Very interesting - thanks
Interesting read. Thanks.
I didn’t listen to shortwave very much, though we did have a shortwave radio.
But, I did listen to AM radio at night a lot when I was younger. I was fascinated by the fact that when the sun went down, you could receive AM stations from distant cities.
I grew up in the Washington, DC, area. I recall at night listening to far away stations, such as WBZ in Boston, WOWO in Ft. Wayne, Indiana, and WBT in Charlotte, North Carolina.
And being a big baseball fan, I enjoyed tuning in distant stations to listen to the baseball games. I recall hearing Reds games on WLW from Cincinnati, WJR in Detroit to hear Tigers games, WGN in Chicago for Cubs games, and KMOX in St. Louis for Cardinals games.
The good old days of shortwave radio provided me a plethora of information before the web came along, I also watched satellite dishes when I worked in the media seeing television from distant locales in the 1980’s and 90’s.
I had a “World Radio TV Handbook” and became engrossed with local broadcasting relayed on shortwave like the stations of the South African Broadcasting Corporation, ABC in Australia and Radio New Zealand, among others.
I listened to Reshet Bet from Israel and Mayak from the USSR, picked up shortwave relays of Swedish radio (P1 and P3), listened to Radio Luxembourg in German, English and French, plus several German outlets on SW.
I had the same experience. When I was a teenager, I was really into shortwave pirates back in the heyday of the 80s and 90s. Now I have a General license and I tinker around with it occasionally.
Thanks for the flashback! I was part of our HS radio club back in the early 70’s. Bought a very used National NC-300 from a radio swap meet in Detroit. Spent many hours listening to SW stations around the world. I just wish I had kept my QSL card collection :(
My experiences are exactly the same as yours with the `golden age of shortwave’. I listened on my Dad’s Zenith Trans-Oceanic, the old vacuum tube model in the black wood case.
Radio Moscow: “Nobody in the USSR speaks English that good! He must be a turncoat!”
Radio Havana: I perfected my Spanish listening to Castro rant for hours. The Cuban cha-cha music was pretty good.
Radio Budapest: The Racokczy March intro. Radio Nederland’s intro was carillon bells pealing.
BBC: World Service reportage was the best in the world.
Nowadays, next to nothing in the ether, even out of my Hammarlund HQ180A receiver (young hams call it a `boat anchor’).
Belongs to another time. Like listening to LP records.
My father introduced me to SW in the late Sixties. I remember sitting out in the garage with him in summer evenings listening to Deutsche Welle or once in a while to nonsensical propaganda broadcasts from Radio Pyongyang.
When I was a kid, we had a Radio Shack multi-band radio. When I couldn’t sleep, I would slowly dial through the shortwave bands. Today, same thing. Grundig YB400PE by the bed.
As I child I had a Panasonic with 2 shortwave bands, then as a teen got a Zenith Transoceanic and ran an antenna wire from my second floor window to a tree in the yard. (Still have the Zenith, but the band selector isn’t working as well as it should and if you don’t jiggle it just right, you end up with static.)
But, yes, the internet seems to have killed shortwave.
What model radio do you have? I have a little Tecsun PL 600, got last year as a ‘starter’ radio. Haven’t had time to play with it a lot, but it was magical when we picked up a station in England after only turning it on a couple of times.
-JT
I love listening to shortwave radio. My Tecsun PL-880 is by my side all night, every night. It has the ‘SSB’ (Single Side Band) for HAM listening too.
Frequency Ranges:
FM: 64 – 108 MHz / 76 – 108 MHz / 87.5 – 108 MHz
MW: 522 - 1620 kHz (band step 9 kHz), 520 - 1710 kHz (band step 10 kHz)
LW: 100 kHz to 519 kHz (tuning step 1 kHz or 9 kHz)
SW: 1711 kHz to 29999 kHz (tuning step 1 kHz or 5 kHz)
I get my nightly dose of Alex Jones, TruNews, etc... along with many other programs on it. I can’t imagine being without it.
This thread for me is walk down memory lane.
I spent many hours listening to AFRTS, Radio Australia, Radio Nederland, Radio Moscow, BBC World Service....I even occasionally braved listening to Radio Tirana.
Same here .... carried a AM/FM/SW1/SW2 portable w external antennas of sorts during my entire military career..... BBC was my information haven as well as my time set for my watch...... beep...beep...beep ........beeeeeeeep.
Still listen each day at home .
That brings back great memories. Now in the Internet age no one thinks of what a big deal it was to turn on a radio and hear a radio station on another continent. I grew up around shortwave radio. My father had an old Zenith tube-type receiver that still worked. I finally got a multiband transistor radio as a Christmas present. I bought an old Hallicrafters receiver.
I often listened to the news on Radio Australia before going to school. Deutsche Welle was a regular - they continued broadcasts in German until a few years ago, then that ended. I liked the program that had the title in English although the announcer spoke in German, “Jazz Hot and Sweet.” I remember during the financial crisis on 2008, I would get the financial news from Deutsche Welle and then the same from Radio Australia. I got a glimpse of the European and Asian markets for the day. The last big even I learned about on shortwave was one morning in 2011 when I turned on Radio Australia and they announced the disastrous earthquake/tsunami in Japan. About the only thing I listen to regularly as far as shortwave broadcasts is Radio Australia.
When I was young they bought me a Grundig radio.
Zenith Trans-Oceanic G500
Probably my biggest shortwave moment was listening to Radio Beijing in 1989 during the Tiananmen Square protests. When the clampdown occurred, I heard the broadcast with the announcer saying that people were being killed. Then an hour later, the announcer was replaced with somebody repeating the government line.
I found the audio on YouTube, and I shared a thread about it.
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1147233/posts
When I was a teen-ager in the sixties, my granddad was in his late eighties. He retired as a federal judge, but began his career as a boy telegrapher on the Lehigh Valley railroad. In those days news traveled by telegraph he remembered relaying “San Francisco destroyed by earthquake” along his line. In his later years he was nearly blind, but he would have me sit beside him and tune a National shortwave radio onto some high speed code transmission. His mind and talent with Morse were still sharp and with a pencil and paper he would effortlessly mark down letters blazing by at 40wpm.
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