(Source: ?Victor Goonetilleke via the WRTH Facebook page)
We have the DRM test in place for 9 – 13 Jan 2017. Please pass thisonto those you know who may be able to send in reports.Details are here below.
DRM test broadcast form KTWR Guam
Date 9 – 13 January 2017
Time UTC 1445 – 1515
Freq 9910 KHz
Power 90 KW
Mode B 64 QAM
Azimuth 290
Target South Asia (Ciraf 41)
Dates 9-13 January 2017Shakthi Varma TWR India
Noted DXer, Victor Goonetilleke, recently posted this circa 1971 QSL on Facebook and has kindly allowed me to share it here on the SWLing Post:
Click to enlarge
Victor comments:
“The Glory Days of Short Wave Radio. Can you imagine someone hand writing all this today?”
Indeed! I’m very impressed with the detail this Central African Republic broadcaster included in this QSL card–very neat handwriting! Certainly a gem and wonderful memory of hearing this domestic shortwave radio service so far outside its intended broadcast footprint! Thanks for sharing, Victor.
Victor Goonetilleke has kindly shared a passage he recently posted to Facebook. Victor pretty much sums up why I still listen to the shortwaves:
“For almost four score and 5 I enjoyed shortwave radio. Yes I was a DXer, and a dedicated listener. The thousands of hours of broadcasts I listened from the BBC, VOA, RNW, DW, RFI, Swiss Radio, NHK and many more of the international broadcasters influenced me over the years. The knowledge I gathered was transferred to hundreds of homes as I taught my students in class rooms and as a lecturer too in higher Colleges, in many social gatherings, day to day conversations with important people and everyday folks, what I gathered from my radio made them realize that there was a story out there.
And as the years went by one by one those stations started to go away and I became more and more a DXer and finally I have only those signals to bring me joy.
Tonight would you blame me for being a DXer, abandoned by the international broadcasters, if I sit back and enjoy this music through the crackle of shortwave and happy that I have a radio which few seems to understand these days.”
You can listen to the recording Victor made by clicking here: https://app.box.com/s/tcryw2ymt38gz8y6zaw4
I would also encourage you to read Victor’s guest commentary on BBG Watch which was prompted by the BBG pulling the (shortwave) plug on much of Asia.
Finally, in 2003, Jonathan Marks interviewed Victor Goonetilleke; you can watch the full interview below:
Visit with Victor Goonetilleke 2003 from Jonathan Marks on Vimeo.
Many thanks to SWLing Post reader, Richard Cuff, for sharing this article from The Straits Times which interviews our friend Victor Goonetilleke. This is one of the first articles I’ve seen in the international press which gives a listener’s perspective on recent cuts to shortwave broadcasting.
(Source: The Straits Times)
For 67-year-old Victor Goonetilleke, sitting with his headphones on in his house in the lush green Sri Lankan countryside, June 30 was the end of an era.
Voice of America’s (VOA) short-wave broadcasts to Asia abruptly went off the air, raising howls of protest from many of the US government-funded broadcaster’s listeners across the region.
But as the broadcasts had already been greatly diminished, this was not a surprise. The big Western radio broadcasters have gradually ceded the political “soft power” space they once dominated to a new heavyweight: China Radio International (CRI).
In recent years, Radio Canada International and Radio Netherlands Worldwide have shut down while the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) and VOA have cut back on their range of languages and hours of programming. Now, the VOA has left Asia.
Mr Goonetilleke is not just an avid radio listener. He professionally monitors radio frequencies for the VOA. He is also a former veteran radio correspondent with Radio Netherlands for 24 years in an era when short-wave radio broadcasts from the likes of the BBC, VOA, Radio Netherlands, and Deutsche Welle were often lifelines to other worlds for hundreds of millions especially in times of conflict and misery.
The BBC now broadcasts in 29 languages across the planet, down from a peak of 69 in the 1970s. CRI broadcasts in 65, up from a reported 43 in 2006. Some programmes are run by local FM stations.
These days, Mr Goonetilleke can listen to four hours of CRI broadcasts in Sinhala and Tamil daily, compared with 30 minutes each on BBC.
CRI’s Tamil language broadcast is one of its oldest, run by fluent Tamil speaker Zhu Juanhua, a Shanghai native better known by her tens of thousands of listeners as Kalaiarasi.
According to the CRI website, it has 3,165 listener clubs around the planet, including CRI netizens’ clubs.