Posted on 07/04/2016 9:24:15 AM PDT by Zionist Conspirator
Way back in the early 70s, my mother's youngest brother (who was a seasonal worker for the US Army Corps of Engineers), as was his habit, brought his car over to our house while he was away on "the boat" (as we all called it). But this time he left something else . . . an very plain-looking, ordinary radio.
Back in those days FM was still fairly exotic. AM was still king, and that's where most of the music and regular radio programming was. This little radio happened to have both AM and FM. But it had a third option--something labeled "SW."
I had no idea what this "SW" was at the time, so naturally I began listening. At first all I got was noise. Then I noticed some of the noise was decidedly atypical for radio static. There were Morse code signals, muffled voices (I found out later they were hams), things that sounded like a constant roar (we assumed these were the "motors" of ships and planes) as well as what most people know as "woodpeckers."
This was all very interesting, but it certainly didn't seem to have any entertainment value. Then before long, I noticed that at night, I started picking up stations (though nowhere near as clear as the other two bands). And what stations!
The first was station HCJB, the Voice of the Andes in Quito, Ecuador (a Protestant missionary station). Then came the Voice of America . . . Radio Canada International . . . BBC World Service . . . and then I discovered the really exotic stuff--Radio Moscow . . . Radio Havana Cuba . . . Swiss Radio International . . . Deutsche Welle . . . Radio Nederland Wereldemroep . . . Swiss Radio International . . .
Yes . . . I had, quite by accident, stumbled upon the wonderful world of international broadcasting!
In those days most adults had lived through World War II and I had of course heard of Tokyo Rose. Here was the same thing! Not only did I get to listen to the government radio of exotic foreign countries, but I had a whole half a world of "bad guys" to listen to, just like the grown ups had thirty years before!
Naturally I gave names to the various Commie announcers. The two most common English language announcers on Radio Moscow I named Moscow Mildred and Leningrad Larry. Radio Havana Cuba had three: Havana Hannah, Santiago Sam, and Cuba Clyde. It was all so magical.
And there was something else as well . . . that wonderful time signal broadcast continuously from the National Bureau of Standards in Fort Collins, Colorado--an obsessive-compulsive's dream!
Then after I graduated from high school I decided I wanted a better radio. I found one in a mail order catalogue . . . a ten band beauty with two short wave bands. Homina-homina-homina!!! I enjoyed that radio so much over the decades. I kept it by my bed so I could listen to it at any time, though of course it was portable. The only problem was that two short wave bands, like the one I had access to previously, wasn't enough. It didn't have the whole spectrum. There were stations out there I couldn't get or couldn't find. Plus my beloved time signal immigrated across the band and at times disappeared completely.
I dreamed of a humongous digital receiving set that could get everything, even the broadcasts of Irish anarchists on a ship at sea whose broadcaster had to be turned off intermittently to keep it from melting down. Well, I was poor and couldn't afford the coveted Grundigs or any such thing. It was just me and my ten band for thirty years (and the old analogue dial slipped a lot and at times couldn't even access everything it should have).
Before going further, I would like to reminisce just a little bit about those stations and those broadcasts.
Voice of America was important to me because I could actually listen to exotic foreign languages I had only read of before, languages my parents had never heard spoken in their lives. There would be the "ding" at the top (or bottom) of the hour followed by a voice saying "This is the Voice of America; the following program is in [fill in the blank]." Wow.
And straight out of World War II was AFRTS, the American Forces Radio and Television Service.
Deutsche Welle was important because it represented a country that not too long ago had been an enemy, but was now an ally. I really enjoyed their 65 minute programs, especially the feature with Larry Wayne, Deutsche Welle's answer to Paul Harvey. And at the end of each of his programs he would always close by saying "with regards from Jezzy, the Cat What Am!" Unfortunately they eventually cut back to just twenty minutes and Larry Wayne and Jezzy were gone.
Sunday nights meant "Happy Station" on Radio Nederland hosted by the redoubtable Tom Meijer. "Happy Station" had begun way back in 1928 with Eddie Startz and was one of the oldest and longest-lasting programs in broadcasting history.
Albania was one of the most isolated and repressive countries on the world under the heel of the unlamented Enver Hoxha (the only country to actually make the worship of G-d a crime), but their signal came in loud and clear. I recall one time the announcer chirping that in Albania "the socialist spring is blooming with all the colors of the rainbow."
HCJB and Family Radio WYFR often carried the old gospel dramatic program "Unshackled." Does anyone else remember that? HCJB also had a program called "The Cracker Barrel" where they read viewer mail.
And of course for many years I was a regular listener (especially on Shabbat and holidays) of Qol Yisra'el, the Voice of Israel.
My QSL card collection (which I still have) is small, but I was very proud of it. I got cards from Qol Yisra'el, HCJB, Radio Nederland's "Family Radio," the Voice of Turkey, Radio Japan, Radio Australia (famous for having gone completely broke at one time), the Voice of Spain, Deutsche Welle, and various other stations (I'm sure I've forgotten several). I had two rules though: I never sent for a card to a Communist or an Arab station.
Other Communist stations I picked up other than those I have mentioned included Radio Peking (yes, that was actually its name at the time), Radio Prague, Radio Sofia, Radio Budapest, Radio Kiev, and Radio Vilnius. I never did find Radio Berlin International (the East German station). One time I actually picked up Qaddafi's Radio Jamahiriya ("the voice of the Socialist People's Libyan Arab Jamahiriya") for a few days.
Other exotic stations I picked up were the Voice of Spain, Swiss Radio International, RAI (Italy), Radio Japan, Portugal, the Voice of Turkey, Radio Cairo, Radio RSA (South Africa from Johannesburg), the Voice of Free China (via WYFR in Okeechobee, Florida), and the Pinochet-era Voice of Chile (great music!).
In the early years of this millennium I finally achieved my dream of getting a digital short wave receiver that actually had the entire short wave spectrum on it. Unfortunately, the Internet was already cutting into international shortwave broadcasting as the medium by which governments propagandized each other.
What brought this whole post on was the fact that half a year ago I noticed that my valiant little digital radio was giving forth distorted sounds. It had been around a long time, so I guess it certainly had the right. I tried to find someone who could fix it, but the regular repairman had gone out of business and the people at the local ham club (no, I'm not a member) said that the little radio's time had come and gone. I knew I had to have another one, so I just last month ordered and received its replacement. It's the exact same model it is replacing, which is the cheapest model to cover the entire shortwave spectrum. Unfortunately, international broadcasting on shortwave is now only a shadow of its former self. Even that old stand-by HCJB closed down years ago to be replaced by a series of local AM stations.
Radio Canada International and Swiss Radio International are Internet-only. BBC and Deutsche Welle no longer broadcast to North America. Radio Moscow went out of existence twenty-three years ago. The Cold War is over everywhere except domestically. It's almost all over. I can't even find VOA on the radio any more, much less AFRTS.
A few stations remain. Radio Havana Cuba and China Radio International keep perking on. I can now pick up Radio Hanoi. I even got the Czech Republic the other night. Radio Australia, the station that became famous for going broke, is still around. I got the Voice of Turkey as well as Greece, though Greece is always in Greek.
Nowadays shortwave is primarily the home of religious stations and Alex Jones conspiracy types. The first shortwave station I picked up on my new radio was someone in a thick African (I think) accent claiming that the Jesuits run the CIA. But even so, without a shortwave receiving set available to me, my life is simply not complete. Especially since I can now pick up my beloved time signal and practically any time of the night or day, no matter where it migrates to!
Well . . . these are simply my nostalgic musings about the golden age of Cold War shortwave radio brought about by my having to get a new set. I hope maybe a few of you who had the same experience will consider sharing your experiences as well. -_-
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.
My personal favorite. A brief Handel interlude at the top of every hour, with a 15-minute news program in very good English.
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.
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.
Related to what you say about the `yutes’ of today, I still have my Lionel train set from 1956. Collector values peaked in the early 1990’s and have tanked ever since. Ebay has a lot to do with cleaning out the nation’s attics & making yard sales nearly obsolete while lowering prices on collectibles.
But the fact is, kids don’t dig trains anymore. Talked to guys at Lionel meets who are brokenhearted they can’t get their grandsons interested in the train sets they would love to hand on. Gets put under the Christmas tree & that’s it.
Time...marches on.
I just gave an old SONY 2010 to my best friend.
It belonged to my late father...great old radio!
The 24/7 cable and satellite TV news was already killing shortwave; the internet just speeded things up.
Joe Adamov was the other, see #32, for a fascinating interview with Joe post-Cold War.
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.
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.
My FIL collected the Hess trucks, and husband has a collection going back to the ‘60s - I think Dad bought one every year until he died a couple of years ago.
We’re thinking they might be valuable, and we have nobody to leave them to who would appreciate them; but I don’t want to part ;-)
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.
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.
Yep, I remember train sets, and enjoyed them. I never had the famous Lionel trains though.
Too many kids today may think that something such as the train sets aren’t “cool”. So many kids today play video games, that they just aren’t doing things such as running train sets.
How true, but the death (or severe restriction) of the internet might resurrect shortwave. That was my first thought after reading One Second After, and again this week after reading about an EU proposal to license all internet users. In either event, shortwave might again provide the only means of "unapproved" news from the outside world -- or any outside communications at all.
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.
Yep, the day will come when a Ham Radio operator will be a much sought-out after person.
Reminds me of the old joke, "What do breasts and toy trains have in common? They're meant for children, but their dads always want to play with them."
“So many kids today play video games, that they just aren’t doing things such as running train sets.”
That’s it! Operating a train set taught skills & problem solving. Building Erector Set projects did the same. How about the old Handy Andy toolbox? Those were active ways of playing & made the kid smarter.
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