Tag Archives: Shortwave Radio

Listen to asteroid echos November 8th-9th

The massive Green Bank Telescope will be listening for CW tuned to put the asteroid's echo at a constant 2380 MHz (Photo Source: NRAO / AUI / NSF)

The excellent Southgate ARC has posted information on receiving signals that the Arecibo Observatory, the Deep Space Network Goldstone facility, the Green Bank Telescope and the Very Long Baseline Array will be bouncing off of the near-Earth asteroid 2005 YU55.

The asteroid will be making a 0.85 lunar distance flyby of Earth on November 8.

While the listening frequencies are well above the HF (shortwave) spectrum, many of you may have wide-band receivers or ham radio equipment that could tune in the signals. So, apologies for this slightly off-topic post. The amateur radio astronomer in me couldn’t help but promote this rather cool and unique opportunity.

From Southgate ARC:

Because YU55 will be so close to Earth, its radar echo will be detectable with even small antennas (~1 m^2). YU55’s echo will be a slowly drifting signal with a bandwidth of ~1 Hz within a few kHz of 2380 MHz or 8560 MHz.

[…]On November 8, 2011, 19:15 – 19:30 UTC, Arecibo will be transmitting a continuous wave tuned to put the asteroid’s echo at a constant 2380.000000 MHz at the Green Bank Telescope. Observers elsewhere on Earth will see the echo within 2 kHz of 2380 MHz, Doppler-shifted by the Earth’s rotation. It will be slowly drifting in frequency and have a bandwidth of ~0.6 Hz.

On November 9, 2011, 01:30 – 02:00 UTC, the Goldstone Deep Space Network facility will be be transmitting a continuous wave tuned to put the asteroid’s echo a constant 8560.000000 MHz at a second antenna at the Goldstone site. Other observers may see the echo shifted by as much as 6 kHz, and it will have a bandwidth of ~2 Hz.

Read the full article on the Southgate ARC website.

Shortwave Radio: One of 5 popular espionage techniques from former USSR

(Source: Top Secret Writers)

Shortwave radios have been a tool of the espionage trade for many years. Radios can transmit information encoded to be picked up by the receiver and then decoded.

This technique was used throughout World War I, World War II, and the Cold War. Like Steganography, radiograms are still being used today.

[…]The techniques were used by the Soviets during the Cold War many years ago, but it seems that they have remained long-lasting fixtures in Russian Espionage.

We actually reported on this back when news broke about the russian agents who used numbers stations for espionage purposes. Yep, shortwave radio is your friend if you don’t want people tracing where you are and what you’re listening to.

Mind you, when you live in a country that suppresses free speach, you also reach for a shortwave radio.

Read the full article that details four other popular espionage techniques from the former Soviet Union.

Radio makes us happy

Your key to happiness

I think we radio listeners have known this all along (Source: The Telegraph):

Over 1,000 Britons were polled via their smartphones and asked to record what media they were consuming and to rate their mood and energy levels while doing so.

Radio came out top, beating both TV and online, in the study called ‘Media and the Mood of the Nation’, with respondents recording a 100 per cent lift in happiness and 300 per cent boost to their energy levels when listening to a radio show versus not consuming any type of media at all.

Watching TV and surfing the internet also significantly boosts people’s happiness and energy levels, but failed to come close to the positive effect radio listening has on Britons’ well-being.

“People are the happiest and most energetic when listening to radio. It plays an important emotional role in people’s lives,” said Mark Barber, planning director at the Radio Advertising Bureau which commissioned the research.

Read the full article hear, then turn on a radio and let the happiness begin!

RNW will focus on free speech, eliminate most other broadcasting

RNW headquarters in Hilversum, Netherlands (photo coutesty: RNW)

(Source: Radio Netherlands Worldwide)

The Dutch cabinet has announced plans to cut back the activities of Radio Netherlands Worldwide. The Dutch world service will no longer provide information for Dutch people living abroad, or provide the rest of the world with a realistic image of the Netherlands.

Instead, Radio Netherlands Worldwide is to concern itself solely with providing information in countries where free speech is suppressed or threatened.

While I’m glad they’re keeping a focus on free speech, I’m certain these budget cuts will have a negative impact on the amazing content RNW produces each and every day.

Read full article here.

While some shortwave broadcasters are leaving the China market, one expands

(Source: The Epoch Times)

“While BBC is canceling its Mandarin broadcasts in April 2011 and Voice of America (VOA) its Mandarin and Cantonese broadcasts in October 2011, Sound of Hope Radio (SOH) Network announced that they will be expanding short-wave broadcasting to China to meet the demands of its Chinese audience”

Read full story in The Epoch Times

In an Internet World, Radio Lives

Thank you to Radio World for publishing this:

A teacher with an ETOW radio in Bor County, Southern Sudan. Courtesy Project Education Sudan

For as long as I can remember I’ve been passionate about radio.

From my earliest childhood memories in the 1980s during those final fading days of the Cold War — of my dad tuning in WWV in Fort Collins, Colo., on his dad’s vintage RCA 6K3; of falling asleep listening to my then-old-fashioned AM transistor radio; and of drinking in all those mysterious DX stations I heard over shortwave and medium-wave … I was the sort of kid (a throwback to a former generation, one might say) who couldn’t get enough of radio.

In those days when cable TV and video games and the first PCs upstaged and supplanted radio in nearly every American household, even in the blue collar town in which I grew up, it was nonetheless radio that captured my imagination, and taught me early on that everyone has a story. Radio taught me, too, that each voice is different in his or her consideration of what’s meaningful or newsworthy. I learned to understand or at least appreciate the diverse perspectives I heard in my vicarious radio journeys, and from these sprang my own opinions, hopes, beliefs. Radio became my teacher—a teacher who gave me, in my formative years, a global perspective.

I would have to say that radio has shaped my life. I suppose that’s why radio recently has become a mission for me…

…Today, I am the founder and director of Ears to Our World, a grassroots charitable organization with a simple objective: distributing self-powered world-band radios to schools and communities in the third world, so that kids, not to mention those who teach them, can learn about their world, too.

I want others –– children and young people, especially –– who lack reliable access to information, to have the world of radio within their reach.

Click here to read the full article.

More links: