Many thanks to SWLing Post contributor, Ulis (K3LU), who shares the following note via his Twitter feed:
“Comrade Africa” – a historic look at the GDR’s (Radio Berlin International) Cold War era shortwave broadcasts to Africa via the BBC World Service:
Click here to listen to the documentary at the BBC World Service.
Many thanks to SWLing Post contributor, Dan Robinson, who shares the following guest post:
by Dan Robinson
It is rare — no super rare — that we get any good news these days about shortwave broadcasting. Remember the excitement a few years ago when Guinea returned to shortwave? Then, Nigeria returned but has now become worryingly intermittent.
Today, a station returned to shortwave, one that was absent for some time.
CFVP, the low power relay of 1060 kHz AM in Calgary, Alberta returned to 6,030 kHz with the help of amateur radio operators. The station had been off the air through 2019 — the last time it was reported was in late 2018 when it was relaying CKMX 1060 AM in Calgary.
According to a note posted on the World of Radio group:
“two engineers from Bell Media, Dale and Gerry, who are also hams, VA6AD and V6QCT respectively, rebuilt the transmitter (partially with ham radio parts) and repaired the connection to the antenna with a temporary matching network…the temporary matching network means that not all the 100 watts are going into antenna.”
According to Harold Sellers, who is acting as eQSL manager for the re-activated shortwave station, CFVP 6030 was back on the air as of 0900, though I was unable to hear it until later on June 19th. Best reception was via SDR sites in southern Alberta, northern Montana, Idaho and up in Edmonton, Alberta.
Programming consisted of straight comedy routines from Funny 1060 AM, the Calgary station that carries old recordings of standup comedians, with local IDs and ads mixed in every few minutes. I made a video showing CFVP reception on one of the SDR sites, changing between 6,030 kHz and 1060 kHz which was also audible at SDR locations.
Earlier this year, in March, DX’er Don Moman reported the following, which proved to be true:
” . . .They had a transmitter problem which has been fixed, but they have also identified an antenna issue. The problem [was] troubleshooting and testing the antenna and matching network in the point blank presence of a 50kw AM transmitter. Testing/ repair on CFVP radiator will be done when the 50kw signal can be powered down or off, to enable more accurate testing. Bell will not power down or shut down during ratings periods which are long and frequent. Having said that, repair will likely happen with the above taken into consideration, as well as warm weather. Best guess: Before next winter at the latest, this spring the earliest.”
In August, Harold Sellers reported that the ground at the base of the shortwave tower was under water, and that grounding rods and ground wire needed replacement, and later that the tower grounding had been replaced/fixed. The transmitter also had issues but was repaired and back out at the site.
I quickly sent a reception report to the email address provided by Harold Sellers, and was pleased to receive back a eQSL which Harold said was the second one sent out to those who heard the station on its re-activation day.
Those of us who began our listening in the 1960’s (some much earlier than that!) remember the great days when Canada had a number of regional stations on shortwave. QSLs from some of those, including a 1983 QSL from CFVP/Calgary, are attached to this article.
A screenshot of CFVP as it was being heard on reactivated 6,030 kHz is also shown.
Interestingly, the Wikipedia listing for CKMX shows 6,030 kHz as being active — it’s not known, however, whether the Wikipedia listing was ever updated to note that 6,030 kHz was off the air for nearly 2 years.
Photo from K3LR’s “super station.” (via QRZ.com)
Many thanks to SWLing Post contributor, Mikael, who writes:
It was late or earlier here in France, when I switched on my Tecsun PL-660 with its wire antenna plugged in.
As always, I was scanning the 40 meters band. I obtained my ham licence in 2019 but still do not have a rig to transmit on HF, so I am listening and learning.
Well…it was not exactly typical, because usually at this hour I am asleep. It was 02:00 UTC. I was not able to catch a lot traffic as Europe is asleep or just beginning to wake up…
And I hit the 7128 kHz frequency. Amazing! Lots of traffic and some very powerful stations. As I was listening, I figure out that it was not a chaotic traffic, but an organized one where every participants were referring to one or two call signs, which were giving a turn to speak and call CQ to make contact all over the world and try to help each other to make contact.
Oh! it is a net! And what a net ! The “Big Gun Friendship Net” where you can find amazing big station from all over the world and mainly from north America and Europe.
Now I am listening to these friendly voices at least one or three times per week. I spotted some recurring call-signs, and thanks to the qrz.com database I could check out their personals pages with the amazing photos of their antennas and installation. I can cite WP3R, Angel from Arecibo Porto Rico who gives us news about the state of the Arecibo Radio Telescope. K3VOX almost always the master of ceremony of the Net from Florida, who manage it so kindly and friendly, but there are many others Tim, K3LR, Mr. Pete YO7MPD from Romania always present and M0KPD/M with its impressive mobile installation who pops up sometimes.
Listening to this net, I could enjoy the contacts they are able to do, Kuwait, Nicaragua, Russia and many more.
Many thanks to all the participants of the Big Gun Friendship Net who make it possible!
If you are an SWL, I encourage you to tune in 7128 kHz between 02:00 UTC and 04:00 UTC; it is amazing!
Hoping one day I would be able to respond to the “CQ DX, CQ Delta X-Ray…” launched by the net.
73
Mikael, F4IGT
Thank you for sharing this, Mikael! What a great recommendation.
I don’t think I’ve ever noted this on the SWLing Post before, but I often use radio nets like the Big Gun Friendship Net to not only check propagation, but also how sensitive and selective a portable shortwave receiver is in SSB mode. It’s a great one stop shop! Simply tune to the frequency and listen to the stations check into the net. Their callsigns make it easy to ID the station location and, quite often, they’ll give detailed TX information such as their rig, power output, and antenna.
Thanks again for sharing!
Many thanks to SWLing Post contributor, 13dka, who shares the following guest post:
by 13dka
When I got the IC-705 in late October 2020, I didn’t get that much chance to enjoy it at the dike: After a couple of initial tests and 2 nightly “FYBO” MW DX sessions in November, a way too long and wet winter struck the German North Sea coast, with nighttime temperatures recovering to 2-digit Celsius figures only in the past few weeks. I took the opportunity to do more experiments with loops, preamps and a phasing unit to improve the RFI-stricken reception at home, so I could at least listen to European hams on 80 and 40m raving about their new 705s and start to write my own musings about that lovely little radio, recently posted here.
June 1st, 202
Finally, acceptable temperatures at night! But they come with a downside: When I connected the vertical around 8:00pm (local time), it was still almost 2 hours before sunset and a lot of thunderstorms in Europe made even 14 MHz very noisy, my hopes for some nice catches were immediately taking a dive. A short scan of the bands brought up nothing special, the only notable thing being the CB and 10m bands being moderately open. I should’ve known better: As soon as the sun splashed into the ocean, grayline propagation worked its magic!
Grayline while receiving Japan, June 1st
As the image probably hints, a couple of Japanese “big guns” produced some nice, comfy signals on the monopole, in addition to the South American and Carribbean stations usually booming in here!
Video: A short collection of ham stations heard around midnight
After midnight I noticed a residue signal of WWV on 20 MHz and still a few EU beacons on 10m. Both incredibly weak with QSB making them disappear but that’s where the 705 really shines – it’s not only picking up these grassroots signals just fine, it shows me that they’re there, or that they were there – a waterfall display keeps on proving that a perceived lack of activity on a band is often pure bad luck – you can tune across an entire band without hearing anything because on each frequency with some activity there’s the other (inaudible to you) station speaking right now, QSB is dipping the signal just when you tune past it…
June 5/6, 2021
That evening the Japanese stations were missing on 20m, I thought I picked one up on 17m, and like so often, the one odd Australian station came in on 20m. After midnight I noticed the 10m beacons again, there were even a few more of them. This time I brought my Belka DSP to the dike so I could compare it with the IC-705, after all the Belka proved to be my most sensitive portable before! The devastating result is likely owed to the fact that the Belka is pretty picky about passive antennas not being matched very well to its input (which is much optimized for the whip) but it picked up diddly squat. If it isn’t a testimony for the sensitivity of the IC-705, it might be one for its aptitude to cope with all sorts of antennas.
Then I tuned into the 10m SSB range and I was veeeery surprised to hear VO1FOG from St. Johns, Canada! This is the first time I heard a transatlantic signal on 10m in a solar minimum ever, but it was with condx only elevated enough for some daytime DX within the EU…and literally in the middle of the night! The signal was very unstable though, he later switched to the 12m band which worked better. Back to what I said about the waterfall display above: Without it, I could’ve missed this station with a pretty high probability simply because I didn’t expect any activity up there, so I wouldn’t have tuned across that band for very long, and without seeing the signal while the VFO is already somewhere else…
I also heard another new country (Ecuador) in SSB, the usual collection of Carribbean islands and some participants of the “Museum Ships Weekend Event” including NI6IW, which is the vanity call of the history-charged USS Midway in San Diego. The “Japanese” station JW4GUA turned out to be on Svalbard island, with the main town Longyearbyen being the northernmost town in the world, only 650 miles from the north pole, and I don’t hear stations from there very often!
Video: June 5th
June 10/11
The past days saw the SFI passing 80 and 11/10m becoming quite busy. By the time I parked the car at the dike, SFI had dropped to 73. That evening the grayline confined itself to colorizing the horizon. 10m and 11m were still full of signals, I could still hear 2 British chaps chatting on 27 MHz at 3:00 in the morning, but nothing really “extraordinary” was coming in – the one odd VK, more Carribbean islands, one Argentinian but not much from other parts of South America, it never gets boring how this all defies predictability. But as always I heard most of the North American continent, not booming in much that night but I followed 2 POTA activations for a while, which are usually at most 100W stations working a lot of other “barefoot” stations and I heard almost all of them. In the morning grayline window for the west coast I finally got one solid signal from Oregon. All my radio life, the US west coast has been a tough target for some reason.
The signal had that typical “over the pole” sound, a relatively quick phasing imprinted into the signal by the charged particles converging over the pole, causing northern lights in the region and that exiting feeling when observing really big, planetary scale physics in realtime, over here at my listening post. The magic of shortwave. 🙂
After the post touting the IC-705 as a SWL/BCL receiver, demonstrating it on the broadcast bands seems mandatory to me. However, capturing cool BC DX is a very different business than waiting on the ham bands for interesting stations coming and going and collecting spectacular (-ish) results in a single night this way. Broadcast schedules have to be studied, current “hardcore” DX targets identified… and I have to admit that I’m out of that loop currently. Just turning the knob and recording whatever is populating the bands, and doing that between 21-22:00 UTC, when all programs are directed towards anywhere except Europe turned out to yield pretty boring results. Here it goes anyway:
Video: Browsing the most important BC bands
The antenna I was using in these videos was a simple wire running up a 10m/33′ fiberglass pole, forming a very archetypical “monopole” or “Marconi” antenna, just a vertical wire, no counterpoise, no matching network, no un-un, transformer or flux capacitor. I planned on using this to make some experiments about the practical benefits (for reception) of all the components it’s now lacking, but it already demonstrates that the beauty of receive-only antennas is that they often don’t require crazy efforts: On the conductive soil at the dike it works pretty well (good signals all over the bands and sufficiently low takeoff angle) as it is.
The evening and the 2 full nights at the dike once again had condx that nobody would phone home about:
SFI, A and 3-hourly K-indices while I was at the dike.
It’s not that these numbers always fully explain actual and current condx but decreasing SFI and rising A/K-indices mean low expectations. Despite the condx still characterized by the solar minimum that way, the location is always delivering proper DX for my radios. Unless stormy or severely unsettled geomagnetic conditions give DX a day off, there’s almost always something to take home, be it a new country, a rare island, unexpectedly loud signals from the other end of the planet at unusual times and/or on unusual bands or other ionospheric mysteries.
Speaking of location: These videos demonstrate the properties of that listening post as much as the capability of the IC-705 to harvest them, and they don’t put that into relation to other radios, so you have to rely on my word on this: Compared to what I brought to that place so far it’s jaw-droppingly good, but a big contributor to that is that only few of my other radios can really cope with the antennas I like to use out there in first place. A radio like the IC-705 is sure making the most out of location and antenna, but it’s not the key component because a low-noise location is everything, it always was and it is today more than ever. Without it, radios and antennas can’t really play their jokers.
Many thanks to SWLing Post contributor, 13dka, who shares the following guest post:
by 13dka
When Thomas got wind of its development in 2019 he immediately asked “could the Icom IC-705 be a shortwave listeners holy grail receiver?”. I usually wince a little when I hear “holy grail” because it means very different things to different people, it’s also a moving target with many people aiming at the spot where it was decades ago. But Thomas certainly had a very level-headed assembly of technical performance, quality and practicality requirements in mind when he used that term, and I thought he might be onto something!
There are some excellent, trustworthy reviews of the IC-705 out there. The following is not one of them, I just want to share an opinionated breakdown on why I think this is an interesting radio for SWLs/BCLs indeed, also deliberately ignoring that it’s actually a transceiver.
While the era of superhet/DSP-supported tabletop holy grails ended with the discontinuation and sell-off of the last survivors more than a decade ago, powerful PC-based SDR black boxes were taking over the mid-range segment and it became very slim pickings for standalone SWL receivers: Thomas just recently summed up the remaining options here.
Between the steady supply of inexpensive yet serviceable Chinese portables, upgraded with a least-cost version of DSP technology, and the remnants of the high end sector there’s very little left to put on the wish list for Santa – that doesn’t need to be paired with a computer that is.
No surprise that SWLs/BCLs in search of new quality toys with tangible controls are taking a squint over the fence to the ham transceiver market: Hams are still being served the best and the latest in radio technology in all shapes and sizes, and even entry-level rigs usually come with feature-rich general coverage receivers. But transceivers never had SWLs much in their focus in the past decades, and particularly not BCLs: Frontend adaptation, additional AM filters, switches and functions would’ve meant increasing costs and so transceivers were never perfected for that purpose. DSP and SDR technology allowed for improvements on that without actually adding (much) hardware and so some interesting alternatives surfaced in the past years, but most of them still come with little downers, at least for BCLs.
Many thanks to SWLing Post contributor, Alan Roe, who shares his latest A21 season guide to music on shortwave.
Click here to download Music on Shortwave A-21 v3 (PDF)
Note that we’ve created a permanent page for Alan Roe’s guides!
This page will always have the latest version of Alan’s guide available for download.
Many thanks to SWLing Post contributor, Don (W7SSB), who writes:
Hi Thomas,
One of my friends has probably the best museum in the history of radio !
Your readers can spend days looking at all the information from the early days to present ! Plenty of pictures!
Don W7SSB
Thank you for the tip, Don! What a deep treasure trove of radio nostalgia!