Kandersteg, Switzerland (Photo by Matt Foster)
Many thanks to SWLing Post contributor, David Iurescia (LW4DAF), who shares the following note from SwissInfo.ch:
Since you’re no doubt wondering what Christmas sounds like in Switzerland’s four national languages, we’ve dusted off an old radio interview, produced in 1975 by the Swiss Short-wave Service, later Swiss Radio International and ultimately SWI swissinfo.ch:
Thanks for sharing this bit of radio nostalgia, David!
Radio Waves: Stories Making Waves in the World of RadioBecause 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 Mike Terry, Dan Robinson, Ulis Fleming, and William Lee for the following tips:
GENEVA — Switzerland is embarking on the next phase of its digital radio switchover strategy. In May René Wehrlin, media specialist at Switzerland’s Federal Office of Communications (Ofcom) announced the country’s next steps toward the country’s total transition to DAB+.
Ofcom officially confirmed in 2019 that the nation would say “adios” to all FM radio programs by the end of 2024 at the latest. At the time, the “Digital Migration” (DigiMig) working group, set up by the Swiss private and public radio sectors and Ofcom in 2013, stated that 68% of radio listening was digital, 37% of which was via DAB+ and 15% exclusively via FM.[…]
Guyana’s President David Granger late Friday said his administration rejected a request by the United States (US) to use the medium wave radio frequencies of this South American nation to broadcast Voice of America programmes to Venezuela.
Mr. Granger said Guyana turned down the request because of security, health and political risks that Guyana could expose itself to with Venezuela which is claiming the Essequibo Region that makes up about two-thirds of this former British colony.
“Given the length of an unpoliced western border, the influx of refugees, the unsettled territorial question and the public health risks, it would not be in our national interest to do anything to contribute to destabilising relations at this time,” the President said.
A US Embassy spokeswoman said the American government was no longer interested in the project. ” The U.S Agency for Global Media is not actively considering this anymore. It is important that the people of Venezuela have access to uncensored news from credible Venezuelan and international journalistic news sources. Guyana has shown leadership in the past, in defense of representative government by joining other Lima Group members from the Americas to strive for a democratic resolution to the crisis in Venezuela,” she said.[…]
The Chinese navy has warned off a US military plane that briefly flew close to the southern coast of China, north of the Taiwan Strait, according to a Beijing-based think tank.
In a 34-second scratchy radio recording released by the South China Sea Strategic Situation Probing Initiative (SCSPI), a think tank based in Beijing, a man – purported to be a Chinese naval official – can be heard saying in English: “This is China Naval Air Force on guard, you are approaching Chinese air domain, change your course immediately or you will be intercepted.”
He then repeated the warning in Mandarin Chinese.The institute said on its Twitter account that the recording was captured on Thursday morning by a radio amateur. It remains unclear which aircraft was involved, or if there was any face-off in the air.[…]
Charity Intelligence is recommending donors support Farm Radio International for the coronavirus pandemic. Farm Radio has a network of over 1,000 radio programs reaching more than 250 million people in 41 countries across Africa.
To donate to Farm Radio’s covid-response
Communication is critical in the early stages of a disease outbreak to give people information. Rumours swirl that Africans cannot get coronavirus. Tanzania’s president, Magufuli, said churches should stay open because the coronavirus is “satanic” and “cannot survive in the body of Christ.” As all have witnessed, fake news has harmful consequences with the quick coronavirus.
Farm Radio International is a Canadian, medium-sized charity with donations of $3.9m in 2018. Typically, a charity of this size would not be front of mind in a global response. Yet Farm Radio has the existing platform and local operations to play an effective role reaching millions quickly in a coronavirus response. Early communication is an urgent need. […]
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Many thanks to SWLing Post contributor, Dennis Dura, who shares the following article from SwissInfo.ch. Make sure you visit SwissInfo.ch to listen to their embedded recordings:
What did SWI swissinfo.ch sound like for the first seven decades of its existence? The short answer: a radio station.
From the mid-1930s to 2004, Switzerland’s international service was Swiss Radio International (SRI). The first few decades of SRI’s existence were the heyday of shortwave – it was often the only way of getting news directly from other countries.
A brief history of SRI, the predecessor of swissinfo.ch, helps explain why you hear what you do in the video above.
What began as the Swiss Short Wave Service in 1935, would grow from broadcasting programmes in German, French, Italian and English to include other European languages and Arabic, and eventually change its name to Swiss Radio International.
The international service was considered a voice of neutrality during times of war, first during World War II, followed by the decades of the Cold War and up to and including the first war in the Gulf in the early 1990s.
This decade would mark the beginning of the end for Switzerland’s shortwave broadcasts. Shortwave transmitters gave way to relaying programmes via satellite, and this, in turn, would give way to the internet when the service went online in 1999 as SRI’s website.
In 2004, the plug was pulled for good on SRI as part of budget cuts, but not swissinfo.ch. Now producing exclusively online, the international service extended its linguistic reach by adding Russian, Japanese and Chinese, and publishing more video and audio reports.
Journalists working in swissinfo.ch’s current ten languages collaborate closely to set the editorial agenda, providing the necessary context in their stories so they are understood wherever they are read, seen, or heard in the world.
Project ‘The Sounds of…’
This article is part of the project “The Sounds of…” produced with our partner media organisations Polskie Radio, Radio Canada International, Radio Romania International and Radio Prague International. Further videos have been produced by journalists at these outlets, to give an insight into their work in these countries.
Photo by Ajeet Mestry on Unsplash
(Source: Fortune via Mark Fahey)
Switzerland Is Doing Away With Over-the-Air TV. Could the U.S. Do the Same?
Rabbit ears and other TV antennas could be useless in Switzerland before too long.
The Swiss government has given the country’s public broadcaster approval to turn off its digital terrestrial TV (known as over-the-air to most people) by the end of 2019. It will be the first nation in Europe to do so.
Most Swiss have high speed broadband internet connections and cable networks in their homes, so the move is unlikely to affect many citizens. Only 1.9% of the population, about 64,000 people, reportedly take advantage of the service that’s being discontinued.
Other European nations are expected to follow Switzerland’s lead in the next 10 to 15 years. And while many Americans believe the right to free, over-the-air broadcasts are protected, that’s not quite as cut and dry as it might seem.
Yes, the federal government licenses the airwaves to television stations (among other entities). […]But the government doesn’t license networks, only individual stations, as outlined by the FCC.
“We license only individual broadcast stations,”: the agency says in a 2008 report explaining its authority.
[…]Put another way: Networks are not required to broadcast their shows over the air.[…]
(Photo: SwissInfo.ch)
Many thanks to my buddy, Rob Wagner, for passing along yet another great article with archived sound clips from Swiss Radio International.
Click here to read Switzerland’s international voice in a changing world.
The host of Switzerland in Sound, Bob Zanotti.
For any of you who listened to Swiss Radio International (SRI) on shortwave radio, you’ll no doubt know the name of long-time radio presenter Bob Zanotti. For me, his deep, rich voice was synonymous with SRI.
What you may not know is that Zanotti hosts his own website called Switzerland In Sound. It is chock-full of up-to-date Swiss information, news (Tina Turner became Swiss?), interviews, thoughts, musings and a wealth of vintage recordings from SRI.
If you were a fan of The Swiss Shortwave Merry-Go-Round, you’ll be pleased to discover the many recordings he has of The Two Bobs (Bob Zanotti and Bob Thomann).
Bob also manages a Facebook page for Switzerland in Sound. If you’re on Facebook, I encourage you to join his group.
Check out Switzerland In Sound:
http://www.switzerlandinsound.com
(Photo: SwissInfo.ch)
(Source: swissinfo.ch)
During the Second World War, Switzerland’s fledgling short wave radio service was essential to its attempts to communicate its policies and actions to an external audience made up of both foreign governments and the Swiss abroad.
The archives of the Short Wave Service (SWS), founded in 1935, have been digitalised and are now available online (See link). SWS was the forerunner to Swiss Radio International (SRI) which later became swissinfo.ch.
The manuscripts of news bulletins from this dark time in Europe reveal Swiss thinking on events both out of its control and right on its doorstep as the country desperately held on to its beloved neutrality.
In Switzerland’s national languages (German, French, Italian) as well as English, Spanish and Portuguese, SWS broadcast news and analysis of military events on both sides.
It also reported on living conditions of Australian, New Zealand, South African and American POWs interned in mountain retreats, and issued sharp rebukes of external criticism of Swiss government policy.
“Switzerland finds herself today in one of the most peculiar situations of her long history. From a certain viewpoint, she is surrounded by one power only. From another viewpoint, she is surrounded, among others, by three defeated powers: Austria, France and Italy. Under these circumstances Switzerland has remained true to her traditional role of guardian of the Alpine passes,” began an English broadcast from Hermann Böschenstein in the wake of the fall of Mussolini in 1943.
The same broadcast went on to discuss dashed hopes that Italy’s fall would see a reopening of transport routes to the sea, praised the Swiss influence of the International Red Cross as “incontestable”, and noted that “all-out” training of Swiss army troops had resulted in “quite a few casualties lately” with the use of flame-throwers being responsible in some cases.
Treasure trove
Lausanne University’s François Vallotton, a specialist in contemporary audio-visual and media history in Switzerland, was unable to resist the lure of such a treasure trove of documents.
Vallotton, whose work focuses in particular on the Swiss Broadcasting Corporation (SBC) – the parent company of swissinfo.ch – convened a seminar to undertake initial research on the SWS archive documents.
The archives, which have been formatted into a database searchable by keyword, are particularly interesting for historians because the historiography of international radio services has not yet been developed, particularly in Switzerland.
Vallotton says analysis of the archives is unlikely to reinvent what is already known about Switzerland during the Second World War, but: “What is interesting is that it is a source that allows us to see the image that Switzerland wanted to present to the outside world.”
“That is something that is really new because before we examined local media which was aimed at the Swiss public.”
Broadcasts by SWS at that time were also notable for the fact that they were the first news bulletins produced by a dedicated radio editorial team; previously news bulletins had been written and read by journalists from the Swiss News Agency, a press organisation.
“The service treated events in a different manner than to the local media,” says Raphaëlle Ruppen Coutaz, who is doing his doctorate on the subject. “For historians, it’s precious because it is the only Swiss media outlet to address those abroad during the war.” [Continue reading…]
I have really enjoyed looking through the archives. Of particular interest are the corrections that were made before reading the news. They’re all there.