Radio in Liverpool...

Photos from http://instagram.com/chrissycurlz

Info first published in my Radio Websites column in Radio User, July 2013 (extract)

I have been listening to a variety of online radio this past month, and some of it was inspired by a few visits to Liverpool- real visits in person rather than virtual, that is. For most people the landmarks of this city are the cathedrals and the Liver Building with its famous birds on the top. 

But for me it has always been the Radio City Tower that dominates the skyline and the centre of the city. It was opened in 1969 and Radio City broadcast from it on 96.7 MHz and online. http://www.radiocity.co.uk 

They have a Twitter handle of @RadioCity967 and a YouTube channel at http://www.youtube.com/user/radiocity967 which has promotional videos and interesting offshoots such as acoustic sessions. It’s a station that successfully juggles local sports coverage with local music. And for a fiver you can even go up the tower itself. http://www.radiocity.co.uk/near-you/tower-tours/ 

City Talk 105.9 covers all the bases too, with politics and sport sandwiched between news and phone-ins, which include Dr Mike’s City Surgery, offering health and welfare advice. Planet X investigates the paranormal while there is a smattering of mainstream music such as the Top 40 and oldies shows. www.citytalk.fm/

Juice 107.6 is another commercial station but one which concentrates on chart and contemporary music for the young at heart. www.juicefm.com/

BBC Radio Merseyside offers the usual tried and tested BBC local radio fare of personalities spinning discs, and a range of sometimes offbeat phone-in topics. www.bbc.co.uk/radiomerseyside

Recent phone-ins have included memories of days at the seaside and how audio cassettes are making a comeback in Canada as bands prefer their vintage sound quality.

The city has a healthy history of lively free radio as well. Central Radio Liverpool is a pirate station, online at www.centralradio.info/ if you are out of its frequency range. The Scouse House Shout Out Show is one example of programming. Merseyside Alternative Radio at http://www.mar.me.uk is a well-established FM and medium wave pirate and includes some welcome female pirates in the form of Jackie Frost and Kelley Collins, the latter is based in Philadelphia.

Liverpool stations that are also interest to me though are those based elsewhere in the world. County Community Radio is in Liverpool, Nova Scotia. www.qccrfm.com The station started in 2008 and tries to suit all of its older listeners’ tastes by “playing music from the 40's, 50's, 60's, 70's, or 80's. Oldies, classic rock, big band, disco, old school R&B, country, and gospel are a few of the genres that share QCCR's airwaves. We take pride in being an eclectic station that serves the varied and discerning tastes of our Queens County audience.”

CKBW South Shore Radio on 94.5 also serves the area with a typical blend of modern pop and similar genres http://ckbw.ca/ It also produces “That East Coast Show” which is an interesting podcast.

There are a handful of Liverpools in the USA too. Liverpool in Texas only has a population of 500 so is not large enough to sustain its own station. However, Liverpool in Illinois has about a dozen FM stations in its reach, see http://www.radio-locator.com . These include Peoria Public Radio http://peoriapublicradio.org/ which has an array of interesting features and talk.

Suzanne Vega’s old song “In Liverpool” always pops into my head too- it’s a melancholic quiet Sunday wandering around deserted streets- she performed it well as part of a live set when I saw her many moons ago. The Daily Motion website includes it www.dailymotion.com/video/x1u2aq_suzanne-vega-in-liverpool_music#.UZ8at6LVCxo as does the official Suzanne Vega YouTube channel at www.youtube.com/user/SuzanneVega

On the road...

First published in my Broadcast Matters: Long, Medium and Shortwave column in Radio User, July 2013 (extract)


Over Easter I spent a fabulous family fortnight in the western USA, on a road trip.

Sightseeing quite rightly took up much of our time but I spent some late evenings and early mornings tuned to the radio. Surveying the USA radio scene is always fun. While FM offered many genres of music, in the cities at least, medium wave was more interesting to me.
This was partly because there were DX opportunities and I never quite knew what I’d hear next. I didn’t achieve any spectacular DX catches as it happens, but just listening to and identifying stations a few miles to a few hundred miles away was hugely enjoyable.

We started in Las Vegas and where I logged around 15 mw stations. Sports radio is big news in the States with KMZQ on 670kHz and KBAD Fox Sports on 920 kHz being two examples. On 1100kHz KWWN was a community sports station with live basketball commentaries. From North Las Vegas came station KXNS with plenty of sport along with other programmes. They were on a pledge drive with adverts urging listeners to donate unwanted vehicles to sell for charity. This is obviously something of a popular fund raiser at the moment as I heard a couple of National Public Radio FM stations do similar. 

Incidentally NPR was the best quality of programme content I heard anywhere in the USA: Interesting and entertaining, with quiz shows, comedy, features, news and often carrying BBC World Service overnight. I still haven’t got my head around all the variations of the regional and local NPR networks but they shine like a beacon on the US FM bands. 

KLAV on 1230 kept me up to date with hottest happenings of the Las Vegas nightlife, but you don’t need a radio to tell you about that. Simply head for the madness of the bars and casinos and see it for yourself in this 24/7 city.

Summer radio reading essentials...

The European Medium Wave Guide is celebrating its 15th year in 2013 http://www.emwg.info/ Herman Boel is responsible for the publication which he started when getting more involved in medium wave DXing in the 1990s. It merged in the early noughties with James Niven’s African medium wave guide to become an invaluable online resource. You can also order a pdf version too for 5 Euros. The cover I also always a stunning photo which draws the eye- this year’s is of Trakai Castle in Lithuania.

I’ve just received my copy of “Tales From Bush House” which was published last year. This is the result of the BBC World Service writer in residence Hamid Ismailov’s work (who I mentioned last year). He is now head of the BBC Central Asian service. The paperback is available online and also as an e-book from many sources. http://www.cheapukbooks.co.uk/

“The book is a collection of narratives about working lives, mostly real and comic, sometimes poignant or apocryphal by former and current BBC World Service employees. They are tales from inside Bush House escaping through its marble-clad walls at a time when its staff began their departure to new premises in Portland Place. It shows how the extraordinary people who worked there, and the magnificent, chaotic building they shared, shaped one another. “

Hamid Ismailov is an Uzbek novelist and poet whose spell as writer in residence took the form of blog posts which are now collected together at www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/worldservice/writerinresidence/hamid_ismailov/ There is a video and audio show too at 
www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/arts/2010/05/100511_hamid_writer_residence_audio_slideshow.shtml

The summer schedules from the World Radio TV Handbook are available free of charge at www.wrth.com. The 80 page file gives broadcast schedules for international and clandestine broadcasters, international broadcasts in DRM, frequency listings, certain language broadcasts and transmitter site and target area codes.

A radio read

Kerrie Wood Thomson’s book “Diary of a Public Radio Slave” is a short but entertaining read. A romp through a radio station in the Us building up to an annual pledge week to raise fund, and the visit of a giant of Public Radio. A jolly good read that you can download for under £1 at www.amazon.co.uk/Diary-Public-Radio-Slave-Thomson

Another Kerrie is Kerrie Miller at Minnesota Public Radio with a book review programme and always a good list of book choices on her page at http://minnesota.publicradio.org/projects/ongoing/midmorning_books/  

Follow her on Twitter at https://twitter.com/KerriMPR She co-hosts the Daily Circuit Radio Show which you can follow on Twitter at https://twitter.com/DailyCircuit and listen online at http://minnesota.publicradio.org/radio/programs/daily_circuit/

If you are into National Public Radio then you may wish to read The Sound and the Story: NPR and the Art of Radio. This 1995 book is available from £2 on Amazon. It’s “An inside look at a popular radio network analyzes its size in relation to its following, introduces the personalities behind such programs as Morning Edition and All Things Considered, and weighs the effects of television on radio broadcasting”. www.amazon.co.uk/The-Sound-Story-NPR-Radio

I seem to be stuck in an all-American mode today and we head next to the Smithsonian magazine, always a good read .

The story of how a family were found in 1978 in Siberia with no idea that World War II had ended, was both fascinating and disturbing http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history-archaeology/For-40-Years-This-Russian-Family-Was-Cut-Off-From-Human-Contact-Unaware-of-World-War-II-188843001.html You can watch the television documentary footage, in Russian, of “Lost in the Taiga” at the You Tube channel www.youtube.com/user/pilgrim2heaven 

The 2010 article on 100 years of Public Radio is worth your time too. http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history-archaeology/Radio-Activity-The-100th-Anniversary-of-Public-Broadcasting.html 

BBC World Service to British Antarctic Survey team

The annual BBC Winter Solstice Broadcast to the British Antarctic Survey team is on today June 21 from 2130 to 2200 UTC. (The link above is to the 2012 broadcast).

5965 kHz via Dhabayya transmitter, beaming 203°
7350 kHz via Ascension Island transmitter beaming 207°
9890 kHz via Woofferton txer, transmitter beaming 182°

Thanks to the British DX Club, Dan Ferguson and Glenn Hauser's DX Listening Digest for updates.

June Radio Websites...

Extracts from my latest column in Radio User

I have mentioned the Radio Heritage Net website when it first launched a few short years ago. It specialises in radio news from the Far East and Australasian Pacific region but is looking to expand its coverage worldwide in the next year or so. That expansion is already starting to happen with their amusing Retro Radio Dial feature with looks back at the radio scene in US states such as Texas and Idaho 50 years ago. www.radioheritage.net and on Facebook too.


Radio User reader Graham Smith would like to share two radio related websites. The first is the Solar Terrestrial Activity Report (www.solen.info/solar ), which is compiled by Jan Alvestad in Norway. At the top of the page is a daily graph showing the sunspot number, A index and so on. If short wave reception is bad there is usually a spike in the A index. Further down the page are photos of sunspots, and at the bottom is a chart of the sunspot numbers (apparently we are past the peak of the current cycle). 

The second site is Ydun’s Medium Wave Info (http://mediumwave.info/index.html), compiled by Ms Ydun M. Ritz in Denmark. According to the News page for 12 April China Radio International has launched a frequency in the South China Sea. The Voice of the South China Sea broadcasts in six languages, including Mandarin, English, Vietnamese, Malaysian, Filipino as well as Indonesian. You can hear the English programmes of the voice of the South China Sea at AM 1008, 1400-1500 (local time).

Not a happy Bradley...

Bradley Allen asks about Glenn Hauser. Host of World of Radio (www.worldofradio.com ) and writer of DX Listening Digest for many decades Glenn is a giant in the DX world. From his home in Enid Oklahoma he collates and monitors a wealth of information. There is always much of interest to be read at http://www.w4uvh.net/dxlatest.txt 


Bradley would also like information on the Radio World programme that was aired on Belgian broadcaster Radio Vlaanderen International and hosted by Frans Vossen. The station broadcasts in Dutch /Flemish at http://www.vrt.be/ and is due to move into an impressive new building in Brussels in 2019 (see translated article at http://www.vrt.be/nieuws/2013/04/vrt-kiest-voor-nieuw-gebouw-brussel) 

Fans of the station can hear a programme made around the time of their 50th anniversary at Jonathan Mark's Media Vault http://jonathanmarks.libsyn.com/mn-10-08-1995-belgium-external-broadcasting (it's also at Marks' Critical Distance blog http://criticaldistance.blogspot.co.uk/2011/03/remembering-radio-vlaanderen.html)


When did Radio World start? asks Bradley- he has tracked versions in German, Spanish and French as far back in time as the 1988 World Radio TV Handbook. Jerry Berg's Listening On The Shortwaves 1945 to today book comes up with a definitive answer on page 254. (Berg's opus magnum is available from many online booksellers). A twice monthly DX Corner programme started in 1970 with Frans Vossen introducing DX tips and listeners' letters. It became weekly in 1980 and focused more on features, as well as changing its title to DX World, which lasted until foreign language services were closed in 2005.


The station's mailbag programme Brussels 1043 is also missed by Bradley and he says the demise of the station is "clearly ridiculous".