Tag Archives: Radio Caroline

Radio Waves: Solar Cycle 25 Looking Up, Vintage Radio Flea Market Finds, the SBITX SDR, and More Power to Radio Caroline

Radio Waves: Stories Making Waves in the World of Radio

Because I keep my ear to the waves, as well as receive many tips from others who do the same, I find myself privy to radio-related stories that might interest SWLing Post readers. To that end: Welcome to the SWLing Post’s Radio Waves, a collection of links to interesting stories making waves in the world of radio. Enjoy!

Many thanks to SWLing Post contributors Eric McFadden, Ken Carr, Mike Terry, Pete Eaton, and the Southgate ARC for the following tips:

Revised prediction for Solarcycle 25 (Southgate ARC)

A revised prediction from the NASA High Altitude Observatory based at the University Of Colorado.

NASA Heliophysicists have released a revised prediction for Solar Cycle 25.
The report generated by Ricky Egeland a Solar Physicist working in the NASA Space Radiation Analysis Group now calls for the peak of Solar Cycle 25 to top out at a value of 195 ± 17 based upon the new scale for calculating Smoothed Sun Spot Number. For reference Solar Cycle 21 peaked at an SSN 233 (new scale) while Solarcycle 23 peaked at an SSN of 180 (new scale). If this predictions holds up Ham Radio will see Excellent Worldwide F Layer Conditions on 10 Meters for several years around Solar Max. 6 Meters conditions should be good in the Equinox Periods before and after Solar Max with consistent openings on Medium Haul Polar Routes. 6 Meter routes traversing the equator should experience consistent openings ± 9 months from Solar Max.

Ricky Egeland is a particpating member in the group headed up by Scott McIntosh and Bob Leamon that published a paper 9 months ago outlining the existance magnetic bands within the Sun that govern the Sunspot and Hale Cycles. At the time of its publishing the paper went on to predict the peak of Solar Cycle 25 could be as high Solarcycle 21. Today’s released is a revised prediction based upon data observed since the original paper was published. To be sure we are still in early days.

The Solar Rotation Cycle as marked by Sunspot Activity was established on April 19, 2021 so we are only 90 Days into actually observing Cycle 25 Activity. It is now agreed the dramactic run-up in Sunspot Activity we experienced late Last Fall while tied to Cycle 25 was an outlier. When asked directly about whether they can declare if the Terminator Event they wrote about in the Fall 2020 Paper has occurred Scott McIntosh stated “We can’t be sure just yet but we are very very close”. It also should be noted that while it has been over a year since the sun produced a Cycle 24 Region with a Sunspot worthy of a NASA Classification the Sun has been steadily producing Spotless SC 24 Active Regions the last of which formed right on the Solar Equator at N00-W54 on July 24,2021 as recorded by Jan Alvestad’s Solar Terrestial Activity Report Website. These Active Regions being part of a Solarcycle in its final stages of existence produce no spots and only last for a few hours before they dissipate away. The previous SC24 Active Region formed on June 28, 2021. Once the SC24 active regions cease forming Solar Cycle 25 will take off in earnest.

Bob Marston AA6XE

Bob Marston AA6XE email – [email protected]
Ricky Egeland email – [email protected]
Scott McIntosh email – [email protected]
Bob Leamon via Twitter – https://twitter.com/leamonrj

Flea Market Finds at the Vintage Radio & Communications Museum of Connecticut (KE1RI)

I have an addiction to old radios, especially anything that was manufactured in the 1923-1950 period. That may seem like a long time to some folks but when you gain senior citizen status 25 years is a blink of the eye. This love of old radios is tempered by the limited display space that I have in my home. I am at the point where I am very selective when it comes to buying a new radio. Although there is always room for another ‘small’ radio I am somehow attracted to the larger models. A rough count of the full-size consoles in this house (and garage and shed) comes to about 11. Just in this room (second floor radio shack) there are 5 console radios, two of which reside in the closet. The only surprise is that my wife has not tossed the radios and me out by now.

So, it is no surprise that I enjoy attending radio flea markets. Most of the events I frequent are either in Connecticut or Massachusetts. Rhode Island has very little in the way of antique radio flea markets (although we do have a great wireless and steam museum). And you can forget about eBay. Radios on eBay usually have inflated prices and descriptions. Even if you do find something reasonable the shipping for anything bigger than an All American Five table model is very costly and hazardous (many are damaged during shipping).

This is where the Vintage Radio & Communications Museum of Connecticut (VRCMC) comes in. This is a wonderful museum that has an enormous collection of radios and other communication-related technological wonders. They also hold regular flea markets to help raise funds needed to run the museum. During the cold months the events are inside (limited space) and during warm seasons (April, June, September) they are outside (plenty of space). This year I attended the first Spring event that was held on April 13, 2021. It was a great success! [Click here to continue reading…]

SBITX: Hackable HF SDR for the Raspberry Pi (Hackaday)

Cheap, easy to use SDR dongles are an immensely powerful tool for learning about radio technology. However, building your own SDR is not something too many hackers are confident to tackle. [Ashhar Farhan, VU2ESE] hopes to change this with the sBITX, a hackable HF SDR transceiver designed around the Raspberry Pi.

[Ashhar] introduced the project in talk at the virtual “Four Days In May” annual conference of the QRP Amateur Radio Club International. Watch the full talk in the video after the break. He first goes over the available open source SDR radios, and then delves into his design decisions for the sBITX. One of the primary goals of the project was to lower the barrier of entry. To do this, he chose the Raspberry Pi as base, and wrote C code that that anyone who has done a bit of Arduino programming should be able to understand and modify. The hardware is designed to be as simple as possible. On the receive side, a simple superheterodyne architecture is used to feed a 25 kHz wide slice of RF spectrum to an audio codec, which send the digitized audio to the Raspberry Pi. The signal is then demodulated in software using FFT. For transmit, the signal is generated in software, and then upconverted to the desired RF frequency. [Ashhar] also created a GUI for the 7? Raspberry Pi screen.[…]

Ofcom agrees for Radio Caroline to turn up the power (Community Radio Today)

A power increase has been agreed for Radio Caroline to extend its coverage area from Suffolk and Essex to include Kent as East Sussex.

The station is broadcasting under a community radio licence and was originally granted 1kW of power on 648 AM in 2018. The actual power increase amount has not been announced.

Ofcom says a power increase was agreed to combat man made noise and interference in the existing coverage area, and to extend coverage to adjoining areas.

While the subsequent increase in the licensed area was considered to be significant, the decision-maker deemed there to be exceptional circumstances in order to approve this request, saying the service has experienced high levels of background noise and interference, particularly in urban areas.

The licensee also serves a ‘community of interest’ as opposed to a defined geographic community meaning the service is positioned to be accessible to the community of interest in the proposed extended areas.[…]

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Radio Waves: Narco-Antennas, Pirate Radio Beginnings, Arqiva Restructure and Redundancies, and the Ghostly Buzzer

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Radio Waves: Stories Making Waves in the World of Radio

Many thanks to SWLing Post contributors Skip Arey, David Goren, Paul Evans, Kanwar Sandhu and Dave Porter for the following tips:

Special Report: Drug cartel ‘narco-antennas’ make life dangerous for Mexico’s cell tower repairmen (Reuters)

MEXICO CITY (Reuters) – The young technician shut off the electricity at a cellular tower in rural Mexico to begin some routine maintenance.

Within 10 minutes, he had company: three armed men dressed in fatigues emblazoned with the logo of a major drug cartel.

The traffickers had a particular interest in that tower, owned by Boston-based American Tower Corp (AMT.N), which rents space to carriers on its thousands of cellular sites in Mexico. The cartel had installed its own antennas on the structure to support their two-way radios, but the contractor had unwittingly blacked out the shadowy network.

The visitors let him off with a warning.

“I was so nervous… Seeing them armed in front of you, you don’t know how to react,” the worker told Reuters, recalling the 2018 encounter. “Little by little, you learn how to coexist with them, how to address them, how to make them see that you don’t represent a threat.”

The contractor had disrupted a small link in a vast criminal network that spans much of Mexico. In addition to high-end encrypted cell phones and popular messaging apps, traffickers still rely heavily on two-way radios like the ones police and firefighters use to coordinate their teams on the ground, six law enforcement experts on both sides of the border told Reuters.[…]

How Pirate Radio Rocked the 1960s Airwaves and Still Exists Today (HowStuffWorks)

If you’ve been binge-watching movies lately, you may have come across “Pirate Radio.” Director Richard Curtis’ 2009 comedy-drama stars the late Philip Seymour Hoffman as The Count, a disc jockey for an unlicensed rock radio station that broadcast from a rusty, decrepit ship off the British coast in the mid-1960s, defying government authorities to spin the rock records that weren’t allowed on the BBC at the time. The plot is based loosely on the saga of an actual former pirate station, Radio Caroline, that was founded by an offbeat Irish entrepreneur named Ronan O’Rahilly, the inspiration for the character portrayed by Bill Nighy.

“Pirate Radio” is a period piece, set in a time when the Rolling Stones’ “Let’s Spend the Night Together” and the Who’s “My Generation” were still scandalous and controversial rather than nostalgic anthems for today’s aging baby boomers. So you couldn’t be blamed for assuming that it depicts a long-vanished phenomenon, like Nehru jackets with iridescent scarves and psychedelic-patterned paper mini dresses.

To the contrary, though, more than a half-century later, pirate radio is still a thing. In fact, it’s possibly more widespread than it was in the 1960s, even in an age when streaming internet services such as Spotify and Pandora put the equivalent of a jukebox in the pocket of everyone with a smartphone. And as a bonus, Radio Caroline still exists — though, ironically, it’s gone legal.[…]

Arqiva confirms restructure and redundancies (IBC.org)

[Note: Arqiva is the UK domestic broadcast transmission provider.]

Arqiva is working on a restructure of its business that could result in a third of its staff being made redundant.

According to a report in the Telegraph, the media infrastructure business is preparing to cut around 500 staff, which is approximately a third of its workforce.

An Arqiva spokesperson confirmed to IBC365 that some job losses will occur.

They said: “The sale of our telecoms business makes Arqiva a smaller organisation, changes our revenue profile and reduces our available profit pool.

”We are therefore conducting a review of the costs and systems we need to run our business over the next three years.

”Regrettably, we will need to reduce the size of our workforce, but it’s much too early to speculate about numbers.”

The Telegraph report cites the shift to streaming and a drop in income for broadcasters as reasons for the potential cuts.[…]

The ghostly radio station that no one claims to run (BBC Future)

In the middle of a Russian swampland, not far from the city of St Petersburg, is a rectangular iron gate. Beyond its rusted bars is a collection of radio towers, abandoned buildings and power lines bordered by a dry-stone wall. This sinister location is the focus of a mystery which stretches back to the height of the Cold War.

It is thought to be the headquarters of a radio station, “MDZhB”, that no-one has ever claimed to run. Twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, for the last three-and-a-half decades, it’s been broadcasting a dull, monotonous tone. Every few seconds it’s joined by a second sound, like some ghostly ship sounding its foghorn. Then the drone continues.

Once or twice a week, a man or woman will read out some words in Russian, such as “dinghy” or “farming specialist”. And that’s it. Anyone, anywhere in the world can listen in, simply by tuning a radio to the frequency 4625 kHz.

It’s so enigmatic, it’s as if it was designed with conspiracy theorists in mind. Today the station has an online following numbering in the tens of thousands, who know it affectionately as “the Buzzer”. It joins two similar mystery stations, “the Pip” and the “Squeaky Wheel”. As their fans readily admit themselves, they have absolutely no idea what they are listening to.[…]

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Radio Caroline’s Founder, Ronan O’Rahilly, dies aged 79

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Photo of Ronan O’Rahilly 16 August 1967 by Eric Koch / Anefo

(Source: BBC News)

The founder of Radio Caroline – the first pirate radio station off the UK – Ronan O’Rahilly has died aged 79.

His death was announced by the current Radio Caroline, which still exists off the Essex coast.

The station was founded in 1964 to compete with the BBC and launched the careers of many well-known DJs, achieving enormous popularity.

Mr O’Rahilly, who lived in Ireland, had been diagnosed with vascular dementia in 2013.

Radio Caroline was the first of several pirate radio stations that challenged BBC radio’s dominance in the 1960s.

The station played pop music all day, while the BBC only played pop for an hour a week.

[…]After the Marine Broadcasting Offences Act was passed in 1967, Radio Caroline continued to broadcast from ships until 1991, when the Ross Revenge was shipwrecked off the Kent coast

The station, which started broadcasting again on medium wave in 2017, helped pave the way for modern commercial radio.[…]

Click here to read the full story at the BBC.

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Radio Caroline North broadcast December 14th – 15th

Special event stations celebrating anniversaries of famous European pirate stations

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Many thanks to SWLing Post contributor, Harald Kuhl (DL1AX), who writes:

At the beginning of August there will be two special event amateur radio stations active on shortwave, celebrating anniversaries of famous European pirate stations Radio North Sea International and Radio Caroline:

Radio Northsea International PA45RNI

from 01-08-2019 to 31-08-2019

http://www.radio-northsea.org

email: [email protected]

[source: https://www.qrz.com/db/pa45rni]

and

GB55RC will be active from the Ross Revenge:

Celebrating fifty five years of Radio Caroline

Thursday 1st – Monday 5th August 2019

2019 is the fifty fifth anniversary of Radio Caroline and the Martello Tower Group are pleased to be able to activate the world famous MV Ross Revenge again in August. This year we have been granted the ‘special’ special callsign of GB55RC. […]

[source: https://www.qrz.com/db/gb55rc]

Special QSLs will be available.

[The QSLs above are] from previous GB5RC activities.

Thank you for the tip, Harald! I’d love to grab one of those QSLs!

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This weekend: Radio Caroline North broadcast from the Ross Revenge

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(Source: Southgate ARC via Eric McFadden)

Caroline North June

We are counting down the days to another fabulous Radio Caroline North broadcast – LIVE from our historic radio-ship Ross Revenge this weekend.

Welcome back Chris Pearson after a two-year absence, now joining us as both a Caroline presenter and MD of Manx Radio!

Tune in on Saturday 22nd and Sunday 23rd June as our on-board presenters bring you some of the best music from the 60s, 70s and 80s.

Our sponsor for the June broadcast is Dave, Brian and Roger from Plastic Building Supplies Thetford – and you can win prizes in our web shop competition sponsored by Pete Gadd.

Listen in on 648 AM in the South and South-East, on 1368 AM via Manx Radio in the North and North-West, online here, on your mobile, on smart speakers … so many ways to listen!

We would love to hear from you – please send your emails direct to the Ross studios at [email protected] during the broadcast.