carries over into the museum displays. The museum has all kinds of fighting equipment on display. But along the way, there is also an extensive collection of radio equipment with good explanations of how and when it was used. Photos of the radios in the museum would, by themselves, make for an interesting pictorial. But they are meaningless without understanding the context they belong to.

Two Thousand Years of Warfare

The use of radio communication in warfare has only been around for a little over a century, and this story begins long before that. That’s why the title refers to “The Vietnam Wars.” The Vietnam Military History Museum has three sections, and the first is totally focused on China. The story told in that room is long and complex. Two thousand years ago, Vietnam was ruled by China. Then in the year 40 CE, two sisters, Trung Trac and Trung Nhi, began a rebellion. They raised an army of 80,000 men and women (including numerous women generals) and successfully pushed the Chinese out of their region.

Three years later, a much larger Chinese army put the rebellion down and executed the sisters. But it didn’t end there. The Vietnamese people continued to rebel and eventually pushed the Chinese out. In the following centuries, China continued to attempt to rule Vietnam. Sometimes they succeeded, but the Vietnamese never accepted Chinese rule. Men and women, together, would rise up to fight the invaders. The lesson in this room is that the Vietnamese people have been fighting to keep foreign powers from controlling their country for over two thousand years. It’s a sobering thought.

By the 19th century, China was in decline but Southeast Asia was now a target for European colonialism. So the subject of the second section of the museum is France. In 1858, French troops landed in Da Nang, along the central coast. That initial attack was repulsed but the French regrouped and a year later attacked Saigon, in the south of the country. This time they established a foothold and the three years of war that followed resulted in France gaining control of three southern provinces. The next few decades were a series of wars followed by treaties intended to be broken until eventually France gained control of all of Vietnam as well as neighboring Cambodia and Laos.

Taking control of Vietnam wasn’t easy and neither was ruling it afterwards. The Vietnamese never stopped resisting French rule and major rebellions broke out every few years. But the best place to understand the scope of Vietnamese resistance is at the Hoa Lo Prison Museum, where John McCain and other American POWs were kept. The prison had seven cellblocks when the French colonial government opened it in 1901. Two cellblocks were for criminals and five for political prisoners. That’s an incredible ratio. And as bad as American POWs had it later, the Vietnamese political prisoners of the early 1900s had it far worse, as shown in this display in one of the actual rooms at the prison museum.

The Japanese Occupation

In June 1940, the French government surrendered to Hitler’s Germany, resulting in the formation of the puppet Fascist Vichy French government in the south of France. Most of France’s overseas territories, including French Indochina, came under control of the Vichy government. But France was a long way from Indochina, and their control was tenuous. In June 1940, Japan invaded northern Vietnam. Initially, there was some scattered fighting, but the two sides, both allies of Hitler’s regime, soon came to an understanding. The Vichy French would continue to nominally rule French Indochina, but the Japanese were really in charge.

Needless to say, the Vietnamese people did not acquiesce. And as bad as treatment from the French had been, the Japanese were worse. Once again the Vietnamese rebelled and gradually all the resistance forces became united under the leadership of the Viet Minh organization and its founder, Ho Chi Minh. For most of the war they were on their own, but by early 1945 the United States began air-dropping supplies and advisors from the OSS (later CIA).

On 15 August 1945, Japan announced its unconditional surrender, which would lead to the official surrender ceremony a few weeks later. It was understood that Japanese troops would remain in control of the various territories they had occupied until the European colonial powers could send in forces to replace them. The Viet Minh, however, did not agree. The very next day, Ho Chi Minh convened a meeting of the Viet Minh leadership. Also present were several American advisors.

The result of the meeting was what became known as the General Uprising. American-made radio equipment made it very easy to coordinate plans throughout the country. Over the next two weeks, Viet Minh forces marched in and took over cities and towns all across Vietnam. In one or two places the Japanese soldiers briefly resisted but mostly it was a peaceful takeover. The Japanese soldiers understood that the war was over and saw no reason to fight and die for French rule in Vietnam.

The Wireless Set No. 19 was developed in 1940 by the British War Office and saw heavy use in the North African desert campaigns. The Mark II models were primarily made by several manufacturers in Canada in 1942. Most of those had Cyrillic labels and were sent to the Soviet Union. A small number of Mark II models, including this one, were made in Chicago by the Zenith Corporation.

There were no markings to indicate who made this next set, which appears to be homebrew.

The next piece is truly a spy radio. The first photo shows the SSR-1-G unit, which was the receiver in the SSTR-1 set. The second photo, from Wikimedia Commons, shows the complete set.

The name stands for Strategic Services Transmitter Receiver Number 1. Developed by the U.S. Office of Strategic Services in 1942, it consisted of a receiver, a transmitter, a power supply, and a box of spare parts. It could run off either AC or DC, and everything could fit in a small suitcase. The versatility and portability of the set made it perfect for use by resistance fighters in Europe during World War II and later by spies in the early days of the Cold War. And some units found their way to the Vietnam theater.

A New Beginning

On 30 August 1945, the Viet Minh under Ho Chi Minh controlled all of Vietnam. Over the next few days, the Viet Minh leadership, with assistance from their American advisors, drafted a Declaration of Independence. It was heavily modeled on the American Declaration of Independence and even directly lifted some phrases in a few places. On 2 September 1945, Ho Chi Minh read the declaration in public and over the radio airwaves. Vietnam was now a single united independent country, totally free of foreign rule.

Next: Part Two

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The Vietnamese Marine Radio Network

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By Don Moore

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.

Fair warning … This article comes with a quiz at the end!

If asked to make a list of major maritime nations, I never would have put Vietnam on the list. It’s not particularly big, and while it does have a long coastline, there are a couple dozen countries with longer ones. But I recently found out that in terms of tonnage, Vietnam has the fourth-largest fishing industry in the world – after China, Indonesia, and India. And that explains something else: why Vietnam has an extensive network of coastal radio stations far greater than would be expected for the country’s modest coastline.

Vietnam’s marine radio network, however, is not easy to hear in Eastern North America. So when I planned my trip to Southeast Asia last winter, my top DX goal was to log all the stations in the network. From November to February, I made SDR spectrum recordings at seven different locations. I did a little DXing of the files while traveling, but it wasn’t until this summer that I had the time to seriously go through them. The spectrum analyzer tool in SDR-Console allowed me to easily find what I was looking for in my many hours of recorded files. Google Translate gave me the means to understand what I was finding. The combination made it possible to DX this network in a way I never would have imagined a few years ago. It’s not just that I made loggings of all the stations. I also gained a deeper understanding of everything the network is doing. It turns out there’s a lot to it, so let’s take a look.

The Duyen Hai Network

The parent organization of this radio network is Vishipel, a Vietnamese government-owned company that provides various services to the fishing and maritime industry. One of Vishipel’s most important responsibilities is the coastal radio station network, known in Vietnamese as the Duyen Hai system. The name is the Vietnamese word for coastal.

Duyen Hai operates twenty-nine coastal radio stations strung along Vietnam’s coast from north to south. Some sources give the number of stations as thirty or thirty-three, but those figures include locations used for satellite monitoring and other support activities. Via California DXer Ron Howard, we have this map showing the network stations.

Ron also found this three-page Vietnamese-language PDF file listing the various services and schedules. In the rest of this article I’ll be combining information from the Duyen Hai website, the PDF, the DX Info Centre website https://www.dxinfocentre.com, and my own extensive monitoring.

But first … about spelling. Vietnamese is written using the Latin alphabet but with an extensive system of diacritic marks. It’s far beyond what languages like French and German use and doesn’t always play well with English language websites. For that reason, I’ve omitted the diacritic marks from all the place names and Vietnamese phrases here. But a complete list of everything with the proper Vietnamese spelling can be found in this text file and/or PDF. If you want to put any of these words and phrases into a text-to-speech engine or a translation application, you will have to copy from the text file to get the correct result.

All twenty-nine Duyen Hai stations broadcast scheduled marine weather forecasts twice a day on VHF. Seventeen of those also broadcast the forecasts on 7906 kHz shortwave. Here is a list of those along with the UTC times of the reports on 7906 kHz. Note that three stations also use 8294 kHz. The coordinates are to their antenna sites, per the DX Info Centre website. I’ve reformatted them so they can be pasted directly into Google Maps.

  • 2220 & 1020 Kien Giang 9°59’36.0″N 105°05’50.0″E
  • 2235 & 1035 Quy Nhon 13°46’40.0″N 109°14’21.0″E
  • 2250 & 1050 Hue 16°33’02.0″N 107°38’28.0″E
  • 2305 & 1105 Hong Gai 20°57’21.0″N 107°04’07.0″E
  • 2320 & 1120 Phu Yen 13°06’22.0″N 109°18’41.0″E
  • 2335 & 1135 Ca Mau 9°11’23.0″N 105°08’01.0″E
  • 2350 & 1150 Nha Trang 12°13’19.0″N 109°10’50.0″E
  • 0005 & 1205 Hai Phong * 20°51’01.0″N 106°44’01.0″E
  • 0020 & 1220 Vung Tau 10°23’41.0″N 107°08’44.0″E
  • 0035 & 1235 Da Nang * 16°03’17.0″N 108°09’28.0″E
  • 0050 & 1250 Ben Thuy 18°48’50.0″N 105°43’07.0″E
  • 0105 & 1305 Ho Chi Minh * 10°23’41.0″N 107°08’42.0″E
  • 0120 & 1320 Mong Cai 21°31’33.0″N 107°57’59.0″E
  • 0135 & 1335 Phan Rang 11°33’51.0″N 109°00’42.0″E
  • 0150 & 1350 Phan Thiet 10°55’04.0″N 108°06’22.0″E
  • 0205 & 1405 Can Tho 10°04’18.0″N 105°45’32.0″E
  • 0405 & 1605 Thanh Hoa 19°20’58.0″N 105°47’36.0″E

* Daily weather also on 8294 kHz

Using Google satellite view and Google Street View, I was able to spot all the antennas except for Hong Gai, where there is no sign of any radio activity. There is a high-voltage power line there, so it doesn’t seem like the best place for an antenna tower. Perhaps the coordinates are wrong, or maybe Hong Gai shares the antenna farm at nearby Hai Phong.

The antenna farms vary greatly in size, from large fields with multiple towers to sites with just a single tower in the back of the building or even on the roof. In terms of how the stations are used and the size of their antenna farms, five are clearly more important than the others: Hai Phong, Da Nang, Nha Trang, Ho Chi Minh, and Vung Tau. The latter two share the same antenna farm in Vung Tau, which is located on the coast at the mouth of the Sai Gon River. The port of Ho Chi Minh, Vietnam’s largest, is forty kilometers upriver.

At Nha Trang I see at least eight towers in this satellite view.

Da Nang has a similar large site. There is a good view of it from the back on Google Street View.

Ca Mau is a mid-sized installation with four towers. Click here to view.

Phu Yen also has four towers. Click here to view.

Phan Rang has a single tall tower behind the station building but zooming in shows several wire antennas. Click here to view.

Quy Nhon has a single tower on top of the building. Click here to view.

The Daily Weather Reports

On a day-to-day basis, the marine weather forecasts are the primary job of the Duyen Hai stations. As noted above, seventeen stations broadcast twice-daily forecasts on 7906 kHz, with three also using 8294 kHz. Sixteen stations are scheduled every fifteen minutes over a four-hour block in the local morning (starting at 2220 UTC) and the local evening (starting at 1020 UTC). The broadcasts begin at five, twenty, thirty-five, and fifty minutes after the hour. A seventeenth station, Thanh Hoa, is outside the regular pattern.

During inclement weather, stations may broadcast additional forecasts, but always at the same time slot in the four-hour cycle. For example, Vung Tau might also broadcast at 0420, 0820, 1620, and 2020 in addition to the regular broadcasts at 0020 and 1220 UTC.

Weather reports usually take around five minutes and never more than ten. And they are always read live by a woman announcer, never a man. The voices on the different stations sound similar, so I suspect they look for a particular type of voice when hiring. Usually, when a station comes on the air, the announcer starts immediately, but sometimes a long audio tone is played first. I haven’t figured out if there is a reason for that.

The announcer starts by repeating a short phrase about the state of the weather three times and then gives a station identification announcement three times before continuing with the detailed forecast. Knowing the pattern, it’s easy to pick out the station name if the signal is clear enough. Here’s an example from Ca Mau Radio, recorded at 1135 UTC on 15 February 2026 near Butterworth, Malaysia.

The announcer starts by saying “Canh bao khong khi lanh” three times.

This means “cold air warning.” Next, she says the identification, “Dai thong tin tren hai Ca Mau goi cac dai tau.” That translates as “Ca Mau Maritime Radio calling all ship stations.” The Duyen Hai stations all use the same wording for the identification, but the initial statement about the weather varies. Under normal conditions, the broadcasts start with the phrase “Du bao thoi tiet bien,” which simply means “marine weather forecast.” The word bien means sea. Other initial phrases describe various hazardous conditions.

Canh bao thoi tiet nguy hiem tren bien – Warning of dangerous marine weather.

Canh bao bao. – Storm warning. (I heard this one a lot.)

Canh bao ve cac nguy hiem. – Hazard warning.

Canh bao gio mua. – Monsoon warning.

Khoang vao ap suat khi. Changing air pressure.

Du bao thoi tiet buon. – A gloomy weather forecast.

That last one is a good example of how Google Translate self-corrects as it works. The translation first said, “The weather forecast is sad,” before correcting to the more idiomatic “A gloomy weather forecast.”

Urgent Information

The frequency of 7903 kHz is reserved for announcements about incidents that require assistance from other nearby vessels. Examples include looking for a man who fell overboard, looking for an overdue vessel that hadn’t been heard from for a few days, and helping a stranded vessel that had broken down.

These transmissions usually last under two minutes. They always start with the phrase “khan cap”, meaning “Urgent!” repeated three times, followed by three station identification announcements, and then the emergency message. Here is a recording of an announcement from Phan Rang Radio on 7903 kHz at 1320 UTC on 14 February 2026, as recorded near Butterworth, Malaysia. The message is about a missing fishing vessel and gives the coordinates where it was last seen.

Any station in the system can broadcast an urgent message. I logged ten different stations on 7903 kHz, and most of them on multiple occasions. Urgent messages air as needed but they do stick to the same 15-minute spacing of broadcasting at five, twenty, thirty-five, and fifty minutes after the hour. When there is an urgent message, the station airing it will usually repeat the message hourly for several hours. As with the weather forecasts, the announcers are always women.

The Marine Operators

Marine operators are radio stations that serve as intermediaries for ships at sea to make radio-telephone calls to land-based phone numbers. The ship contacts the station via radio. Then the radio station dials the phone number provided to connect the two parties. Sometimes the land-based party calls the station first, and then the station tries to reach the ship on the radio. Before satellite communications came along, these were the primary method for making phone calls to/from ships at sea. And they weren’t just for ships in the middle of the ocean. The United States had an extensive network of marine operators on the Great Lakes and the inland rivers. I have old QSLs from marine operators in places like Cincinnati and Memphis.

It turns out that Vietnam’s fishing vessels are not equipped for satellite communications, as the Duyen Hai stations also serve as marine operators. Below is a list of frequencies used, according to the PDF file mentioned above. Note that this includes two additional stations that do not broadcast the marine weather on shortwave: Cam Ranh and Cua Ong. Broadcasts typically begin with the ship calling the land-based station and giving the operator (always a woman) the phone number to be called. Sometimes the station broadcasts the dialing noises and then the initial connection as the operator tells the land-based party who is calling. Other times they play instrumental hold music until the connection is ready.

Most of the marine operator traffic goes through just a few main frequencies. I frequently logged 8104 Ho Chi Minh, 8125 Da Nang, and 8146 Nha Trang and had a couple of logs of 7960 Thanh Hoa and 7948 Cam Ranh. Vietnamese marine operator traffic was also heard on the unlisted frequencies of 7918, 7993, and 8687 kHz. Normally, there is no identification at the beginning of these transmissions, as the calling vessels would know which station they are calling based on the frequency. They just come on and say, “Hey, operator!” and wait for the operator to answer. However, in one instance, I heard a vessel specifically call Cam Ranh Radio on their frequency of 7948 kHz. The two stations connected and went on to make a phone call. Here’s a recording of the initial contact, made on 18 November 2025 at 1248 UTC in Taal, Philippines.

Vietnam Marine Operator Frequencies

  • 6224 Kien Giang
  • 6227 Can Tho
  • 6230 Vung Tau
  • 7912 Phan Rang
  • 7915 Ben Thuy
  • 7927 Quy Nhon
  • 7948 Cam Ranh
  • 7960 Thanh Hoa
  • 7966 Phu Yen
  • 7969 Ca Mau
  • 7975 Nha Trang
  • 7981 Can Tho
  • 7987 Ca Mau
  • 7990 Phan Thiet
  • 8101 Hai Phong
  • 8104 Ho Chi Minh
  • 8125 Da Nang
  • 8143 Cua Ong
  • 8146 Nha Trang
  • 8149 Hue
  • 8155 Mong Cai
  • 8158 Kien Giang
  • 8167 Nha Trang
  • 8173 Hong Gai
  • 12359 Hai Phong
  • 12359 Ho Chi Minh
  • 12365 Da Nang

Other Duyen Hai Services and Frequencies

Last winter, I wrote about finding the Duyen Hai Information Station broadcasts. As explained in my recent article on Google Translate, the language is Vietnamese, not Thai as initially reported. Originating at the Hai Phong station, these are regular twenty-minute daily programs of information of interest to the fishing industry. They are scheduled at 0005 and 1205 UTC on 8101 kHz and at 0505 UTC on 7996 kHz but typically begin about fifteen minutes late. Once again, the announcers are always women, but you might hear a man’s voice as they sometimes do interviews or play short, prerecorded reports. The programs start and end with a distinctive musical interlude.

Hai Phong isn’t the only station doing what I think is not so much a utility service as shortwave broadcasting.

Several times I heard Da Nang (with ID) at 1300 UTC on 8140 kHz with a short two-minute broadcast that was mostly an advertisement for the company’s new “fishing vessel journey monitoring service.” This is a safety service that fishermen would pay to have installed and then pay a monthly service fee to keep activated. According to the announcement, this same broadcast was repeated at 0100, 0500, and 1300 UTC. A couple times around 1245 and 0045 I heard Da Nang on 8140 kHz with a five-minute chatty advertisement-like discussion between a woman announcer and a male fisherman promoting various Duyen Hai products including a “sludge separator.” Another time the pair recommended that fishermen download the Duyen Hai app.

I found a similar advertisement-like 2 ½ minute broadcast once at 0100 UTC on 7915 kHz. Google Translate struggled with the noisy signal but got enough of it for me to determine that the man and woman were promoting Duyen Hai navigation services. There was no ID, but this is the marine operator frequency for Ben Thuy. Continue reading →

Google Translate as a DX Tool

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by Don Moore

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 still remember an email I received from a DX friend in 1996. I had occasionally helped him translate things from Spanish, and he had just gotten a message from a South American DXer. But this time was different. My friend had already run the message through a new online translation website. He sent me both the original Spanish and the English translation. The translation got the meaning across even if the wording was awkward and unnatural. There was just one thing that puzzled my friend. Why, at the very bottom, did the sender finish with the short phrase “I graze?”

I immediately knew what had happened. The South American DXer was named Francisco but went by the nickname Paco. The Spanish verb for “to graze” is “pacer”. If you know even basic Spanish you know what happened, too. The first-person present form of pacer is paco. Without any sense of context, the translation software had seen the name as a verb and translated accordingly.

Translation software has developed astronomically in the last three decades. Not only has the quality of the translations gotten better, but so has the number of languages that can be translated on websites or in apps. Launched in 2006, Google Translate is the best-known and translates the most languages. But there are many others. Some offer far fewer languages but concentrate on offering better quality translations. Others offer languages that Google doesn’t have. You’ll need to use Bing Translate for Upper Sorbian.

I don’t remember when I first used a translation website or which ones I may have used. Google Translate has been my go-to site and app for years. It’s an easy way to look up Spanish words I don’t know. But my biggest use of Google Translate has nothing to do with translation. When writing messages in Spanish, I often use it even though I know exactly what I want to say. Instead of writing in Spanish, I compose my message in English and then give it to Google. The translation puts in all the accent marks and tildes that are awkward to type on my English-language keyboard. And the fact that 90% of the time the Google translation exactly matches what I would have written makes me feel good about my Spanish.

Before leaving on my trip to Southeast Asia last November, I downloaded Indonesian, Lao, Malay, Tagalog, Thai, and Vietnamese to my phone. In my travels, I’ve found it very useful for understanding text on signs, product labels, and museum displays. I had translated stuff from Albanian, Portuguese, French, Croatian, and a few other languages that way, and I knew I would find plenty of use for the app in Southeast Asia. Google Translate can also understand spoken language. You may have seen videos of people who don’t speak one another’s language having conversations that way with the app translating everything. I had never done that but figured I might give it a try.

Trying It Out On DX

My DX goal for the trip was to make lots of SDR spectrum recordings along the way and then later use the spectrum analyzer tool to DX them. (I’ll be writing about the places I DXed from in an upcoming series of articles.) After five weeks of travel, I arrived in Chiang Mai, Thailand, for a one-month stay, and I started DXing recordings I had made in the Philippines, Vietnam, and Laos. The utility bands were filled with voice broadcasts in lots of languages that I couldn’t even recognize. That’s when I got the idea – why not use Google Translate to see what these stations were saying and maybe identify some of them?

Did it work? Well… sort of.

With any block of written text in an unknown language (even in a different writing system), if you plug it into Google Translate and it’s in their system, the app will quickly identify which language is being used and translate the text. But the documentation at that time pointed out that identifying which language is being used in an audio stream took too much processing power to be practical. Instead, the user had to specify which language was being translated. In most cases, that wouldn’t be a problem. If you’re in Japan and trying to understand a waiter, he’s probably speaking Japanese. But I had no idea what language I was listening to on any of these broadcasts.

My solution was simple. Pick a strong signal and select one of the regional languages to translate from. If it didn’t start translating after about sixty seconds, then I’d switch to a different language. In a few minutes’ time, I could try all the major languages spoken in the region.

The first thing I tried doing this with was an unusual program-like broadcast I had found in the 8 MHz marine band. I set Google Translate to Thai to start, and a few moments later it started translating to English. That turned out to be the Duyên Hi broadcast from Vietnam that I reported in January. It seemed odd to me that they were broadcasting in Thai, but that was the first language I tried, and the app translated everything easily. But after publication of my article, a DXer of Vietnamese ancestry pointed out in the comments that the language being used was Vietnamese, not Thai. That made more sense and, indeed, when I set the app to Vietnamese, the app translated everything equally well. And it continued to do so when set to Thai.

Thai and Vietnamese are as different from one another as are Spanish and Russian. I even reproduced the issue with other broadcasts and other languages. If the app understood the audio, it would translate even if the selected language was different. And it wouldn’t do anything to indicate what the correct language was. So what was happening? I think I now know. In preparing this article, I found out that in December 2025, Google introduced automatic language detection for audio streams. My app hadn’t been updated yet in January, so it didn’t have the feature. However, the translation of the audio streams takes place on Google’s servers. So I think Google was correctly identifying and translating at their end, but the app wasn’t capable of correcting the displayed language name.

The Big News

The big news is that Google Translate can now automatically detect and identify over seventy different languages. And it works very well. I tested it using four different radio web streams, and within five seconds it correctly identified and began translating from Chinese, Hindi, Bulgarian, and Zulu. These were crystal-clear Internet streams, not DX signals. Still, I think we can all see the potential for this in our hobby.

The How-To

Let’s dive into how to use the app. If you don’t already have Google Translate on your phone, you can download it from the App Store. You may see some minor differences in the layout. These images are from my new Samsung S-26+, and it is slightly different from my old Samsung A53, even though the app version numbers are the same.

Upon opening, the app looks like this. The selected languages on either side are changed by just tapping on the button. I tap on Portuguese to get the selection screen.

There is now a Detect Language choice that wasn’t there before. Below that, it lists the languages I’ve downloaded and then all available languages. Downloading languages allows you to translate written text even if you are offline. Translating audio requires an active Internet connection. Here I can select the language being spoken if I know what it is. I don’t, so I select Detect Language.

Now back at the first page, I tap Live Translate at the bottom.

Now I select the mode. I select the text only option so that I can easily scroll back and read what was said. Conversation mode is only enabled when both languages are known. Now I tap on Start.

The audio I’m playing is from a YouTube video. Within a few seconds, the app identifies the language as Telugu, spoken in India, and begins translating.

Back to DXing

If you’ve been seriously DXing for a few decades, your ears are well trained at picking out station IDs from very noisy signals or signals mixed in with several interfering stations. Google Translate is not a DXer. Translation works best with clear, noise-free audio. As noise and interference creep up, success will go down. Sure, the app is designed to work if you’re trying to talk to a waiter in a crowded restaurant. But that’s a different noise environment. The AI hasn’t been trained on DX signals. However, it does very well on clear signals, such as this marine weather report from Nha Trang Radio in Vietnam.

Vietnam operates a large network of marine stations, and I made extensive use of Google Translate to log all the stations and even to find unlisted frequencies and broadcasts. The network will be the subject of my next article. I found that over time the Vietnamese translation actually got better on signals with slight and even moderate noise. The AI is supposed to learn from experience, so maybe I was training it to DX in Vietnamese!

In the video, you may have noted how the app will first create a tentative translation in gray text and then correct that with black text. Language translation is not a simple matter of exchanging one word for another in order. Grammar rules and word order vary, especially so between unrelated languages such as Vietnamese and English. Slang and idiomatic expressions can cloud meaning. And then there’s context. If I say, “John’s at the bank now,” you would assume he’s doing a financial transaction … unless you happen to know he was going fishing this afternoon. Having studied the complexities of linguistics, I find it amazing how well automated translation works.

If your first language is something other than English, you should know that English is always at the center of Google Translate, with just a few very specific exceptions. When translating Vietnamese to Arabic, Google will first translate the Vietnamese to English and then translate the English to Arabic. That extra translation step increases the chance for ambiguity to creep into the result. So if something doesn’t seem right, you may want to switch to translating to English and then translate that to your own language yourself.

Using Google Translate on radio broadcasts couldn’t be simpler. Getting good results, as we will see, is another matter. To get started, I recommend picking strong, clear signals. I get better results with an external speaker. Laptop speakers are rarely the best, and the app will pick up extra noise if the fan is running. I get good results using this pocket Bluetooth speaker with my phone a short distance away and angled up so that the bottom microphone is pointing towards the speaker.

Translation never starts immediately. On a perfectly clear audio stream, it may start in a few seconds. But even a little noise can delay that from several seconds to a minute. Then the first few sentences may not get translated. That’s a problem because many broadcasts, especially from utility stations, begin with the identification announcement, and you may miss it. So, for DXing, Google Translate is best used with recordings rather than live broadcasts. I do all my DXing from SDR spectrum recordings. Once the translation starts working, I quickly reset the playback to the beginning of the audio. Even then, it may take several tries to get the translation to catch right from the start. And if all I have is a short phrase, it likely won’t work at all. The AI seems to need at least a couple of sentences.

After I thought I was finished with this article, I decided to go back and do some more experimenting by placing my old A53 and the new S-26+ side-by-side. Unless I played perfectly clear audio, the two rarely produced identical translations. And it wasn’t just differences in wording. When playing slightly noisy signals, sometimes one phone would work but not the other. Or one would get a few sentences and then hang, but maybe the other would pick up and start translating. Together, they gave me more information than either of them did alone. So, the most productive way to use this on DX signals is to use two (or more?) phones to do the translation and to play a recording back several times to piece together the message.

For example, I had a 90-second broadcast in Tagalog on 7828.5 kHz that I knew was the Philippine Coast Guard, apparently from a place named Cape San Augustin. I pulled that back out, and after playing the recording several times on both phones, I figured out that it was the Philippine Coast Guard vessel BRP Cape San Augustin in the harbor in Masinloc on Luzon Island. Besides identifying the ship and location, the operator gave the call sign MRRV-4408. However, he preceded it with the English phrase “call sign,” and that was throwing off the translator, as it was expecting Tagalog. As a side note, the broadcast was a storm warning and, per the translation, he was telling the fishermen to “go hide.” A better translation would be to take shelter.

A few more observations. Using this for a while – like an hour straight – can really heat up a phone. It’s a good idea to occasionally take a break and turn off the display. It also drains the battery more quickly. And remember, the app is sending the audio stream back to Google’s servers to do the real work. If you’re not on Wi-Fi, it might be a heavy user of data, although I haven’t tested for that.

How Useful Is It?

So just how useful is this to DX hobbyists? On the shortwave broadcast bands, automatic translation makes it possible to monitor stations even if they don’t broadcast in a language that you speak. It also makes it possible to compare what a specific station is telling its different audiences. What is China Radio International’s Swahili service saying? It can be a tool for medium wave DXing if you are in a place where there are stations in multiple languages.

I was primarily interested in translation for utility DXing, and it worked well for communications from official organizations. Google Translate was indispensable for DXing the Vietnamese marine stations, and it also helped me translate and identify scheduled marine broadcasts from China, Japan, and Indonesia, and to log that Philippine Coast Guard vessel.

But what I was really interested in was the two-party and multi-party conversations in numerous languages that fill many of the utility bands. My hope was to translate those and, in the process, identify and log some really unusual stations. It didn’t work anywhere near as well as I had hoped. For one thing, the users of those stations know one another by voice or by nicknames, so there aren’t ID announcements, and rarely do they say anything to indicate exactly where they are located. But the real problem was still language.

My Spanish is very good, and I have no trouble following weather forecasts from the Colombian Coast Guard. But when they start taking messages from local fishermen, I’m lucky if I can pick out a third of what the fishermen are saying. And it’s no better in my native language. I perfectly understand weather reports from the Canadian Coast Guard in Newfoundland, but I struggle with Newfoundland fishermen.

Google Translate can deal with dialect differences – say between Colombian and Argentine Spanish or between English as spoken in Alabama versus Scotland. But in any language, people with less education or less status or far from the centers of commerce and learning are less likely to speak the language according to expected standards. Grammar rules aren’t followed, and pronunciation gets muddled. Localized slang and expressions get used. (It would be wrong, however, to say these people don’t know how to speak their own language. For more on this, read up on prescriptive versus descriptive linguistics.)

Language translation AI is trained on official sources and what is available on the Internet. Not much of that comes from the least educated and most remote speakers of any language. That is precisely the problem I had in trying to DX the two-way chatter on the utility bands. Even with a strong, clear signal, the app would struggle with the translation and only get phrases here and there. Sometimes the translation didn’t make sense because the AI seemed to be literally translating local slang expressions. But occasionally I got something useful, such as two Indonesian stations that gave their locations as Bandung and Kendari, even if I had no idea who they were.

How useful automatic translation is for DXing depends on what you want to use it for. And, of course, how clear the signal is that you want to translate. If nothing else, it’s fun to play with, and I recommend giving it a try.

Links

How Do They Say That? Using Text-to-Speech for Foreign Language DX Identification

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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.

When I first discovered shortwave radio way back in 1971, right from the start I was both a listener (looking for interesting content) and a DXer (trying to hear as many different places as possible). But my DXing had a problem in that I only spoke English. Sure, lots of countries had international broadcasters with programs in English. But how was I going to log the many that didn’t?

In July 1972, I ordered a sample copy of FRENDX, the bulletin of the North American Shortwave Association. It was the first time I had seen a DX bulletin, and I learned a lot. The most eye-opening thing I found out was that other North American DXers were routinely identifying and logging radio stations using languages that they didn’t themselves speak. I was genuinely surprised by this. But if they could do it, then I could, too.

I began by going after Spanish-language broadcasters. I had started studying Spanish in school, so I knew the pronunciation rules even if I didn’t yet understand much. Some station names, like Barquisimeto and Bucaramanga, were even fun to say. I soon branched out to DXing stations in Portuguese, Arabic, and French and eventually to other languages like Russian and Indonesian. One thing that helped was that in those days the World Radio TV Handbook included transcriptions of standard ID announcements from many stations, such as in the image below of Radiodiffusion Television Algerienne in the 1972 WRTH. But whatever the language, the difficulty was always the same. What my English-centered brain thought the words in a book should sound like didn’t always match how the native speakers of the language actually said it.

The anecdote, of course, was experience. Over time I developed an ear for the various languages used by lots of DX stations. Even so, long words could still trip me up. Sure, my knowledge of Spanish made Barquisimeto and Bucaramanga easy. But words like Tanjungkarang and Manokwari in Indonesian and Itatiaia and Goiânia in Portuguese still gave me headaches.

The Reasons Why

In the late 1980s I went back to school to get a master’s degree in Applied Linguistics with the goal of teaching English as a Second Language. One of the first classes I had to take was phonetics – the study of how our mouths make the sounds that turn into words. It’s more complex than you might think. The International Phonetic Alphabet has 107 symbols for distinct vowel and consonant sounds. I had to learn to audibly recognize each of them. (Just don’t ask me to do it now.) Each of those sounds can be further modified in various ways, and it’s those sounds with modifications that produce the unique phonemes that make up each language. Standards of measurement vary, but the best estimates put the total number of phonemes in all the world’s languages at around eight hundred. Most languages only use around forty. English has 44 phonemes.

So that station name spelled out on a printed list may not only sound different than you expect, but it likely also contains sounds that you don’t even know. And when the sounds get chained into words, there’s the issue of which syllable gets the stress (consider photograph versus photography). Many languages help by using accent marks when stress differs from the standard. As words get chained into sentences, the connections also affect pronunciation, such as how “got to” becomes “gotta” in colloquial English. Other languages do the same thing. And I’m not even going to go into the use of tones in languages like Mandarin, Vietnamese, and Thai.

If you think English is an easy language, you are wrong. In terms of how the pronunciation of a word matches the spelling, English is one of the worst. There are historical reasons for the inconsistencies, but about 20% of English words are pronounced significantly differently from how they are spelled. And we don’t use accents or other diacritic marks to indicate when the sound differs from what’s standard. That makes English a difficult language to learn to speak and to understand. My linguistic DX heroes are any non-native English speakers DXing American medium wave stations. Local people do not pronounce places like Louisville (Kentucky) or DuBois (Pennsylvania) the way you would expect.

So there are all types of reasons why that station identification may not sound like we think it should sound.

But There’s a Solution …

I didn’t lead you all the way here just to complain about how complicated it all is. We now have a solution.

Text-to-speech is the process of presenting a computer program with a word or phrase and having it generate the sounds. For most of us, our first experience with this probably happened two or three decades ago when calling an automated phone system that used a mechanical voice to read back unique information that couldn’t be prerecorded by a human. It was pretty bad, and text-to-speech of the era deservedly got a bad reputation.

But the good news is that, like so much technology, text-to-speech has gotten a lot better. Some of it is so good that it’s become difficult to distinguish computer-generated speech from real human speech. Of course, the ways that can be misused also make it scary, but that’s a topic for other forums. Dozens of companies provide text-to-speech software in dozens of languages. And most of them have websites where you can try out their software for free.

I do a lot of DXing of stations in languages that I don’t understand or know well. And sometimes I hear what seems to be an ID but doesn’t match what I would expect from the spelling of any listed station. Then I go to one of those text-to-speech websites and plug in the station name to create a sample audio file. I compare that file with what is being said in my DX recording to see if they match.

I’ve been using this method for several years with Brazilian medium wave stations, Russian airports, and Indonesian marine stations, among others. I’ve confirmed numerous IDs this way that otherwise I wouldn’t have figured out, or at least not have been as comfortable that I had gotten the logging right. A couple of times it’s even saved me from making mis-logs on similarly spelled station names on the same frequency.

Most text-to-speech generators offer multiple voices, including both male and female. I always pick the gender that matches that of the ID I’m comparing to. For the most widely spoken languages, some companies offer multiple dialects, like Nigerian English or Argentine Spanish. So if you’re trying to ID a Colombian station, pick Colombian Spanish, not Argentine.

And, very important, be sure to use the correct spelling when pasting in the station name to check. That means including all the accent marks, tildes, umlauts, cedillas, etc. They are there to indicate how the word is pronounced, and if you omit them you will not get the right result. To make sure I have the correct spelling with all the proper diacritic marks, I usually copy/paste from Google Maps, a Wikipedia article, or some other webpage.

Finally, be aware that some local pronunciations are so unusual that the speech engines still may not get it right. I grew up near DuBois, Pennsylvania, and not one of the text-to-speech sites I tested said “DuBois, Pennsylvania” the way the people who live there do. They call their town “DO-boys.” To any native French speakers reading this, I sincerely apologize for what we Pennsylvanians have done to your language.

Links

A quick way to find a TTS engine is to do a web search for “<language name> text to speech”. Here are a few of the better ones.

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 →

Part Three: A Beginner’s Guide to ALE

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Many thanks to SWLing Post contributor Don Moore–noted author, traveler, and DXer–who shares the following post:

A Beginner’s Guide to ALE: Part Three

By Don Moore

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.

In the first two parts [Part 1 and Part 2] we looked at software used to decode ALE signals. Now let’s look at the stations and countries waiting to be logged.

If you’ve read the first two parts of this series then you know that there is no listening involved in ALE DXing. I know some traditionalists who would claim it’s not real DXing if you aren’t sitting next to the radio listening to a speaker or headphones. To me, DXing is having fun by logging new and interesting stuff. With ALE, the fun comes from researching the callsigns and frequencies to figure out what was logged. Every DX session produces numerous puzzles.

Identifying ALE stations may not sound hard. After all, one of the best things about monitoring ALE is that the stations are constantly identifying themselves. What could be easier? Unfortunately, it’s not always that easy to match up the callsign with what organization is behind it. Obvious location identifiers like ILLAPEL and VILLAVICENCIO2 are the exception, not the rule.

Around a third of the callsigns I decode stay complete mysteries as to who is behind them and where they are from. For about another third, the organization may be known (and, by extension, the country), but not the transmitter site. Only about a third of my ALE catches can be pinpointed exactly on a map as to where they came from. I wish it were more than that, but that doesn’t mean I haven’t logged some really interesting and unusual places.

Actually, it is surprising that I can pinpoint as many as I do. After all, every ALE network I’m aware of belongs to a government agency, a military, or some other government-affiliated organization. Bureaucracies like those are typically very careful about how they share information even when there is absolutely no security risk involved. Nevertheless, the utility DX community has gathered some excellent information over the years. While some of it is researched from public sources, I understand that some of it comes from inside sources that certain DXers have with people who install the networks. I don’t ask questions about where the information comes from and I’m glad to have the references and lists, which you can find in the links below.

Join the UDXF

The best source of ALE information is the Utility DXers Forum. The UDXF website has a lot of great utility resources that anyone can download. The best information, however, is the members’ loggings. To see those, you have to join the mailing list, where you can see member logs reported in the daily messages. But what you want to do is download the log compilations from the Files section (at Groups.io). Those go all the way back to the UDXF’s founding twenty years ago.

The first zip file is a compilation of all the logs from 2006 to 2019. After that, the logs are compiled into files for each year from 2020 to 2025. Download all of these and unzip them into a single folder. And periodically check back for newer files. At the beginning of each month, there will be a compilation for the previous month. Those will be compiled into a single file for 2026 at the beginning of next year. Finally, you need a way to search within the contents of an entire folder of files. A good text editor, such as Notepad++ for Windows, will do the job.

So let’s say I have a logging with the ID of 355013 on 8092 kHz. That really doesn’t tell me a thing about who could be behind the signal. Lots of organizations use six-digit strings as identifiers. I open up the Find in Files feature in Notepad++ and point it at the folder of UDXF logs. Now I type in the ID followed by a colon. Why a colon? Because in the UDXF logs, IDs are followed by a colon. By including the colon in my search term, I can eliminate any other random places that the same string of characters might be. (That’s more important when searching for shorter ID strings, such as three-digit numbers.)

I click Find All and get back a listing of every line in those logs that contains my search string. I can click on any line to open that file at that point. In the frequency column here, I see two hits for this ID on 8092 kHz. I think I can be certain that this is the Turkish Civil Defense station in Samsun province.

But what if I got these same results, but without any reports on 8092 kHz? That wouldn’t prove that I had logged Samsun even though the six-digit ID is a match on other frequencies. There are other organizations that also use six-digit numbers as IDs, such as UN Peacekeepers in several African countries. What I would do then is run a search for the frequency of 08092 (no colon) to see what other stations have been reported there. That turns out to be an important frequency in the AFAD network, so I could still safely assume that I had logged Samsun.

If the identifier doesn’t show up in the UDXF logs then there are some other resources (listed below) that can be checked. Sometimes the UDXF has complete network lists that include stations not yet reported in the logs. Another thing to do is look to see just what has been reported on that frequency. If there are lots of logs from a particular organization and the IDs follow the same pattern as the one you logged (e.g., six digits beginning with a ‘3’), then you likely got an unknown station in the same network.

If I get this far and still have no idea who is behind the station, then I have two options. I can delete the log and forget about it. Or I can put it in a ‘check later’ list, which I go through every year or so. I’ve identified a number of stations that way, especially from new networks. To be honest, which one I choose to do depends on how I feel that day!

Now let’s take a look at some of the places that stations can be logged from.

North America

The US government heavily uses ALE and there is no question that you will log more stations from the USA than from any other country.

The most widely used set of frequencies by the US government includes 7527, 8912, 10242, 11494, 12222, and 15867 kHz. These frequencies are shared by several organizations, including the US Coast Guard, the FBI, the DEA (Drug Enforcement Agency), and the Customs and Border Patrol. The USCG is an especially heavy user, and it’s easy to log not only USCG bases but also USCG cutters at sea, as well as USCG aircraft. Another heavy user of these frequencies is the COTHEN network, or Cellular Over-The-Horizon Enforcement Network.  This is a network of various law enforcement agencies and includes stations in some unusual places such as Limestone, Florida, and Lovelock, Nevada. Here is a string of Black Cat loggings on five different frequencies by MEM, the COTHEN station in Senatobia, Mississippi.

Another large US government ALE network is run by FEMA (Federal Emergency Management Agency), which operates stations at each of its ten regional offices. The callsigns include the region number, e.g. FC4FEM1 from the region four office in Thomasville, Georgia. If you are in North America, it won’t take long to log all ten regions. Much rarer are the stations in individual state offices, such as SD8FEM in South Dakota and TN4FEM in Tennessee.

Some state National Guard units also operate on ALE, but by far the most active are the Wyoming and Utah National Guards. These can be logged on several frequencies, including 7805, 7932, and 8065. The Wyoming stations mostly identify by the full town name, e.g. LARAMIE or GILLETTE, while the Utah stations use the first three letters of the local base, e.g. AME for American Fork or TOO for Toole. In September, I passed through Vernal, Utah, and took these pictures of the Vernal National Guard center and the HF antennas on the roof.

Finally, there are several regional government and quasi-government organizations that can be logged. The most active network is probably the Bonneville Power Administration in the Pacific Northwest. It operates a handful of stations with calls including 1121BPA and 1351BPA. Unfortunately, there is no information as to where the individual stations are located.

US government ALE transmissions are not confined to the continental USA. As noted in part one of this series, the US Air Force operates from bases around the world. The US Coast Guard operates from Puerto Rico, Guam, Alaska, and Hawaii. The DEA has a station in Nassau, Bahamas. Finally, the US State Department operates from many consulates and embassies around the world.

The Canadian military has a few ALE stations on the air. Aside from that, to my knowledge, there is no ALE activity from Canada, Mexico, or any of the countries in Central America and the Caribbean, except for that done by the US government.

South America

The militaries of Brazil, Colombia, and Venezuela all operate ALE networks. The Brazilians seem to be particularly active. The police networks of Chile and Colombia, as mentioned in part one, are the most interesting as they identify with the station location. However, logging the Chileans in the northern hemisphere will require good conditions. I’ve only managed to get a few when DXing in the USA, although I have logged several more while DXing in South America.

Africa

Algeria is the heaviest user of ALE from Africa. The Algerian Air Force and Army operate from bases throughout this huge country, and in many cases, the exact locations of the stations are known. One of my favorite ALE logs is CM6 from Tamanrasset in the heart of the Sahara in southern Algeria. Sonatrach, the Algerian national oil company, also has a huge network of stations using four-digit numbers as identifiers. Unfortunately, there is no information as to the exact location of any of those stations.

Morocco, Mauritania, and Tunisia are three other countries with large ALE networks operated by their militaries and/or national police. Finally, United Nations Peacekeepers operate from several countries, including Mali, the Central African Republic, and South Sudan.

Europe and the Middle East

The United States may have the most ALE stations, but without a doubt, the most active ALE callsign is XSS from Forest Moor, England. Operated by the British military, this station pops up on dozens of frequencies throughout the shortwave spectrum. The previously mentioned Turkish AFAD operates what is probably the largest ALE network in this region. Another large network is Italy’s Guardia di Finanza, a sort of combination coast guard and tax enforcement agency. It’s hard to receive in North America, but I did once get one of their patrol boats. ALE is used by the militaries and border patrols of several other countries in this region. My best ALE catch from Europe is getting the Polish UN Peacekeepers in Kosovo. That’s my only logging of any type in that small country.

Asia and Pacific

Australian state police run an ALE network with 10505 kHz being a favorite frequency. To my knowledge, there is no other significant ALE activity in the region aside from that of various US government organizations.

That’s just a general overview of the major users of ALE, but there is a lot more to be logged that I didn’t mention. Unlike a lot of things on HF, the use of ALE is expanding, not contracting. For example, the Colombian police network didn’t even exist two years ago. So, give ALE monitoring a shot. I think you’ll find it to be one more way to make the DX hobby challenging and fun. I do.

Links