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Radio Australia: Another one bites the dust

We will miss shortwave radio even more if the current administration decides that we deserve to be protected from fake news on the web.
 
Let's see what they do with the transmitter site. They can knock the towers down ASAP, which would no doubt delight the haters of "outdated" technology at Radio Australia. They can sell or lease to one of the large broadcasters still interested in SW - China Radio would be a likely candidate. Or they might find a religious broadcaster is interested - Brother Stair on a few more frequencies...
 
I taped about 20 minutes of R-A 9580 this morning, around 1530z. Talk program about Trump's Muslim ban and effects on Australians. RIP Radio Australia, 1939-2017!
And yet Brother Stair still hollers through several 49, 41 and 31m frequencies. Sad.
 
CTListener said:
The final minutes have already been posted to YouTube by a couple of listeners. Nobody said goodbye. The program ended, a promo for the station played, then less than a minute of the "Waltzing Matilda" interval signal and an abrupt power off.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RZx7K_A6tgQ
Click to expand...

That's because Radio Australia, as a broadcasting entity, did not go off the air. It just turned off its shortwave transmitters. It's still available online for listeners outside Australia.
 
KeithE4 said:
That's because Radio Australia, as a broadcasting entity, did not go off the air. It just turned off its shortwave transmitters. It's still available online for listeners outside Australia.
Click to expand...

I realize that, but a mention of shortwave would have been nice. Of course, the program airing at the time might have been prerecorded.

Curious about the interval signal, though. Did that go out over the domestic transmitters and the internet as well as on SW? Have domestic/online listeners been hearing it all along, or have other programming elements aired instead while the SWLs have been listening to "Waltzing Matilda" and waiting for the transmission on that frequency to open?
 
CTListener said:
I realize that, but a mention of shortwave would have been nice. Of course, the program airing at the time might have been prerecorded.

Curious about the interval signal, though. Did that go out over the domestic transmitters and the internet as well as on SW? Have domestic/online listeners been hearing it all along, or have other programming elements aired instead while the SWLs have been listening to "Waltzing Matilda" and waiting for the transmission on that frequency to open?
Click to expand...

Waltzing Matilda was unique to the shortwave service since it was their interval tone. It did not go out over the satellite feed of RA, as someone was smart enough to record both the sign off on shortwave as well as the feed from Intelsat or whatever it's called, that feeds RA to the Pacific islands' FM transmitters. The satellite feed went right into the news, seamlessly.

I hate to hear RA go, it was a companion of mine back in the 90's many a morning on a summer job out of high school. That and RCI, both gone now. Sad. But that's life. We're on the tail end of the world of government shortwave broadcasting, so I say we enjoy what's left. Romania still puts out a lot of signals, so does India and Brazil and even France and Japan. Radio Prague and Radio Slovakia are on WRMI beamed to the US each night, and they're both appointment radio for me when I can remember to record them and conditions are favorable. So is The Mighty KBC on weekends. Great music. Nikkei 2 from Japan plays great music, too. And of course RNZI is still alive and kicking for the time being, albeit with a smaller signal than Australia had. Cuba is… well, it's Cuba. The music is great, the commentary on the US is comedy gold sometimes. And of course you can still get your fill of patriotic jingoism through North Korea's many broadcasts.

Everything else is basically Brother Stair and friends. Thanks but no thanks. I've got about 25 religious signals on AM/FM, I don't need more preaching and hollerin' on SW too.
 
I wonder how shortwave has become and is becoming,
"...an increasingly unreliable technology"?
Is this a byproduct of climate change, or what?
I think the answer is what.
Sounds like the SIBC is your typical corrupt government agency.
I would guess that their FM relay of RA on 107.0 in Honiara (Guadalcanal) receives its feed from satellite or the web.
 
rtc said:
Radio New Zealand steps in to fill the gap left by RA:

http://swling.com/blog/2017/02/rnz-thousands-in-solomon-islands-affected-by-abc-shortwave-cut/

and

http://swling.com/blog/2017/02/rnzi-continues-to-serve-people-across-the-pacific-region/
Click to expand...

I almost hate to say it, because Oz was for many years my favorite foreign country -- but RNZI's decision to stay on the air is a reflection of New Zealand's reputation for being a country of good will, whereas the government in Australia seems to recently be myopic about serving people and is over-emphasizing money 'savings' by cutting SW even to its own Outback.

I know New Zealand has many close ties to the Pacific Islands, but their governments typically seem to be more receptive to people's needs than perhaps the ones in Oz -- at least from what little I can glean from internet comments by Oz FB friends and other sources.

Very sad to hear nothing on 9580 (even on good propagation nights and mornings) -- I used to listen to RA religiously on 9580 and 5995. The passing of SW is the passing of an era. Internet is not free, and it isn't available for many people, whereas you could usually pick up R Australia on a decent cheap portable for the cost of a set of batteries. It seems that this change is a reflection of an information and economic divide.

A parallel would be the NOAA weather service: what if they decided to get rid of their 'expensive old technology' VHF outlets, leaving people to get the info the new tech, high tech way on our smart phones instead? VHF radio is old technology, after all. I think it's been around since the 1940's. That's almost 80 years ago.
 
boombox4 said:
A parallel would be the NOAA weather service: what if they decided to get rid of their 'expensive old technology' VHF outlets,
leaving people to get the info the new tech, high tech way on our smart phones instead? VHF radio is old technology,
after all. I think it's been around since the 1940's. That's almost 80 years ago.
Click to expand...
I have not been around since the 1940's, but I am old enough to remember, "WGU-20,
the defence civil preparedness agency station serving the east-central states with emergency information".
 
ai4i said:
I wonder how shortwave has become and is becoming,
"...an increasingly unreliable technology"?
Is this a byproduct of climate change, or what?
I think the answer is what.
Sounds like the SIBC is your typical corrupt government agency.
I would guess that their FM relay of RA on 107.0 in Honiara (Guadalcanal) receives its feed from satellite or the web.
Click to expand...

Propagation is at an all time low due to being at the low point in sunspot activity. That, combined with easy internet access in developed countries, has really caused the death of shortwave as we older folks know it.

Propagation is so bad right now that everything above 12 MHz is pretty much useless and has been for a while. This winter has been the worst I remember since I got back into the hobby a few years ago.

Despite these setbacks, radios for shortwave have never been better. China cranks out the cheapest but most sensitive radios we've ever been able to buy. I heard a guy last night saying he thought the little $40 Tecsun type radios from China outperform the old tube radios from long ago despite an unfavorable atmosphere. I tend to agree.
 
KeithE4 said:
That's because Radio Australia, as a broadcasting entity, did not go off the air. It just turned off its shortwave transmitters. It's still available online for listeners outside Australia.
Click to expand...

That's what makes this particular shutdown so peculiar. Most of the other big broadcasters were shut down to save significant money for their governments. Shutting down program production, dumping large staffs, giving up leases, or selling buildings, etc., yet this is only saving the incredibly small amount of $1.5 million per year, and maybe cutting staff by 5.

The stated purpose is to use those savings to improve digital and /or satellite delivery. All that targeted mainly to a particular listening audience that mostly cannot use those new technologies and preferred shortwave.
 
"I heard a guy last night saying he thought the little $40 Tecsun type radios from China outperform the old tube radios from long ago despite an unfavorable atmosphere. I tend to agree."
You're right...as one who used some of those rigs from
way back (as a kid) there is no comparison...drift,
the neccesity for an outside antenna,one thing and
another ( a common saying then was that no one had ever
been in a ham shack where everything worked,and it
was true) the rigs now are miraculous by comparison.
Used to copy cw with one hand and tune the HQ-170
with the other,you got so used to the drift... .

The actions by Radio New Zealand will make the RA
people look petty and small by comparison...their
politicians will not care for this embarrassment,either.
 
Last edited:
Ah,WGU-20...wasn't that on 179 khz?
Some gov't outfit had some alarm receivers
made as a test...next thing you know NOAA
was using it on their weatherradios.
As for WGU-20,it morphed into the USAF's
GWEN,the 50 kw Ground Wave Emergency
Network...they banged out digital test messages
all thru the late 80's,and that was it it for LWDX.
GWEN eventually got turned off after the cold
war but the stations came back as D-GPS ...
most were finally turned off by the USCG
last year.
 
rtc said:
"I heard a guy last night saying he thought the little $40 Tecsun type radios from China outperform the old tube radios from long ago despite an unfavorable atmosphere. I tend to agree."
You're right...as one who used some of those rigs from
way back (as a kid) there is no comparison...drift,
the neccesity for an outside antenna,one thing and
another ( a common saying then was that no one had ever
been in a ham shack where everything worked,and it
was true) the rigs now are miraculous by comparison.
Used to copy cw with one hand and tune the HQ-170
with the other,you got so used to the drift... .
Click to expand...

Haha. You brought back fond memories of my HQ-170. I had one because my main SWLing interest was the ham bands (I used a Zenith TransOceanic 3000-1 for broadcast) and loved it, but yes, it drifted long after it had warmed up. Many a cold winter night I spent listening to ragchewers on 75 and 40, their voices getting lower and lower and lower ...
 
I was never fortunate to have a Hammarlund (sp?) but I would love to have had one of their very special models with dual parallel tuners for spacial diversity reception. I believe their AGC's controlled each other.
 
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