In the early 2000s I was lucky enough to travel the world for work. I was a football nut and always carried a Sony radio so I could pick up the BBC World Service.
I vividly remember turning it on late in a Sunderland vs. Newcastle match. I was in central Bogota, Colombia. Struggling for reception, knowing we'd gone 1-0 down early in the match, I can still hear the commentator: "and who would have thought, after going one-nil down at St. James' Park, Sunderland would be two-one up". I shouted out loud like a lunatic. We won the game.
I've strung wire coat-hangers from windows in Nigeria, Ukraine, and Macedonia all trying to improve reception so I could listen to a football match.
There's a romance there that internet streaming will never touch.
While admittedly not at all the same, there was a certain romance shared by all listeners of a Boston-local FM radio station, WFNX. Whereas many commercial radio stations broadcast with tens of thousands of watts, FNX made do with a Class A broadcast license, limiting them to around 3000 watts of power. This made picking up the station a challenge for all but the closest listeners.
My particular romance was taking a pair of TV rabbit ears and hanging them out the window by the twin-lead cable, much to my mother's chagrin.
Growing up in a somewhat remote part of India, I would tune to BBC, Radio Australia to listen to test cricket commentary, on short wave. I have fond memories and owe a lot of my personal growth to SW.
Idk, it was pretty fun when all my friends were huddled around a single phone on the subway to watch the World Cup final on grandmastreams123321.xyz, with a second tab open on soccerplus321123.ru as backup
There's a romance there that internet streaming will never touch.
Simple broadcast rights for one. It's hard to explain to my father why he needs to still pack a handheld radio for the beach because he can't listen to the game by streaming the local sports station on his phone.
Same for me. Beyond the broadcasts, I'd write the stations and they'd reply by sending program guides, newspaper clippings, postcards, and other neat things from faraway places.
Some of the stations even offered language lessons over the air. I learned basic German when I was 12 from the ones on Deutsche Welle. I attempted to learn Chinese the following year from the big shortwave station in Taiwan.
Those who've had experience with either transmitting or receiving on the HF band and or lower frequencies (≤30MHz) and who've knowledge of ionospheric propagation just know that short, medium and longwave RF bands are still essential in this digital/cable/satellite era for reasons that when all other communications systems have failed then communications on these frequencies will still be reliable.
Moreover, in wartime or during some other major catastrophe when technical infrastructure is likely to be impacted or destroyed then establishing and maintaining communications services on these frequencies is easy for reasons that the technology is low-tech and easy to understand—and there's an enormous amount of engineering experience to fall back upon (about 100 years' worth).
That we even have to raise this discussion is a quintessential example of intergenerational information loss.
Given their strategic importance, governments should put priority on educating the smartphone/streaming generation that these other modes of electronic communication actually exist and that they may even have to depend upon them.
I only need to refer to the current debate over retaining AM-band reception in car radios to illustrate the paucity of understanding. That EV manufacturers are pushing for the removal of the AM band in their car radios is proof-positive of how little the current breed of electronics engineers knows about these frequencies let alone their strategic importance.
You covered all the points I was going to make. As part of the pre-internet generation that grew up with radio and a ham radio operator since my school years this is second nature and common sense to me.
It is interesting that governments have long recognised the power of shortwave such that they have restricted what a citizen can do with it. In wartime, ham radio is usually made illegal. The recipient of a broadcast cannot be detected (save some very local factors - meters range) which is why governments around the world still use shortwave number stations to transmit coded instructions to spies.
I suspect the removal of AM radio in EVs is also because the cost to RF shield the car against EM emissions in that frequency range was deemed too high for the audience it would address, and maybe just lazy or engineering too. Agree, very short sighted.
Hell, even the BBC in the UK is closing down local AM transmitters on cost grounds (but I suspect there is political pressure to move the masses to digital UHF infrastructure).
A medium wave/shortwave transmitter is the ultimate in post apocalyptic film memes!
> Hell, even the BBC in the UK is closing down local AM transmitters on cost grounds (but I suspect there is political pressure to move the masses to digital UHF infrastructure).
Yeah in a couple of years it'll just be Radio Caroline and various small-time pirates on AM. Even the venerable longwave transmitter for Radio 4 is getting shut down in a couple of months sadly.
Can't help feeling this is all a bit short-sighted, it's not like you can do anything else with those bands and if things go sideways it's a reliable way to reach a lot of people without power. Personally if we can't keep our medium and long wave transmitters on economic grounds I think those bands should be opened to unlicensed hobbyists, it'd be an excellent technical and artistic opportunity that would allow for actual broadcasting rather than just two-way communication. I doubt there'd be a huge issue with interference as few people have the room to put up a 150' quarter wave, and if copyrights were a material issue rights holders would have gone after public SDRs capturing the broadcast bands years ago.
> such that they have restricted what a citizen can do with it
My grandfather, born in Canada and later naturalized as a US citizen, got his ham ticket back in the 1960s, but, as he wrote: "This was O.K. for one year but to renew & become general I would have to obtain more than just a US passport; It would be necessary to get a certificate of citizenship. This took years and during those years I landed up in the Dom. Republic & got my Ham ticket there without it, HI3XRD."
He later moved to Miami. When Hurricane David came through the D.R. in 1979, he was one of the ham volunteers who helped handle communications from the island.
Oh, and he never got Extra because while he could manage 13 wpm for General or Advanced, he couldn't manage the 20 wpm for Extra.
"I suspect the removal of AM radio in EVs is also because the cost to RF shield the car against EM emissions in that frequency range was deemed too high for the audience it would address,.…"
The difficulty in suppressing switching noise/RFI is one of the stated reasons EV manufacturers give for removing AM reception. They say that keeping AM will increase EV costs.
If regulators/spectrum management were to agree to their request then that would imply a relaxation of existing EMI emission standards. With thousands of EVs on the roads the noise floor on the HF band and lower frequencies would become intolerable, the band would become unusable.
A while ago on HN I referred to a now-dated NATO communications tech note on interference that said the noise floor on the HF band had increased about 6dB. I went on to mention that about a decade ago I'd mentioned the NATO stats to an engineer from a HF transmitter manufacturing company at a trade show. He responded by asking me where I'd been in recent years and went on to state the noise floor on HF had since increased to about 17dB above the pre-digital switching era.
As I said that was about a decade ago when EVs were still only lab prototypes. If EV manufacturers are allowed to get away with emitting more EMI then the HF bands will become altogether unusable. And no doubt this is a serious problem.
EV manufacturers like Musk have enormous power and what worries me is that spectrum management authorities around the world will cave in further to pressure and relax EMI standards even more.
That increase in the noise floor from 6dB to 17dB was the result of spectrum management caving in to commercial pressure from the 1980s onwards. This was the era of deregulation and EMI regulations were loosened—EMR/noise testing etc. was not only relaxed but further outsourced.
It seems to me those who've a vested interest in the LF/MF/HF bands and want them preserved/saved from interference need to join forces and make concerted efforts to save them. An unlikely alliance of say the military, amateur radio (IARU), broadcasters and others speaking in unison to governments/ITU is what's needed to save these bands.
BTW, I once held an AR license which I got whilst I was still at school.
But modern comms will switch bands or 'glide' frequencies in sympathy with the changing ['fading'] MUF, etc. and can do so automatically (using OWF in conjunction with IPS also helps). Combine that with modern encoding/digital modulation and say DRM of the right kind—Digital Radio Mondiale—for audio etc. and it's pretty damn reliable.
Want better? Diversity TX/RX and or multichannel via in-band and or cross-band into comparators etc.
> Britain and most western countries have put all their eggs in one large basket: that of digital communications. In a time of global conflict, this could be a risky and painful prospect.
There's a scene in The Garden of the Finzi-Continis (1970) where a man (Jewish) is listening to the events of WWII play-out over shortwave. He is living at the moment in relative safety but he understands from what he hears that change is afoot in his country.
At the risk of sounding like a prepper, it was clear to me then that having a radio capable of long distance reception was a very valuable thing to have around.
There is a difference between being prepared and being a prepper. Having the means to receive outside information is being prepared. Listening to it day and night because you think your government is out to get you is being a prepper.[1]
Conversely trying to prepare for things that could occur by, for instance, getting first aid training, ham radio license, etc. is a communal activity "how could I be an asset to my community in times of trouble?" I think it's telling that in the cold war the "prepper" activity was putting together civil defense groups. In this century it's building a bunker full of guns and spinning fantasy about protecting your hoard of stuff from the mob.
The Dutch government updated their "prepper" guide the other day, basically asking everyone to make sure they'll be alright for up to 3 days (was 2) in case of calamities - weather events, utility outages, etc. It's pretty standard stuff - water (3 liters/day/person), food, radio / powerbank, flashlight, candles, first aid kit, blankets, hygienic products, etc.
More astonishing than knowing what HF radio can do, is to notice how empty the HF bands are compared to past decades.
During my around-the-world solo sail (1988-1991) (https://arachnoid.com/sailbook/), I relied on two-way HF radio for many things no longer present, including open-water phone calls. But that absence represents a choice, not a necessity. Here's an easy receiver project: "Create Your Own Open-Source Software-Defined Radio" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iXNgPYVpTng).
Receiving is cheap and easy. To transmit on these bands, you must get a Ham license. But that's easier than it was -- Morse code is no longer required.
I can remember what I thought when I first heard about the Internet -- that it would make Ham radio look slow and stupid by comparison. I was never so wrong about anything in my life (not for a lack of eager candidates).
There has been a bit of a shortwave revival in recent years, with activities like POTA (Parks on the Air) and SOTA (Summits on the Air) getting people back onto the HF bands. For those unfamiliar, POTA encourages people to get out to State and National parks, set up a portable radio (usually shortwave), and make as many contacts as they can in a short time. If you make 10 contacts, you’ve “activated” the park. The activator submits their logs to the website, and everyone they talked to gets credit for “hunting” that park.
Whoever designed the POTA website… it’s uncharacteristically brilliant for the amateur radio community. There are gazillions of metrics you can track about which parks you’ve hunted and which ones you’ve activated, progress bars for every state, all sorts of awards and “achievements” for various operating times, modes, repeats, etc.
It’s turned portable shortwave operating into gamified crack, except these are real skills that are valuable during an emergency. Having the equipment is one thing, but the regular practice of knowing how to quickly set it up and operate it anywhere is invaluable.
I used to get the woodpecker, and some very ominous semi-continuous monotonous hums in human hearing ranges with occasional tweedle. And the lincolnshire poacher. Or, something very like it.
This was 70s Edinburgh, with a long-line antenna strung from my window to a tree about 50m away. I tried to make a dipole out of it, not sure it really worked. The radio was WW2 bomber surplus store, about 15U high and probably some precursor to a 19" rack width. you swapped out brick sized tuning blocks to reset it's frequency bands and then used a blade-overlap condenser tuner. I also used bakelite headphones, no soft foam. Hardcore! We had a better one downstairs with a vernier which tuned more accurately, consistently and it did MW for BBC radio. When FM became more common we got a small philips and it sat next to it, doing the hard work.
Shortwave picked up a lot. I was too young to understand what QSL cards would be about otherwise I would have some.
QSL cards (just looked it up) look like a fun hobby to send or receive, but probably moreso if you live somewhere remote or exotic (not me, I live in peak Dutch suburbia).
I had a shortwave radio as a kid in the 90s in Minnesota. I never picked up much with it. Some Mexican stations, weather broadcasts, and when the ionosphere was right BBC World Service. On exceedingly rare occasions I could even pick up stations from South East Asia.
As a lonely and somewhat isolated child, these fleeting glimpses of the wider world were nothing short of magical.
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I vividly remember turning it on late in a Sunderland vs. Newcastle match. I was in central Bogota, Colombia. Struggling for reception, knowing we'd gone 1-0 down early in the match, I can still hear the commentator: "and who would have thought, after going one-nil down at St. James' Park, Sunderland would be two-one up". I shouted out loud like a lunatic. We won the game.
I've strung wire coat-hangers from windows in Nigeria, Ukraine, and Macedonia all trying to improve reception so I could listen to a football match.
There's a romance there that internet streaming will never touch.
My particular romance was taking a pair of TV rabbit ears and hanging them out the window by the twin-lead cable, much to my mother's chagrin.
Low power college radio is great! The broadcasts are always so varied, and there's never any commercials.
Simple broadcast rights for one. It's hard to explain to my father why he needs to still pack a handheld radio for the beach because he can't listen to the game by streaming the local sports station on his phone.
Some of the stations even offered language lessons over the air. I learned basic German when I was 12 from the ones on Deutsche Welle. I attempted to learn Chinese the following year from the big shortwave station in Taiwan.
Moreover, in wartime or during some other major catastrophe when technical infrastructure is likely to be impacted or destroyed then establishing and maintaining communications services on these frequencies is easy for reasons that the technology is low-tech and easy to understand—and there's an enormous amount of engineering experience to fall back upon (about 100 years' worth).
That we even have to raise this discussion is a quintessential example of intergenerational information loss.
Given their strategic importance, governments should put priority on educating the smartphone/streaming generation that these other modes of electronic communication actually exist and that they may even have to depend upon them.
I only need to refer to the current debate over retaining AM-band reception in car radios to illustrate the paucity of understanding. That EV manufacturers are pushing for the removal of the AM band in their car radios is proof-positive of how little the current breed of electronics engineers knows about these frequencies let alone their strategic importance.
It is interesting that governments have long recognised the power of shortwave such that they have restricted what a citizen can do with it. In wartime, ham radio is usually made illegal. The recipient of a broadcast cannot be detected (save some very local factors - meters range) which is why governments around the world still use shortwave number stations to transmit coded instructions to spies.
I suspect the removal of AM radio in EVs is also because the cost to RF shield the car against EM emissions in that frequency range was deemed too high for the audience it would address, and maybe just lazy or engineering too. Agree, very short sighted.
Hell, even the BBC in the UK is closing down local AM transmitters on cost grounds (but I suspect there is political pressure to move the masses to digital UHF infrastructure).
A medium wave/shortwave transmitter is the ultimate in post apocalyptic film memes!
Yeah in a couple of years it'll just be Radio Caroline and various small-time pirates on AM. Even the venerable longwave transmitter for Radio 4 is getting shut down in a couple of months sadly.
Can't help feeling this is all a bit short-sighted, it's not like you can do anything else with those bands and if things go sideways it's a reliable way to reach a lot of people without power. Personally if we can't keep our medium and long wave transmitters on economic grounds I think those bands should be opened to unlicensed hobbyists, it'd be an excellent technical and artistic opportunity that would allow for actual broadcasting rather than just two-way communication. I doubt there'd be a huge issue with interference as few people have the room to put up a 150' quarter wave, and if copyrights were a material issue rights holders would have gone after public SDRs capturing the broadcast bands years ago.
My grandfather, born in Canada and later naturalized as a US citizen, got his ham ticket back in the 1960s, but, as he wrote: "This was O.K. for one year but to renew & become general I would have to obtain more than just a US passport; It would be necessary to get a certificate of citizenship. This took years and during those years I landed up in the Dom. Republic & got my Ham ticket there without it, HI3XRD."
He later moved to Miami. When Hurricane David came through the D.R. in 1979, he was one of the ham volunteers who helped handle communications from the island.
Oh, and he never got Extra because while he could manage 13 wpm for General or Advanced, he couldn't manage the 20 wpm for Extra.
The difficulty in suppressing switching noise/RFI is one of the stated reasons EV manufacturers give for removing AM reception. They say that keeping AM will increase EV costs.
If regulators/spectrum management were to agree to their request then that would imply a relaxation of existing EMI emission standards. With thousands of EVs on the roads the noise floor on the HF band and lower frequencies would become intolerable, the band would become unusable.
A while ago on HN I referred to a now-dated NATO communications tech note on interference that said the noise floor on the HF band had increased about 6dB. I went on to mention that about a decade ago I'd mentioned the NATO stats to an engineer from a HF transmitter manufacturing company at a trade show. He responded by asking me where I'd been in recent years and went on to state the noise floor on HF had since increased to about 17dB above the pre-digital switching era.
As I said that was about a decade ago when EVs were still only lab prototypes. If EV manufacturers are allowed to get away with emitting more EMI then the HF bands will become altogether unusable. And no doubt this is a serious problem.
EV manufacturers like Musk have enormous power and what worries me is that spectrum management authorities around the world will cave in further to pressure and relax EMI standards even more.
That increase in the noise floor from 6dB to 17dB was the result of spectrum management caving in to commercial pressure from the 1980s onwards. This was the era of deregulation and EMI regulations were loosened—EMR/noise testing etc. was not only relaxed but further outsourced.
It seems to me those who've a vested interest in the LF/MF/HF bands and want them preserved/saved from interference need to join forces and make concerted efforts to save them. An unlikely alliance of say the military, amateur radio (IARU), broadcasters and others speaking in unison to governments/ITU is what's needed to save these bands.
BTW, I once held an AR license which I got whilst I was still at school.
...for varying definitions of 'reliable' :)
But modern comms will switch bands or 'glide' frequencies in sympathy with the changing ['fading'] MUF, etc. and can do so automatically (using OWF in conjunction with IPS also helps). Combine that with modern encoding/digital modulation and say DRM of the right kind—Digital Radio Mondiale—for audio etc. and it's pretty damn reliable.
Want better? Diversity TX/RX and or multichannel via in-band and or cross-band into comparators etc.
There's a scene in The Garden of the Finzi-Continis (1970) where a man (Jewish) is listening to the events of WWII play-out over shortwave. He is living at the moment in relative safety but he understands from what he hears that change is afoot in his country.
At the risk of sounding like a prepper, it was clear to me then that having a radio capable of long distance reception was a very valuable thing to have around.
[1] Unfortunately, many exceptions apply.
Conversely trying to prepare for things that could occur by, for instance, getting first aid training, ham radio license, etc. is a communal activity "how could I be an asset to my community in times of trouble?" I think it's telling that in the cold war the "prepper" activity was putting together civil defense groups. In this century it's building a bunker full of guns and spinning fantasy about protecting your hoard of stuff from the mob.
During my around-the-world solo sail (1988-1991) (https://arachnoid.com/sailbook/), I relied on two-way HF radio for many things no longer present, including open-water phone calls. But that absence represents a choice, not a necessity. Here's an easy receiver project: "Create Your Own Open-Source Software-Defined Radio" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iXNgPYVpTng).
Receiving is cheap and easy. To transmit on these bands, you must get a Ham license. But that's easier than it was -- Morse code is no longer required.
I can remember what I thought when I first heard about the Internet -- that it would make Ham radio look slow and stupid by comparison. I was never so wrong about anything in my life (not for a lack of eager candidates).
Whoever designed the POTA website… it’s uncharacteristically brilliant for the amateur radio community. There are gazillions of metrics you can track about which parks you’ve hunted and which ones you’ve activated, progress bars for every state, all sorts of awards and “achievements” for various operating times, modes, repeats, etc.
It’s turned portable shortwave operating into gamified crack, except these are real skills that are valuable during an emergency. Having the equipment is one thing, but the regular practice of knowing how to quickly set it up and operate it anywhere is invaluable.
This was 70s Edinburgh, with a long-line antenna strung from my window to a tree about 50m away. I tried to make a dipole out of it, not sure it really worked. The radio was WW2 bomber surplus store, about 15U high and probably some precursor to a 19" rack width. you swapped out brick sized tuning blocks to reset it's frequency bands and then used a blade-overlap condenser tuner. I also used bakelite headphones, no soft foam. Hardcore! We had a better one downstairs with a vernier which tuned more accurately, consistently and it did MW for BBC radio. When FM became more common we got a small philips and it sat next to it, doing the hard work.
Shortwave picked up a lot. I was too young to understand what QSL cards would be about otherwise I would have some.
If not exactly that model, very similar.
could be buzzer perhaps https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UVB-76
As a lonely and somewhat isolated child, these fleeting glimpses of the wider world were nothing short of magical.