Shortwave radio - The dark web of the airwaves in 2020

On a sailboat crossing the Pacific Ocean my only entertainment was short wave radio bands that would put me to sleep at nights after setting the sails it brings back great memories...I had no TV no internet just short wave radio ... it was the only human voices I would hear for months on the ocean... it’s great stuff...

Interesting video! I do a show on a number of shortwave stations (WRMI 5850 kHz) every Thursday, Friday, Saturday and Sunday evening. Shortwave might not be the most popular broadcast medium but there are still more listeners out there than one would think!

Brings back so many happy memories. I was raised in the 50's on a farm on the Alberta prairies, with no grid power, no TV, few books and very isolated. Very boring for a curious and innovative mind, driving tractors and heaving hay bales just didn't do it. Fortunately I had two uncles who were ham operators and radio repairmen for their communities in the days of big tube-type radios that could be repaired. They handed on to me old radios that couldn't be repaired and junk discarded from their hobby, including a 30's version of the ARRL Handbook. I studied that book 'til my head hurt, but learned enough to get going. I couldn't build a transmitter due to no grid power, but I built a single stage regenerative receiver with a single type 30 tube. That was the most basic triode you could imagine. Could easily see the filament glowing and the grid and the plate and could even imagine the electrons crossing the grid. Scavenged those discarded radios for the components, and wound my own crude coils. Powered the filament with discarded 1.5v cells from the party line telephone, but the 'B' battery was a problem. Those 90v batteries cost a fortune at a time when money was very scarce, but I finally saved up and bought one. Fortunately the receiver drew very little power to feed the old headphones so that battery lasted for years. By carefully adjusting the feedback to just below oscillation, the gain from that regenerative circuit was enormous! and at the same time the selectivity became extremely sharp, so I could pick out weak signals from a very crowded band. There was no powerlines for miles and in the wintertime there was no lightening anywhere and so no static. A 200' aerial from the windmill to a tall homemade tower gave access to the world. This was the late 50's so the 31m band was full of interesting broadcasts from all over the world. Some of them, like Radio Moscow, BBC, HCLB and WWV fairly boomed in and acted as frequency markers to calibrate the dial. The chassis wasn't well shielded so body capacitance made big effects, which was very useful in that I could control the feedback to that very critical peak just by slightly moving my knee under the desk, while I took program notes to send away with an International Reply Coupon for a QSL card. Got 22 of them. The biggest thrill of all was at 3am one night tuning in to Radio Australia just in time to hear the announcer read my letter on air, and they were amazed that I could receive their station with such a basic receiver! Never had near as much fun with any hi-tech receiver since.

The coded beacon signal in Morse is "CAT". It's a non-directional beacon (NDB) located near Chatham, NJ. In the past, it was probably a navigation point for beginning an instrument approach to runway 05 at Morristown Municipal Airport, but the current approach does not use it. Shortwave in the early 1950's was my exploration of the world. In later years, I got to actually visit those countries on the job as an airline pilot. Very fond memories...

The ionosphere is net neutral

Shortwave radio was incredible in the 1990s in the USA. The bands were filled with incredible broadcasts. Now it takes some effort to find anything in English besides crazy preachers. One good comedy show comes on each weeknight at 10pm Eastern time on frequency 4840. Tune in and see! You`ll hear things like: "Shrimp on prozac are attacking seagulls!"

When I was a kid I used a modified cheap MR Microphone transmitter to broadcast dirty jokes over the air to two of my friends who lived on the same block. I got triangulated by some old neighbor who came to my house and told my mom and dad about someone broadcasting smut from this location. That was the end of my comedy career.

I used to sit out behind my parents farm house in rural Kansas with my shortwave radio and watch the stars while listening to all kinds of weird signals. The house had metal siding so it was a huge faraday cage and I was too lazy to put up a real antenna, so I just sat outside and listened. I spent many summer nights like that. My favorites were clandestine broadcasts like numbers stations and pirates. I spent a lot of time around 6925 khz listening for the pirates on their homemade 5 to 50 watt transmitters playing heavy metal or techno or hip hop or sometimes just reading jokes into the airwaves. They had their own weird inside jokes too and sometimes they'd apparently be trying to jam each other playfully with different sound effects. I always wanted to get my amateur radio license and make my own mark on the airwaves, but I've been procrastinating for ten years now. I could probably pass the test in my sleep.

I think someone is letting a cat play with their morse transmitter.

Supposedly Sony founder and long time chairman Akio Morita was a big shortwave buff, which is why Sony always made so many great SW radios.

12:32 It's portuguese. The woman's voice is from Dolores Duran, singing songs that was composed by Francisco Anysio (he's was actor and comediant too). The broadcast was talking about that. She was so popular on 1940 and 1950. She passed on 1959. Francisco had a much more succesfull career at TV shows from 1960 to 2000's, he passes on 2012. So clear broadcast, and really surprising! Nice DX!

Boy, does THIS take me back..... to my Navy days, specifically 1986. At night, I'd drag my big ol' boom box up to the flight deck and sit and listen to all the strange stuff that would come across the radio - including that Cuban propaganda beamed right at us by our communist friends whilst we were there for training, certs, and so forth. Voices from the ether, music from foreign lands, strange blips and bloops and chirps and squeals and tones, all fading in and out and intermingling with each other and the static... definitely a surreal experience. I was never much into shortwave, but listening to it in the middle of the ocean, at night, under a sky full of stars so numerous you can't even imagine, much less count.... it was my 'therapy'. It kept me sane somehow.

The beacon was transmitting the letters C A T in Morse.

Growing up in communist east Germany short wave was my window to the free world. In the early 60s listening to western stations still was a criminal offense.

This takes me back to when I got a SW radio for my Birthday. Although I had tons of bandwidth to catch almost anything I wanted to listen to, I always found myself listening to Art Bell on Coast to Coast AM.

There was something magical about laying in bed at night in the 70’s and 80’s and scanning the bands for civilization different from what I lived in every day. It felt great to succeed in barely tuning in to anything new. Music, news, readings, all in languages I could barely even recognize sometimes. In about 2004 when the BBC World Service stopped broadcasting to North America, I gave up. :(

I'm so conditioned by radio listening in 80's and 90's, I was instinctively tilting and rotating my phone trying to get better sound quality from this video :)))

I like to listen to shortwave, there's just something about listening to the actuall stations transmitter, then to just listen to an internet stream!

The BBC are still broadcasting on shortwave. In August 2019 extended its World Service output.

This is what the movie 'Contact' got so right in the opening scene......the earth fadeout with all the radio broadcasts going back to the inception. There is something fascinating about listening to live broadcasts from thousands of miles away, even if it's in another language. I remember as a 10 year old kid around 1979, playing with some walkie talkies in northern British Columbia, Canada, surrounded by mountains and yet still being able to hear a guy in a truck in Texas. It blew my mind.