{"id":67122,"date":"2026-09-28T07:15:36","date_gmt":"2026-09-28T11:15:36","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/swling.com\/blog\/?p=67122"},"modified":"2026-09-28T07:16:31","modified_gmt":"2026-09-28T11:16:31","slug":"the-vietnamese-marine-radio-network","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/swling.com\/blog\/2026\/09\/the-vietnamese-marine-radio-network\/","title":{"rendered":"The Vietnamese Marine Radio Network"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>By Don Moore<\/b><\/p>\n

Don\u2019s traveling DX stories can be found in his book <\/i>Tales of a Vagabond DXer<\/i><\/a> [SWLing Post affiliate link]<\/em>. If you\u2019ve already read his book and enjoyed it, do Don a favor and leave a review on Amazon<\/a>.<\/i><\/strong><\/p>\n

Fair warning \u2026 This article comes with a quiz at the end!<\/b><\/p>\n

If asked to make a list of major maritime nations, I never would have put Vietnam on the list. It\u2019s not particularly big, and while it does have a long coastline, there are a couple dozen countries with longer ones. But I recently found out that in terms of tonnage, Vietnam has the fourth-largest fishing industry in the world – after China, Indonesia, and India. And that explains something else: why Vietnam has an extensive network of coastal radio stations far greater than would be expected for the country\u2019s modest coastline.<\/p>\n

Vietnam\u2019s marine radio network, however, is not easy to hear in Eastern North America. So when I planned my trip to Southeast Asia last winter, my top DX goal was to log all the stations in the network. From November to February, I made SDR spectrum recordings at seven different locations. I did a little DXing of the files while traveling, but it wasn\u2019t until this summer that I had the time to seriously go through them. The spectrum analyzer tool\u00a0in SDR-Console<\/a> allowed me to easily find what I was looking for in my many hours of recorded files. Google Translate gave me the means to understand what I was finding<\/a>. The combination made it possible to DX this network in a way I never would have imagined a few years ago. It\u2019s not just that I made loggings of all the stations. I also gained a deeper understanding of everything the network is doing. It turns out there\u2019s a lot to it, so let\u2019s take a look.<\/p>\n

The Duyen Hai Network<\/b><\/h2>\n

The parent organization of this radio network is Vishipel, a Vietnamese government-owned company that provides various services to the fishing and maritime industry. One of Vishipel\u2019s most important responsibilities is the coastal radio station network, known in Vietnamese as the Duyen Hai system. The name is the Vietnamese word for coastal<\/i>.<\/p>\n

Duyen Hai operates twenty-nine coastal radio stations strung along Vietnam\u2019s coast from north to south. Some sources give the number of stations as thirty or thirty-three, but those figures include locations used for satellite monitoring and other support activities. Via California DXer Ron Howard, we have this map showing the network stations.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Ron also found this three-page Vietnamese-language PDF file<\/a> listing the various services and schedules. In the rest of this article I\u2019ll be combining information from the Duyen Hai website, the PDF, the DX Info Centre website https:\/\/www.dxinfocentre.com<\/b><\/a>, and my own extensive monitoring.<\/p>\n

But first \u2026 about spelling. Vietnamese is written using the Latin alphabet but with an extensive system of diacritic marks. It’s far beyond what languages like French and German use and doesn’t always play well with English language websites. For that reason, I’ve omitted the diacritic marks from all the place names and Vietnamese phrases here. But a complete list of everything with the proper Vietnamese spelling can be found in this text file<\/a> and\/or PDF<\/a>. If you want to put any of these words and phrases into a text-to-speech engine or a translation application, you will have to copy from the text file to get the correct result.<\/p>\n

All twenty-nine Duyen Hai stations broadcast scheduled marine weather forecasts twice a day on VHF. Seventeen of those also broadcast the forecasts on 7906 kHz shortwave. Here is a list of those along with the UTC times of the reports on 7906 kHz. Note that three stations also use 8294 kHz. The coordinates are to their antenna sites, per the DX Info Centre website. I\u2019ve reformatted them so they can be pasted directly into Google Maps.<\/p>\n