Many thanks to SWLing Post contributor and noted political cartoonist, Carlos Latuff, who shares illustrated radio listening report of a recent Vatican Radio broadcast.
Carlos notes:
Part of Vatican Radio’s news bulletin (in English). Part of Pope Francis’ Christmas message. Listened in Porto Alegre, Brazil.
Many thanks to SWLing Post contributor and noted political cartoonist, Carlos Latuff, who shares illustrated radio listening report of a recent Radio Nacional broadcast that even includes an interview with Carlos!
Carlos notes:
Full news bulletin of Brazil ‘s Radio Nacional, in Portuguese. Listened in Porto Alegre, Brazil.
* Including an interview with me! 🙂 *
Many thanks to SWLing Post contributor, Michael, who writes:
In the eighties for numerous shortwave listeners in German-speaking Europe this
station was a part of their youth. For some it was even a small footprint on the path
to private broadcasting in Germany.
Radio Victoria, the “independent shortwave music station”, comes sponsored through
a former member of the “Victoria Listener Club” back on shortwave with a revival broadcast of the four-hour annual hit parade from 1984 and station operator Roger Kirk,
who died in 2012.
Once broadcasted on Radio Milano International in the 41 meter band over the turn of the year 1984/1985, after forty years now again 2024/2025 relayed via Shortwave Gold from Northern Germany on 6160kHz and this exactly on the analog broadcast days and times – with the quasi-first broadcast on Boxing Day and the two repetitions on New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day:
December 26, 2024 from 09:00 UTC to 13:00 UTC
December 31, 2024 from 09:00 UTC to 13:00 UTC
January 1, 2025 from 09:00 UTC to 13:00 UTC
Have good reception and much fun while listening to “the queen of the airwaves” back again on shortwave!
Many thanks to SWLing Post contributor and noted political cartoonist, Carlos Latuff, who shares illustrated radio listening report of a recent Radio Buenos Aires broadcast.
Carlos notes:
Part of Radio Buenos Aires (Argentina) news bulletin (in Spanish) about the advance of Franklin fire in Southern California, US. Listened in Porto Alegre, Brazil.
Many thanks to SWLing Post contributor, Don Moore–noted author, traveler, and DXer–for the latest installment of his Photo Album guest post series:
Façade of the National Museum of Albania on Skanderbeg Square
Click here to read Part One: Finding Radio Tirana
More of Don’s traveling DX stories can be found in his book Tales of a Vagabond DXer. Don visited Albania in March 2024.
Albania has a lot to offer foreign visitors. The country has coastal beaches, beautiful mountains and historical sites hundreds and thousands of years old. Tirana is a fascinating city filled with good restaurants and friendly people. It’s inexpensive. The central city is easy to get around on foot. I’m already planning my next visit.
But the number one reason to visit Albania is to see the sites related to the Communist era and the Enver Hoxha dictatorship. I don’t think there is anywhere else where you can get such close insight into what real life was like inside a brutal police state. Indeed, after visiting Tirana, I can’t imagine how anyone could praise dictatorships or say that their own country would be better off under a dictatorship. In Tirana three sites in particular stand out in this regard. And each of them has some interesting displays involving the use of radio.
The House of Leaves … the name sounds peaceful and innocent. That was once true. Constructed in 1931, the two-story villa originally served as the first obstetrics clinic in Albania. Then when the Nazis moved in after the Italian surrender in 1943, it was chosen as headquarters for the Gestapo. That might have been a minor blip in the structure’s history, but the Gestapo had remade the building into just what Enver Hoxha’s new government needed: a headquarters for their secret police.
The dreaded Sigurimi would occupy the building for nearly five decades. But that was supposed to be a secret, so no one could say what the villa really was, even though everyone knew. So it became known as The House of Leaves from the vines that covered the outer walls. Even then, the name was mostly whispered among the closest friends. It wasn’t safe to pay much attention to the building.
After the Communist regime fell in 1991, The House of Leaves mostly sat unused. Then, in 2014 the Albanian Ministry of Culture announced it would be turned into a museum telling the story of Sigurimi and its operations. The Museum of Secret Surveillance opened in 2017 and three years later was awarded the European Museum of the Year award by the Council of Europe.
The museum has many rooms focusing on various aspects of Sigurimi’s work. My favorite was one filled with electronics used to monitor and record conversations by suspected malcontents.
The key to monitoring someone was placing a radio transmitter bug in the suspect’s home. The Sigurimi made their own bugs in a workshop in The House of Leaves. They were particularly proud of the tiniest ones, which could very easily be hidden.
The bugs were usually placed inside a small piece of wood that could be placed under a table or chair. The effective range was only about two hundred meters, so monitoring posts had to be in the same building or nearby. The Sigurimi would either recruit a neighbor or persuade a neighbor to host a Sigurimi agent to monitor the recordings. Rinia brand transistor radios made in Romania were the preferred receiver. They were inexpensive and could easily be modified to receive the desired frequency. And they were common enough that possession of one didn’t mark a person as a government agent. Agents usually listened in on headphones while also making a recording of the conversation.
In some cases, homemade amplifiers were used to boost the weak signals produced by the tiny bugs.
Recordings of conversations of interest were taken back to The House of Leaves for further investigation at monitoring posts such as this one.
Enver Hoxha knew that tiny Albania could never support an army large enough to repel an outside invasion. His experience as a guerilla in World War II, on the other hand, had convinced him that an armed hostile populace could do the job. Albania was, after all, the only occupied country to retake its own capital without any outside help. So Hoxha based Albania’s national defense on making sure that invading the country would be so difficult and painful that no one would dare attempt it.
A key part of that policy was constructing concrete bunkers. Hoxha’s goal was to construct 750,000 of them – approximately one for every four Albanians at the time. Just how many were actually constructed is not known, but the number was in the hundreds of thousands. And they were built everywhere – in farms, in forests, in villages, and in cities.
Most were the three-meter-wide Qender Zjarri type, just large enough to give two or three combatants a concealed firing position. Depending on the location these were built individually or else in small clusters. Today, a fun activity while traveling by bus through Albania is seeing how many you can spot. Occasionally these bunkers are used for storage but there are so many that most are abandoned other than the occasional visit by local teenagers. Evidently, they’re the cool place for losing one’s virginity.
The second type of bunker was the eight-meter-wide Pike Zjarri, intended to serve as local command centers. Being larger, many of these have been put to other uses. And then there were the big bunkers, huge complexes of underground rooms and tunnels where officials would take refuge and continue to run Albania’s government. But today’s Albania is not concerned with repelling foreign invaders. Instead it welcomes them in the form of tourists. And so two of the biggest bunker complexes in Tirana have been turned into museums. And both of them contain some interesting radio memorabilia.
The biggest bunker was a vast underground complex built in the 1970s inside the base of a mountain on the eastern outskirts of Tirana. Construction was so secret that this bunker’s existence wasn’t even known publicly until the 1990s. This was where Enver Hoxha and other top officials would have gone in the event of an invasion or nuclear attack. It had over one hundred rooms on five levels with its own power and water systems. The entrance passed through a decontamination station where anyone entering could wash off the fallout if a nuclear bomb had already been dropped. (Or so they hoped.)
The inside is a labyrinth of hallways and small rooms used for everything from communication centers to support services. There is even a small auditorium where the Albanian legislature could meet. Enver Hoxha and the prime minister had small spartan private apartments. Other officials, guards, technicians, and servants slept in dormitories. Of course, the facility was never used. It’s believed that Enver Hoxha only visited three times – once when it was completed in 1978 and then two more times for drills.
One of many hallways in the Enver Hoxha’s refuge.
Enver Hoxha’s office in the big bunker. The desk has the same Chinese-made Red Lantern Model 269 receiver that I saw at the Radio Bar Tirana.
The Albanian military continued to use the facility for several years after the Communist government fell in 1991. After that it was locked up. Then in 2014 a pair of journalists came up with the idea of making it into a museum which was named Bunk Art. But it’s a history museum, not an art museum. Some rooms were left unchanged to show the structure’s original purpose. Others were filled with exhibits on Albanian history, the Italian invasion, the Communist period, and life under Communism. And those exhibits include a few interesting radio items.
According to the display, this was one of two portable transceivers in possession of Xhevdet Mustafa when he was killed by the Sigurimi on the beach south of Tirana in 1982. The display didn’t make clear who Mustafa was working for.
On several occasions in the early 1950s the CIA tried to insert small bands of Albanian agents into the country, mostly without success. This Russian-made transceiver was part of the gear that came with a small group of agents parachuted into Albania in 1953. The group were all killed or captured when they landed. With help coerced from the prisoners, the Sigurimi used this radio for several months to trick the CIA into continuing to air-drop supplies into the mountains.
This black-and-white Albanian-made TV was configured at the factory to only receive Albanian channels. However, clever Albanians figured out ways to use small electronic circuits (called kanoce) that overrode those limits. Albanians along the coast were able to receive TV from Italy while those in border areas could receive Yugoslav or Greek TV.
The original Bunk Art proved so popular with Albanians and foreign visitors that in 2016 it was renamed Bunk Art 1 and a second location, Bunk Art 2, was opened in the city center. This bunker had been built under the city streets near The House of Leaves and had been intended for use by the Ministry of Internal Affairs. It consisted of a single level with several branching hallways lined with small rooms. Today, it’s a museum telling the story of the Ministry (of which the Sigurimi was just one part) until its dissolution in 1991.
This bunker was also configured for a long-term stay. The Minister of Internal Affairs had this private bedroom.
Some Chinese-made radio equipment used by the ministry.
On 12 December 1985, the streets of Tirana were crowded with people out to watch a large patriotic parade which just happened to pass by the Italian embassy. Two women and four men dressed in fashionable western clothes and chatting in Italian among themselves snaked their way through the crowd to the door of the embassy. The Albanian police monitoring the door didn’t try to stop them. Obviously, they were Italian tourists or embassy workers. Except they weren’t. The sisters and brothers of the Popa family had long been persecuted by the Albanian government as their parents had collaborated with the Italians during the war. And now the six children wanted political asylum.
The Italians were willing to resettle the family in Italy but the Albanian government refused to give them permission to leave. Instead Albania demanded that the siblings be turned over to its police, which the Italians refused to do. The family would live in the embassy for 4 ½ years until the Albanian government finally agreed to let them go. In the meantime the Albanians kept a strong police and military presence in the neighborhood surrounding the embassy.
The Sigurimi wanted to know what was going on inside so they recruited an Albanian maid who worked at the embassy to help them. She was given five bugs and instructions to hide them in the usual places like behind paintings and under tables. They knew the Italians would find these and that was fine. It would give the Italians false confidence that they had found all the bugs. The real bug was concealed in a special new broom that the maid brought in and left in a closet next to where the Popa siblings stayed. Each day she was given a freshly charged battery to swap with the depleted one inside the broom. The Italians never discovered the bug-in-a-broom. The Popa siblings were finally allowed to leave the embassy for Italy on 3 May 1990.
Many thanks to SWLing Post contributor and noted political cartoonist, Carlos Latuff, who shares illustrated radio listening report of a recent Radio Buenos Aires broadcast.
Carlos notes:
Part of Radio Buenos Aires (Argentina) news show (in Spanish): “…Burlón*, former Secretary of Tourism of Bariloche, current president of the Argentine Chamber of Student Tourism, was shot in Rio de Janeiro while he was heading to Christ the Redeemer, along with his family… “
“…Burlón was driving with his family in his car, took the wrong route while using a GPS, and mistakenly entered the Morro dos Prazeres favela, an area controlled by the criminal group Comando Vermelho, a Brazilian drug trafficking organization…”
*Gastón Fernando Burlón
By John Figliozzi, NASWA Journal Shortwave Center Editor
Prepared December 12, 2024
Having previously reviewed the overall performance of the Choyong LC90 and then updated that review to include firmware upgrades the radio’s manufacturer has implemented to address some initial problems or shortcomings, I now turn to evaluating how this radio performs as a primary substitute for other comparably sized radios currently and previously on the market.
First, some caveats should be kept in mind.
This is the first – and only – radio on the current market that makes possible reception of longwave, medium wave, shortwave, FM radio station signals and Internet streaming radio stations in one self-contained unit.
Exemplifying that unique status, it also allows for connection to personal music sources via Bluetooth and permits the user to access Internet streaming via both WiFi and cellular over-the-air connections.
Furthermore, in another soon coming firmware update, its developer is promising the addition of RDS capability on FM, metadata transmission within Internet radio streams, as well as music library and podcast access through Spotify and Apple.
In sum, the LC90 is a most versatile instrument – the most versatile radio available anywhere.
This is also a “portable” radio, not a desktop model. As such it is designed to operate as a “traditional” radio optimally off its self-contained whip antenna. Though an ability to connect an external antenna is provided, the use of anything other than a relatively short wire is likely to overload the radio’s internal electronics. This is not a design flaw. Therefore, it should be evaluated against other consumer-grade portable radios, not against more sophisticated semi-professional equipment.
Having said that, I set out to test how the LC90 works as one’s primary portable radio. By that I mean, for example — besides for use when at home — if one is traveling and has limited storage space in one’s luggage, would taking only the LC90 offer satisfactory performance in the absence of any “back-up” receiver?
Most of us establish over time a pattern to our radio listening. We regularly tune-in to particular stations at particular times for particular content. This is how I performed this study.
As one example, I regularly listen to Radio Romania International’s mid-afternoon (mid-morning in eastern North America) transmission in Romanian for western Europe via shortwave. American and European pop rock music is a prominent part of the programming and, since I don’t speak Romanian, I find listening both accessible and enjoyable. This is a good and fair test since RRI is a station with powerful transmitters that, even when not targeting eastern North America, can and does provide reliably good reception here.
I use FM regularly and primarily for local public radio and their content including their relays of BBC World Service, as well as low power community stations.
I’ll tune somewhat distant medium wave (AM) stations after dark for content I find unique. One example is CFZM 740 “Zoomer Radio” in Toronto which offers old time radio shows at 10 each night. Toronto is about 300 miles west of my home location, so it’s an intermediate distance that usually promises decent nighttime reception.
And I have several favorite stations worldwide only accessible via Internet radio. Some are current or former international broadcasters that previously used or still use shortwave. Others are domestic stations that make content that I find enjoyable, informative or unique available through Internet streaming.
The LC90, as stated in my previous review and subsequent revision, performs very well in finding and listening to Internet radio stations. Its interface is still comparatively a little “clunky”, but in truth all of them are in one way or another. What it comes down to is learning the logic behind each and, once one spends some time with the LC90, its own interface becomes more familiar and directly useful. Uniquely, it also allows for voice search of stations, something that doesn’t always work well and can be frustrating. But it’s fun and useful to try it and if not giving the desired result, one can move on to other provided search methods.
The LC90 — also uniquely — provides two ways of accessing Internet radio stations – via WiFi and via a pre-purchase of time on cellular networks. Both work well and the availability of cellular access offers a level of flexibility other Internet radios don’t have.
In sum, one need not have another Internet radio to “back up” the LC90. It’s more than fine on its own.
Off its whip antenna, the LC90 performs at least very close to the way most comparably sized quality portable shortwave radios perform that I’ve used or tested. Included among them are the Grundig YB400, Panasonic RF-B65, Tecsun PL-398 and Sangean ATS909.
Recent firmware updates all but eliminated the annoying “birdies” that cropped up across the bands previously in the LC90. I have noted some random “ticking” at times when listening on shortwave and can’t determine if that phenomenon is due to the radio’s internal electronics or ambient atmospheric conditions that the radio’s sensitive circuitry somehow picks up.
A further update has added a rather rudimentary ability to tune single sideband transmissions. (It’s all that the radio’s original basic architecture will allow.) But this is important because it opens the potential to hear amateur radio transmissions as well as some utility transmissions such as VOLMET weather reports.
One caution, though, if your interest is primarily DXing. The LC90 – while very serviceable as a shortwave radio — is not a DX machine. It is primarily designed for radio listeners, not those who see the radio principally as a hobby.
Nonetheless, the LC90 is both sensitive and stable enough to mostly match and sometimes exceed the performance on shortwave of other portable radios of comparable size.
All that needs saying here is that the good sensitivity of the LC90 on FM combined with its superior audio performance, especially for a portable radio, makes listening on FM most pleasant, noise-free and satisfying whether at home or away.
Though its engineers have tried several ways to improve the “AM radio” performance of the LC90, this is where it meets its one Achilles heel, so to speak. It does have an internal ferrite rod antenna (unlike the now discontinued – again – Eton E1), the performance of which can be marginally improved with use of an inductive tuned loop antenna like the Terk Advantage. Absent that, extending the rod antenna also improves reception a little, as does connection of a reel-type extended wire antenna.
But despite all these attempts, the internal circuitry of the LC90, including its screen, creates a prodigious noise floor in the longwave and medium wave bands that all but the most powerful local stations cannot effectively overcome.
What this means is that while the LC90, as stated, is a good performer on shortwave, it will likely disappoint most on long and medium wave because even inexpensive AM radios will outperform it in this one respect. That means that, unfortunately, the LC90 is not a good option for me to pull in 740 Toronto when at home.
Having said that, no one yet has solved this noise problem and, given all the effort Choyong has put in to try and do so, it might well be unsolvable at least in an affordable way. Luckily, there are a wealth of very compact and inexpensive AM radios out there that can give one what one wants if he or she is determined to use MW to listen.
And that last point about determination is crucial. The fact is, now that Internet radio is almost universally available, that must be first choice for the listener focused on content and “easy listening”. If conditions are such that one can’t access what one wants to hear from AM, FM or SW, Internet radio access will more than likely provide it and in better listening quality. And the LC90 lets the user access Internet streaming from more places than any other radio — almost anywhere (except the very few places without access to a WiFi or cellular network).
But also conversely, on occasions when Internet radio is inaccessible, the LC90 provides other ways to receive entertainment and information “over the air”.
Furthermore, LC90 engineers are about to introduce music streaming and on-demand podcasts through another in an impressive series of firmware updates that continually have improved and enhanced the performance of this radio.
The LC90’s batteries have remarkably long life between recharges, another important factor whether portability is a convenience or a necessity.
Finally, Choyong has established a dialogue with the radio’s users through a Facebook page that provides for direct interaction with the LC90’s chief engineer and developer. In fact, that interaction is not only tolerated, it is encouraged, and has led to a number of enhancements, corrections and improvements that have been implemented in the LC90 through firmware updatws.. Where else has that happened?
So, my judgement is an enthusiastic “yes” — the LC90 can readily serve as one’s exclusive standalone portable, entirely suitable as it is for everyday use around home or on the go.