Word on shortwave forums is that the USAGM will close the transmission facilities on Sao Tome as well as Tinian, Northern Mariana Islands. No official confirmation from the agency yet, but worth keeping an eye on this.
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USAGM closing more transmitter sites?
- Thread starter Mediafrog+
- Start date
Tinang is a big facility for them. A lot of USAGM programming rolls through that facility via fiber and satellite. Especially given what's been going on with the Philippines and China, I doubt they would close that location.
The latest: Now being reported on shortwave forums that many USAGM shortwave transmissions have disappeared in recent days, and that the São Tomé and Tinian transmitter sites have now been shut down. Still waiting for further details and confirmation, but it appears the latest budget cuts are now being put into effect. Of course there is probably a growing realization and acceptance that the shortwave audience is, outside of diehard DXers, gone.
I'm not one of the diehard short-wave DXers, Frog ; was only into it as a meal around 1990 when I began doing the AM dial on a Lafayette HA-600a -- re-doing it, actually, plexiglass, multicolored rolls of real skinny tape -- so it made for better frequency determination ...... finished it, said, 'Ah (heck), that's better.' Rather than waste all that good plexiglass, I went up a knob click to 1.6 to 4.8 mHz, skipped that, and clicked up to the 4.8 - 14.6 band. THAT was more like it. More stations there. Heard some good stuff, the best of which was probably R. Australia while it was daytime out. From a basement apartment in Philly.
Well anyway, hoping here not to come off as someone dancing at a wake, I have to ask how, if, these stations leaving the air are allowing for -- default, attrition or otherwise -- new catches, tough-to-impossible to log countries, and so forth.
Putting it in other ways: There are almost 200 nations on the planet. Are there any that have never been heard because of few or no stations that broadcast from there? What SW DXers have heard the most nations? What, if any, is considered the toughest country to hear anywhere?
The AM dial in the US is gradually lopping off its rusty parts, but at a much slower rate. Nine of them in NE Pennsylvania have gone fooey, and the new catches that come in are there, but finite. Short-wave is doing the major bloodletting for now. I was wondering if the castoff ballast would open up spots for those always desired 'unheards'.
Well anyway, hoping here not to come off as someone dancing at a wake, I have to ask how, if, these stations leaving the air are allowing for -- default, attrition or otherwise -- new catches, tough-to-impossible to log countries, and so forth.
Putting it in other ways: There are almost 200 nations on the planet. Are there any that have never been heard because of few or no stations that broadcast from there? What SW DXers have heard the most nations? What, if any, is considered the toughest country to hear anywhere?
The AM dial in the US is gradually lopping off its rusty parts, but at a much slower rate. Nine of them in NE Pennsylvania have gone fooey, and the new catches that come in are there, but finite. Short-wave is doing the major bloodletting for now. I was wondering if the castoff ballast would open up spots for those always desired 'unheards'.
Shortwave is not like AM radio with large numbers of stations on a given frequency, so the loss of broadcasters really doesn’t “open up” anything. The dynamics of shortwave scheduling and frequency usage are quite different. And the loss of so many SW broadcasters means far fewer chances of hearing anything new or unusual.
But what remains on SW stands out more. When the bands were packed, during the latter years of the Cold War, it was easy to lose stations due to the heterodynes and stronger stations wiping out close adjacents. I'm not saying I prefer to see the bands as sparse as they are now, but there is still much to be heard.
There is still a fair amount to be heard, BUT:
You have to be in the right place
you have to have a decent set up beyond a portable and a 25 ft longwire
You gotta get past the fact shortwave moved from an entertainment medium to news/info and religion.......
and those last two are what people forget/cant get past.
Back in the day you could hear alot with basic set ups because of all the bropadcasters, lack of Rf/rfi/electrical interference, and the high power some of them used
SW now is about getting a message out, soft power.. not the pure entertainment in used to be.
I hear a ton... from a 500 watt pirate in the netherlands to a 10kw in brazil.. but im in the right place path wise.
You have to be in the right place
you have to have a decent set up beyond a portable and a 25 ft longwire
You gotta get past the fact shortwave moved from an entertainment medium to news/info and religion.......
and those last two are what people forget/cant get past.
Back in the day you could hear alot with basic set ups because of all the bropadcasters, lack of Rf/rfi/electrical interference, and the high power some of them used
SW now is about getting a message out, soft power.. not the pure entertainment in used to be.
I hear a ton... from a 500 watt pirate in the netherlands to a 10kw in brazil.. but im in the right place path wise.
There was entertainment back in the day, and I remember a lot of it from Radio Nederland, the BBC (I remember "Records Round the World"). I wonder who could have possibly been entertained by Radio Sofia Bulgaria though.
And now.... I'm heard once a week for an hour via the old Radio Bulgaria transmitter site.. some former employees bought it, formed a new company, Spaceline Bulgaria and From 2100 to 2200 every Friday, they carry my live KSKO show. on 5900khz
I think it was @CTListener who said in another thread "your show is probably the most entertaining thing I've ever heard come out of that transmtiter site"
Radio Tirana was even worse.
i was in arkansas when i got them on my jrc nrd 535 and 80 foot long wire in 2005.. that was near the end of them
Terrific, ear-opening dialogue -- thanks, people! I feel I don't qualify as a 'SW DXer' the way some of you go about it, and was just curious.
There were just two spurts for me as a SW DXer. One was brief, when our 7th grade bunch got probational permission to touch family antiques like Midlands, Atwater Kents and Zenith T-O's. Learned some Morse Code, and how to count in French from CHU; no one in the immediate family spoke a word of it despite two different ancestries full of it (and no one spoke Gaelic , either; just the old-world Brooklynese). And the AM dial was *it* in the 60;s, anyway.
The second time was when I lived in a Philly basement apartment (mid-80's) with a longwire on the flipping ceiling -- while I re-did a few band dials on the LafayetteT HA 600a. Sort of fell into SW by default, you might say. Music on the AM band was becoming an endangered species then, and -- as good as the duo was -- FM stations all sounded like versions of the Hall & Oates of Your Life format.
The second whirl through , as someone here mentioned, was pretty entertaining back then, both hobbywise and musically. CFCX 6005, CHNS, R. Australia, some Hams and beacons, WRNO, R.Rumbos' morning newscasts : terrific listening. That Lafayette radio was a terrific radio for it.
Subsequent work, moving, disengaging from a DJ/News career -- the conventional upheavals -- plunked me in NEPA and back to AM DXing. But in retrospect now it was a gas (a) for a while to've tuned into those 41m and 31m bands for fun and (b) to have spun those dials of a multi-band radio into taped and logged broadcast entertainment that sounded ten times better than the AM dial would sound today.
Thanks for the re-orientation from the more sophisticated viewpoints, crew.
73's!
There were just two spurts for me as a SW DXer. One was brief, when our 7th grade bunch got probational permission to touch family antiques like Midlands, Atwater Kents and Zenith T-O's. Learned some Morse Code, and how to count in French from CHU; no one in the immediate family spoke a word of it despite two different ancestries full of it (and no one spoke Gaelic , either; just the old-world Brooklynese). And the AM dial was *it* in the 60;s, anyway.
The second time was when I lived in a Philly basement apartment (mid-80's) with a longwire on the flipping ceiling -- while I re-did a few band dials on the LafayetteT HA 600a. Sort of fell into SW by default, you might say. Music on the AM band was becoming an endangered species then, and -- as good as the duo was -- FM stations all sounded like versions of the Hall & Oates of Your Life format.
The second whirl through , as someone here mentioned, was pretty entertaining back then, both hobbywise and musically. CFCX 6005, CHNS, R. Australia, some Hams and beacons, WRNO, R.Rumbos' morning newscasts : terrific listening. That Lafayette radio was a terrific radio for it.
Subsequent work, moving, disengaging from a DJ/News career -- the conventional upheavals -- plunked me in NEPA and back to AM DXing. But in retrospect now it was a gas (a) for a while to've tuned into those 41m and 31m bands for fun and (b) to have spun those dials of a multi-band radio into taped and logged broadcast entertainment that sounded ten times better than the AM dial would sound today.
Thanks for the re-orientation from the more sophisticated viewpoints, crew.
73's!
The first shortwave radio had had access to was a floor model from probably the 1940s that my parents had. I eventually got a portable, then a Realitic DX150A. I listened to Radio Nederland, BBC, hate-listened to Radio Havana Cuba, and of course enjoyed Radio Canada International (I won a copy of Procol Harum's Live with the Edmonton Symphony Orchestra, with some assorted CBC production music, from them). I turned to tropical band DXing, mostly 60 meters. In the winter, African stations would roll in about 4:30pm, replaced by Latin Americans by 6 or so, and the Africans would be signing on at 11pm. I listened to Radio Barquisimeto and Ecos del Torbes. I was taking Spanish, but listening to it constantly got me to the point I could hold a conversation with our exchange student. I chased QSLs but eventually got out of that with graduation, work, etc. I turned ore to to medium wave and FM after that. I still miss my Sony !CF5900W I bought especially for my trip to Florida for First Phone Wonder School. It served me well into the 90s.
My first exposure to shortwave came via an old radio/phonograph console at my grandparents' house in the mid-'60s -- a Magnavox, IIRC, with a green tuning eye. I remember being excited about hearing Radio Kiev, and running into the kitchen to tell my grandfather, who was born in Kiev, all about it. I'd spend practically my whole Sunday visit in front of that radio, listening to AFRTS (the Indy 500 was on the first time I tuned that one in), the BBC, VOA, Deutsche Welle, Radio Moscow, Radio Prague, all the usual high-powered regulars. One afternoon, I managed to get ELWA, a religious station in Liberia, which I considered my first real DX, although it was a 50 kw station. Then there were the hams gabbing on AM on 40 meters, CHU and WWV, the "circuit adjustment purposes" looped announcements from AT&T and various foreign telecommunications companies, including Roma Radio, which I misheard as Burma Radio. It was all amazing and fascinating, and it wasn't long before I managed to get a receiver of my own for home listening.
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