[r_barton]

I got a Radio Shack Realistic DX-150 radio in 1972. Had fun listening to shortwave from all over the world. Now you get FM quality stations on the internet from all over the world. No static, no fading.

[dfwgator]

How many of these can you identify?

Shortwave Interval Signals
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hFRYKDF2kxs

[SamAdams76]

Thanks for the great flashback. For a short time in the 1990s, I was a shortwave radio aficionado. For those few years, I really got into it. The holy grail for me was the Grundig Satellit 700 set (pictured below) that I acquired around the 1992-1993 timeframe. It was wicked expensive for me at the time as I was just getting started in my career and not yet making good money. Before that I had something cheap from Radio Shack and I can't even remember the model.

I still have this radio today and even now it delivers the deep, rich sound that only German engineering can deliver. Once in a while I'll take it out and try to dial something good in on the SW bands but it's nothing like it used to be. The Internet just blew up shortwave radio broadcasting and as you state, it's just a shadow of itself.

But I have many happy memories of sitting at my picnic table on warm evenings, "DXing" - as we called it in the day. Sometimes I would pick up some really exotic music from some third world outpost and I'd sit out there transfixed, getting eaten alive by mosquitoes, but not caring as that music was nothing like I ever heard before.

[Okieshooter]

My first experience with short wave radio was in 1953 listening to a friends Hallicrafters. It peaked my interest in ham radio but it was 10 years later before I got my novice ticket as WN5JRH. Back then as novices we were restricted to code and crystal control.

I built my transmitter and purchased a crystal for the 40 meter novice band. Back in those days 40 meters was shared with foreign broadcasters. Much to my chagrin I discovered that my crystal was on the same frequency as Radio Moscow which made it impossible to work anyone during the nighttime as their signal was much stronger than mine.

I as been an active ham ever since and now hold an extra class license with call sign W5HJ.

[dfwgator]

My favorite Interval Signal probably was Radio RSA’s. I always found Radio Kiev’s also hauntingly beautiful.

And the best thing about Radio Moscow was “Moscow Nights.”

[norwaypinesavage]

I think I beat you at it by about a decade. I was interested in ham radio as well as SW. My first attempt was building a transmitter in the early 50's out of a soup can and a battery, when I was in first grade. Unfortunately, it didn't work very well at all.

Later, I did as best as I could on a paperboy's income, which meant building my own stuff. My transmitter (which actually worked) was home brew. My receiver was an Allied Radio Knight kit. I still remember placing orders to them at 100 N. Western Ave., Chicago, and then waiting days, and days, and days for them to get there.

I, too, was a regular WWV listener to get the correct time from Fort Collins, as well as some of the other stations you mentioned.

I found, though, that my interest was building, not using the "stuff". One of my last "conversations" was with a nearby ham who was describing the mercury vapor lamp in his back yard. After a number of minutes, I gave up on trying a response and tuned away. After about a half hour, I tuned back in, and he was still talking. I figured life was too short to keep up doing that. I let my license expire after the first five year period when I would have to lie on the renewal and say I still could do 13 wpm of Morse code. I could barely repeat the alphabet. That pretty much ended my SW radio career, and I became a mechanical engineer, instead of an electrical engineer.

[KarlInOhio]

I went to the Voice of America Museum at the old Cincinnati broadcast site about a month ago. As they build the museum they are only open one day a month so I will probably visit again this month or next.

Interesting piece of trivia: They had no microphones at the transmission site just in case someone took it over so they wouldn't be able to broadcast. They just broadcast programs sent over the phone to them.

[SpaceBar]

“Bob from Omaha writes ‘what do Soviets do for fun?”. Well Bob, Soviets do a lot of things for fun.” - Radio Moscow announcer

[teletech]

Your story took me back in time to when I first started my life long enjoyment of Short Wave radio. My Mom gave me an old Hallicrafters S-38 receiver and I soon figured out how to string up a wire antenna so I could monitor the Short Wave bands. This led to my getting in touch with a local Amateur Radio club and studying to get my “Novice” license. Sixty years later I am still in the hobby although I hold an Amateur “Extra Class” license now and my radio equipment has improved vastly over that S-38 receiver. I still prowl the Short Wave bands from time to time listening to far off lands but I soon return to my favorite 20 meter Amateur Radio band and take part in the Maritime Mobile Service Net or just enjoy a QSO with a fellow “Ham”. My wife is also an “Extra Class” licensed Ham operator who has 52 years in our hobby. I met her when she was 12 through Amateur Radio.

[matt1234]

In the ‘90’s I lived on the first floor of a 3 story apartment building. One day I strung a bare copper wire antenna on the roof, with an insulated connector wire running DOWN A DOWNSPOUT. I ran the connector wire out the bottom of the downspout and through a window to my SW radio. No one except me knew the antenna was there, and I used it for years...until they repaired the roof and took the antenna down.

[StAnDeliver]

"Radio Prague"

My personal favorite. A brief Handel interlude at the top of every hour, with a 15-minute news program in very good English.

[Bobalu]

There is a shortwave ISM band centered on 13.560mhz.

This is the old allocation that was given to medical diathermy machines.

You hear all sorts of stuff in this little band!

Propagation on this frequency is amazing!

I build a tiny transmitter that put out 10mw and left it on a tall hill in Griffith Park. (Los Angeles)

It had a waterproof case with bits of broken solar panel glued to the top. I placed an ATtiny84 processor on the board and programmed it to check the temp sensor and send out the reading once every 5 minutes. The ATtiny84 would send the data and then shut down power to the transmitter and go into sleep mode until time for the next transmission.
A small nimh coin-cell battery was able to gather enough charge to keep the rig going 24/7

I regularly could pick up the signal in El Paso, about 800 miles away. It worked for a little over 3 years and then met some kind of sad fate.

The antenna was a simple inverted vee fastened to a nearby tree limb and connected to the radio by a 15ft run of RG8 coax. The rig was screwed down on a small stump where it could get the sun

From the FCC regs.
15.225 (a) The field strength of any emission within the band 13.553-13.567mHz shall not exceed 15,848 microvolts/meter at 30 meters.

[Charles Martel]

I really enjoyed their 65 minute programs, especially the feature with Larry Wayne, Deutsche Welle's answer to Paul Harvey.

I remember that guy. I used to listen to "Across the Atlantic" on my dad's old Hallicrafters receiver. Many is the night I fell asleep to the soft glow of vacuum tubes.

It was such a different world back when the local TV stations numbered three or four, and they all signed-off after midnight.

[snarkpup]

About 30 years ago I got temporarily interested in listening to short-wave broadcasts and got a Drake receiver (either R7 or R7-A). By temporarily, I mean about ten days.

The first problem was that after a few days, the receiver started acting up. After three trips back to the factory for repairs, and coming back with more and weirder problems each time, it was declared a lemon and I got a refund for the whole thing.

The other problem was that everything I tried to listen to on the SW band was blown off the air by a half-dozen superstations (Radio Moscow, BBC, VOA, a religious broadcaster, and a couple of others). Each one was broadcasting with so much power on so many frequencies that no matter station I tried to tune in (listed in the World Radio TV Handbook) I got either nothing or one of those half dozen. Useless.

But before it conked out, the receiver was good for tuning in distant AM stations, since it had some good features for extracting weak signals from out of the noise. Nowadays, DXing AM stations is not terribly useful, since mostly what I get are simulcasts of Dave Ramsey and a couple of others.

[hoagy62]

I used to have a Radio Shack DX 66 shortwave radio. I remember on the back, it had a Motorola-Style antenna plug. One of my first cars after I became an adult was a 1963 Chrysler Newport. The cable to the whip antenna had a Motorola-style plug on it. I remember pulling the cable and plugging it into my DX 66 and then extending the whip antenna to its full 6 foot length. I was the only car in my city they could listen to the BBC while driving down the street. My greatest triumph in distance listening (or “DX-ing” as it was called) was Radio South Africa one night in the summer of 1993. That was my rarest pick up.

I have also heard Qol Yisra’el and sveral others. I actually got to call in to ‘Happy Radio’ with Tom Meijer and got on the air.
And...I still occasionally tune in to WWV and WWVH.

[dfwgator]

And of course, Lilliburlero on the BBC

https://youtu.be/WuJ5_j4U6HQ?t=68

[fella]

Back around 1960 a friend of mine built a Heathkit SW receiver that’s when I got into it. I went out and got a Bluapunkt. Later I had an used ‘63 Volvo that came with an AM/FM/SW radio in it and that’s where the Mrs. got into SW.

[Riley]

Anybody else play with SDR (Software Defined Radio)?

The ‘radio’ is a USB device the size of a thumb drive, that you connect to an antenna feed. The software (free, all kinds of plug-ins for it) does the rest. The feed comes in from the antenna, not the Internet.

I was fooling around with that recently, had to put it down for a while because I have too much coming at me. It looked promising.

[Southside_Chicago_Republican]

Thanks for the memories! I got started in SW when I was in high school back in the ‘70’s. My grandmother had a ‘40’s-vintage cabinet model radio up in her attic that had belonged to my great-grandfather, and she let me have it. It really opened a whole new world to me. It had beautiful sound on AM, and was pretty good on SW too. I eventually graduated to various Radio Shack Realistic models, and bought a Grundig portable a few years ago. I haven’t listened for quite a while, mainly because so many stations have gone dark. In my recent years of listening, I gravitated to the numbers stations and other oddities.

I might just dig out the Grundig later and see what’s still out there.

[AllAmericanGirl44]

bkmk