Radio Havana Cuba

[SomeRadioGuy]

Ask Keith Perron how many really listening to RHC... its way less than we think based on listener correspondence

 

[crainbebo]

Somehow, Melissa Scott and old recordings of Brother Stair still broadcast to the airwaves...to an audience of a few hundred.
If Cuba is dropping a lot of SW output, how long before China Radio International does the same?

 

[SomeRadioGuy]

Somehow, Melissa Scott and old recordings of Brother Stair still broadcast to the airwaves...to an audience of a few hundred.
If Cuba is dropping a lot of SW output, how long before China Radio International does the same?

Cuba dropping SW content has no real correlation to CGTN dropping it. CGTN has the money to keep it going. RHC doesnt

 

[gr8oldies]

Cuba dropping SW content has no real correlation to CGTN dropping it. CGTN has the money to keep it going. RHC doesnt

I can't imagine who overseas listens to Brother Stair

 

[Mediafrog+]

I wonder what North Korea uses? Maybe Kim can kick down one of his auxiliary units to the Cubans.

It appears the Dear Leader (the North Korean one, not that other guy) has enough problems keeping his own Voice of Korea on the air, judging from recent monitoring by myself and others. Doubt he has any spares.

North Korea was reported to have installed Chinese transmitters for domestic and SW services.

Back in the 1990s the North Koreans installed a couple of secondhand units that had been used by Swiss Radio International. Likely no longer in use.

Ask Keith Perron how many really listening to RHC... its way less than we think based on listener correspondence

Perron has plenty of international broadcasting experience, having worked for a number of organizations. He used to be an advocate for shortwave, but a few years ago changed his mind, and has written that SW is no longer viable.

Somehow, Melissa Scott and old recordings of Brother Stair still broadcast to the airwaves...to an audience of a few hundred.

“A few hundred” might be a generous number. If those two organizations finally run out of greater fools donating money it will likely kill several U.S. private shortwave broadcasters.

If Cuba is dropping a lot of SW output, how long before China Radio International does the same?

A number of CRI/CGTN’s language services no longer have any spoken word content, and consist of music fill. Nonetheless there is still a large amount of shortwave coming out of China. I suppose at some point the Chinese government will have an epiphany that SW is no longer viable, as Russia did a dozen years ago.

 

[Patrick 29582]

This is the A25 Schedule for Radio Havana Cuba. Only english, spanish and portugese remain on SW. And you'll notice, only two frequencies.. 6000 and 15230khz remain. Antenna systems and transmitters are probably beyond repair and China won't give them anymore money

Nevermind, they still sound awful. Fuzzy, distorted and incredibly under modulated.

French, arabic, esperanto and creole will be streaming only.

Honestly, if it were me, i'd reverse course a bit.. drop service to North America and focus on latin america and africa with french, spanish and portugese with English and creol being online only.

View attachment 9030

Truly with their coverage on AM they could use 670/690 as Radio Havana and get a better signal at night.

 

[davideduardo]

Truly with their coverage on AM they could use 670/690 as Radio Havana and get a better signal at night.

Almost all the Radio Rebelde operations are concentrated between 540 and 710, plus 1180. It is unlikely that they would break up the cluster of Rebelde outlets. In addition, those frequencies are used by fairly high power stations in Colombia and Venezuela making any international usage a poor choice (besides, in the daytime neither of those channels gets any kind of decent signal outside of a small part of Cuba itself).

Besides that, the AMs in Cuba are almost all diplexed or triplexed into shared non-directional antennas and changing the use of any of the means significant changes all across Cuba on the lower part of the band.

 

[gr8oldies]

Almost all the Radio Rebelde operations are concentrated between 540 and 710, plus 1180. It is unlikely that they would break up the cluster of Rebelde outlets. In addition, those frequencies are used by fairly high power stations in Colombia and Venezuela making any international usage a poor choice (besides, in the daytime neither of those channels gets any kind of decent signal outside of a small part of Cuba itself).

Besides that, the AMs in Cuba are almost all diplexed or triplexed into shared non-directional antennas and changing the use of any of the means significant changes all across Cuba on the lower part of the band.

I remember in the 80s when Cuba relayed Radio Moscow starting at 3pm on 600.

 

[davideduardo]

I remember in the 80s when Cuba relayed Radio Moscow starting at 3pm on 600.

Of course, that was in the era when all the Cuban stations had been rebuilt by the USSR and the Radio Moscow rebroadcast was just part of the deal. The Russians are long gone, and the Chinese seem to have pretty much given up on Cuba, too.