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Many thanks to SWLing Post contributor, Wlodek, who writes:
I just saw the news [below] that the antennas of the transmitter that broadcast Russian propaganda Vesti FM and Radio Russia on 1413 kHz, 999 kHz and 621 kHz were destroyed.
In the early morning of April 26, two explosions thundered in the village of Mayak, Grigoriopol district: the first at 6:40, the second at 7:05.
Law enforcement officers and emergency services of Pridnestrovie were immediately sent to the scene. Grigoriopol militiamen cordoned off the territory of the Mayak radio and television center, sappers of the Ministry of Defense began to examine all the objects of the PRTC.
As of 9 am, it is known that the two most powerful antennas were out of order: one – megawatt, the second – half-megawatt. Both rebroadcast RF radio.
None of the PRTC employees and local residents were injured.
PRTC – Pridnestrovian radio and television center. This is one of 14 radio transmitting centers of the former USSR.
The signal from the PRTC can be relayed to the USA, the Middle East and Latin America. The radio center was built in the late 60s.
Charlatans originally built powerful ‘border blaster’ stations to evade scrutiny by US authorities
In radio’s early decades, among the oddball attractions found on the airwaves from 1920 to 1940 included a husband-and-wife team of psychics broadcasting from the U.S.-Mexico border under the stage names of Koran and Rose Dawn who became so popular that their extensive following helped them create a secondary income source: an organization called The Mayan Order.
Those who applied for membership and received its periodicals, the founders suggested, could harness the ancient Mesoamerican civilization’s secrets.
The pair were just two of the many psychics and other broadcasters of questionable integrity on the airwaves along the Rio Grande during radio’s beginnings. These characters built “border-blaster” stations of such epic size and scope that they could transmit from the Mexican side of the border into the United States.
Author John Benedict Buescher’s new book, Radio Psychics: Mind Reading and Fortune Telling in American Broadcasting, 1920–1940, unearths Koran and Rose Dawn’s forgotten story, as well as those of about 25 other border-blaster radio personalities on the Rio Grande who were heirs to a longtime American fascination with the occult.
“I was surprised how really dominant this stuff was in the early days of radio,” Buescher said. “Radio historians typically have just waved it off, not really focused on it, didn’t really take it seriously.” [Continue reading…]
Ukraine is fighting with more than weapons. The airwaves are also a frontier. Ukrainian computer specialists and radio operators have managed to jam Russian communications or intercept them. revealing some shocking details of the war’s brutality.
Cox, Dawson explore the benefits of umbrella-spoke feed for MW towers
Ben Dawson and Bobby Cox will talk about flared skirts at the NAB Show.
“A flared skirt is a set of symmetrically spaced cables around the tower, which attach electrically near the top of the tower, extend outward from the tower along a path similar to the top guy cables, and then turn back in toward the tower base at a point roughly halfway down the tower,” said Cox, senior staff engineer at Kintronic Labs.
“Insulators at this midpoint insulate the cables from ground. The cables terminate on an insulated feed ring encircling the tower base above ground level, similarly to a conventional skirt feed. The antenna is driven between this feed ring and RF ground. The resulting flared skirt takes the shape of a diamond, looking rather like umbrella spokes.”
These systems are used to provide a feed arrangement for grounded towers that is mechanically simple but has certain attractive aspects.
“The wide bandwidth characteristics of the flared skirt make these antenna designs extremely useful for multiplexing several AM stations onto a common antenna,” said Dawson, consultant engineer at Hatfield & Dawson. [Continue reading…]
After erecting a new tower Palau’s state broadcaster has restored its AM radio service.
The previous AM tower was destroyed during Typhoon Bopha, in 2012.
Rondy Ronny, head of programming said that the new AM tower and radio service will benefit all the 16 states of Palau.
“A lot of the outlying states are not able to connect into the internet and just don’t have that capability or have very high tech phones like how we do here in Koror. People don’t expect people from Angaur, from Babeldaob to be on their phones all the time.”
Ronny said that the new tower will be crucial to Palauans during natural disasters. [Continue reading at RNZ…]
The capital’s local radio scene is having a renaissance. From pub garden pop-ups to shipping container stations, Londoners are falling back in love with FM (and DAB/online/smart speaker/insert new mode of listening here). Tuning in has never been better, says Jessica Benjamin — antennae at the ready, it’s time to meet our favourite local stations
Westside — Hanwell 89.6 FM
Broadcasting from Hanwell’s Clocktower Mews to west London, Westside Radio was launched in 2007 by none other than Boris Johnson himself. ‘He promised to come back to Westside if he was elected mayor on the condition that we would play songs by The Clash,’ station manager Sone Palda tells me. ‘All of this while he was surrounded by Labour MPs and councillors in the studio.’ Big name politicians aside, Palda is both excited by and concerned for the future of local radio. ‘In this era community radio is one of the key mediums producing genuine local content and news,’ he says. ‘Most of the local independent commercial stations are being bought up by the big groups, then being rebranded and losing their identity. We want to remain being a platform for emerging radio presenting and production talent, and to continue entertaining our dedicated local audience.’
Soho Radio — Soho
Launched in 2014 and broadcasting live from Broadwick Street, Soho Radio has serious clout when it comes to big name presenters. Think Primal Scream’s Simone Marie Butler, Groove Armada’s Tom Findlay, Jim Sclavunos of Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds and Metronomy’s Anna Prior to name a few — and they don’t just stop at radio. ‘We won Event of the Decade [in Time Out magazine] for our 12-hour street party broadcast with R3 Soundsystem,’ station manager Rachael Bird says. ‘We had some amazing DJs join us live on air, with the likes of Seth Troxler, Norman Jay, Artwork, Eats Everything and Sink the Pink gracing the decks. The day culminated with our very own lorry sound system pulling up in the streets of Soho to finish the street party with a bang — it didn’t last long before it got shut down (whoops!) but was definitely a Soho Radio highlight and a day to remember.’ The grassroots online station has since expanded to the Big Apple, where it has been streaming from Lower Manhattan since late 2020 for a double dose of Soho listening. [Continue reading the full article…]
Kraina FM CEO Bogdan Bolkhovetsky says station helps military, lifts people’s spirits
A Kyiv radio station is broadcasting from a makeshift studio to bring Ukrainians the latest news about the war, and music to lift their spirits during the hours spent sitting in air raid shelters.
“In Kyiv, air raid alerts are eight to nine times a day, lasting from 30 minutes to three hours,” said Bogdan Bolkhovetsky, CEO of Kraina FM, an independent Ukrainian music station.
“And while people sit in shelters, they sing … Ukrainian songs,” he told The Current’s Matt Galloway.
Playing a variety of Ukrainian on the airwaves “is good for people … it brings back some normality to life, I guess,” he said.
Bolkhovetsky and his family fled Kyiv in the days after the Russian invasion began on Feb. 24. Members of his team also fled, and they regrouped in a small village in the Carpathian Mountains on Feb. 27. The village lies south of Lviv in the west of Ukraine, where many refugees have fled to escape Russia’s advance from the east. Some find refuge in the west’s smaller towns and villages, but others press on to cross into neighbouring Poland or Slovakia.
Cilla Benkö is the director general and CEO of Sveriges (Swedish) Radio. She started as an intern in the sports department when there were very few females in the industry. Benkö, who has worked at the organization for more than 30 years as a journalist and has held several managerial positions, provides insight into how Swedish Radio is navigating today’s evolving landscape. Continue reading →
Many thanks to SWLing Post contributor, Andrea Borgnino, who notes on Twitter that there’s a new “uncensored” shortwave program targeting Russia. Andrea links to this crowdfunding site which describes the initiative and asks for support:
We are going to broadcast an uncensored program in Russian for people in Russia. The technical possibilities have already been clarified.
The internet is becoming more and more restricted and sometimes at risk for the Russian people.
Right now, uncensored news in Russia is absolutely essential. We draw our motivation from these experiences and see it as a social responsibility to act. The programs will be broadcast on shortwave. Ir is possible to receive that programm with the simplest Radio and the listener is not exposed to the risk of being tracked.
Technically everything is ready for the start, and it could start immediately.
In addition we have some journalistic partners with us to create a daily program of around 60 minutes in length. The program will be broadcast twice a day. Everyone works for free and even the studios will not earn any fee. The only thing we have to pay is the powerful transmitter. every fund is welcome [sic]
This new station is Radio Truth for Russia (Radio Pravda dlya Rossii). It is hiring airtime on SW transmitters in Germany & Austria:
0500 GMT on 9670 kHz (Mon/Wed/Fri)
1500 GMT on 13600 (Tue/Thu/Sat)
1900 GMT on 6070 & 9670 (Tue/Thu/Sat/Sun)
Times/freqs probably subject to change
Many thanks Andrea and Chris for the information.
Please note that none of us are involved in this initiative. It’s for this reason I can’t vouch for the information being broadcast; indeed, I don’t believe I even know the organizers. I’m simply sharing what we’ve learned about the initiative and schedule.
Please feel free to comment if you can provide further insight and background. Thank you!
Update: According to @Radio22_HF, this is the YouTUbe channel associated with this project. Perhaps the organizers of this project can comment with details.
If you’re driving through the greater Ravenswood area and tune your radio dial to 87.9 FM, you might just enter a sort of radio twilight zone. On tap? Old timey, crime-thriller radio dramas, complete with sleuthy melodramatic music, damsels in distress and classic radio sound effects – footsteps, doors slamming, the gun going off.
There are no call letters or DJs, just “audio noir” floating out over a two-square-mile sweet spot on Chicago’s North Side.
It’s all broadcast illegally out of a nondescript two-flat on a residential block. There’s a spindly antenna on the roof, visible mainly from the alley, and a 50-watt transmitter in the upstairs apartment. And there’s Bill, a retired computer and audio engineer who’s been operating this illegal station for some 15 years. He asked us not to use his last name for fear of “FCC prison.”
“People on the lakefront up in the high rises can hear it,” said Bill. “And they used to listen at Lane Tech somewhere on an upper floor. So it gets out a little ways, but not that far.”
Bill got into noir not because it’s gripping radio, but rather because it’s not. He has insomnia, and the plot lines from Dragnet and Yours Truly, Johnny Dollar help him fall asleep. [Continue reading and listen to this piece at WBEZ.]
U.S.-backed news outlets and Ukrainian activists use Cold War techniques and high-tech tactics to get news about the war to Russians.
WASHINGTON — Using a mix of high-tech and Cold War tactics, Ukrainian activists and Western institutions have begun to pierce the propaganda bubble in Russia, circulating information about the Ukraine war among Russian citizens to sow doubt about the Kremlin’s accounts.
The efforts come at a particularly urgent moment: Moscow appears to be preparing for a new assault in eastern Ukraine that could prove devastatingly bloody to both sides, while mounting reports of atrocities make plain the brutality of the Kremlin’s tactics.
As Russia presents a sanitized version of the war, Ukrainian activists have been sending messages highlighting government corruption and incompetence in an effort to undermine faith in the Kremlin.
Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, a U.S.-funded but independent news organization founded decades ago, is trying to push its broadcasts deeper into Russia. Its Russian-language articles are published on copies of its websites called “mirrors,” which Russian censors seek out in a high-stakes game of whack-a-mole. Audience numbers have surged during the war despite the censorship. Continue reading →
EDXC co-founder Anker Petersen has published the latest Trends in tropical bands broadcasting and Domestic Broadcasting Survey.
Anker writes: “Since the Danish Short Wave Club International published the first annual Tropical Bands Survey in 1973, I have registered which stations are active, based upon loggings from our members and other DXers around the world. Here is an updated status outside Europe and North America, where Clandestine and Pirate stations are not included.”
Both of the documents are available at the DSWCI website, to study and enjoy. Click on the two blue boxes on the left side of the website for the current versions, and also to look back over previous versions. Hopefully, these will also encourage more DXers to listen regularly to the Tropical Bands. [Click here to read the original post…]
Talk in Washington about making Daylight Saving Time permanent may bring cheers from people who hate the “spring forward” and “fall back” disruption to their body clocks. But it has the potential to upend radio stations, especially during the darkest winter months. New Jersey Broadcasters Association President Paul Rotella is urging the bill’s sponsor to consider adding some protections for AM radio into the bill.
“If this legislation is adopted, many if not most, AM stations will lose an hour of morning drive with no or reduced power and no one seems to be addressing the issue,” said Rotella in a letter to Rep. Frank Pallone (D-NJ), the chair of the House Energy and Commerce Committee. Permanent daylight-saving time would mean that AM daytime-only stations and AMs with directional signals would not be at full power until after 9am in some parts of the country.
Rotella says such a move would mean that these stations would lose most of their critical morning drive daypart when a lot of ad revenue is made. The upside is the change would give AMs more time during their afternoon drive, when some stations need to power down before 5pm during the winter months. But many AM owners have said that the amount of money they would make from an extra hour of broadcast time during the afternoon would not make up for the losses they would suffer in the morning. [Continue reading…]
RTI’s Russian broadcasts are reaching Ukraine, and the Ukrainian people are talking back. The head of RTI Russian tells Insider what listeners are saying and how RTI is supporting Ukraine from Taiwan. Continue reading →
Many thanks to SWLing Post contributor and noted political cartoonist, Carlos Latuff, who shares his radio log art of a recent China Radio International broadcast.
Carlos notes:
China Radio International, 9525 kHz, broadcasting in Russian from Beijing, China.
Listened in Porto Alegre, Brazil.
April 9, 2022, 20h (UTC).
Part of news bulletin, war in Ukraine.
Report from Borodiyanka
Russia’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs Dept. Maria Zakharova: Bucha is provocation to end negotiations, impose more sanctions.
China, Israel: dialogue is the solution for Ukraine war
Many thanks to SWLing Post contributor, Wlodek, who writes:
