Where are they now? Former shortwave broadcasting giants & minnows

Photo above from Public Radio of Armenia Facebook page

Extracts below from Radio Websites (August 2014)  by Chrissy Brand, for Radio User, 2014. 

Where are they now?

This is the part of the magazine where I track down and remind you of where former radio shortwave broadcasting giants and minnows have now gone to. The Voice of Russia left shortwave to park its bus in cyberspace but can be heard on DAB in south east England, and online at the special UK service website. It’s today’s equivalent of those mighty shortwave broadcasts that Radio Moscow used to target to listeners in “Great Britain and Northern Ireland”.  If you go to  http://voiceofrussia.com/uk/  you can see how the Voice of Russia  still has the variety of exciting programmes that it used to air on shortwave. With current world politics it will pay to keep an ear to that station.

The Voice of Armenia still broadcast on shortwave but not in English, on 4810kHz. The next best thing is that you can watch Armenian television at http://www.armeniatv.am/en/voice with programmes such as The Human Factor, Sharp Angle and Inner Kitchen. It’s also available on a Russian version of You Tube, called Ru Tube http://rutube.ru/  and you can follow the tv channel on Twitter at @armeniantv 

When you mention The Voice of Armenia these days it is more associated with the tv singing show The Voice which started in the USA and has spread globally.  

There is sport as well which doesn’t require too much in the way of knowing the local lingo. It all looks slick and there is a even a little English to help us poor saps. The Armenian alphabet and script looks very elegant I must say, as do some of the presenters you’ll see. It’s a long way from the “This Is Yerevan” identification calls that used to echo across the shortwaves with more regularity than they now do, but I enjoy staying in touch with a country I learned so much about through radio.

Of course, as well as current day audio and video from former international broadcasters, there is an ever-expanding archive being compiled by DXers around the world, and uploaded to You Tube, Vimeo and doubtless other similar video and audio social media sites. You can spend many a happy hour wallowing in the snap crackle and pop of shortwave’s golden era when you search for archive material online. 

For example D Firth has a You Tube channel laden with off-air recordings clips from the late 1960s which feature Radio Australia, Radio Moscow, Radio Peking, Swiss Radio International and the Voice of America at https://www.youtube.com/user/dfirth224  

Our good friend of the DX community SWLDX in Bulgaria, along with a regular blog, has over 2,000 videos online at https://www.youtube.com/user/SWLDXBulgaria which include vintage as well as current catches. Listen to his 40 minute long audio from “The Glory Days of Shortwave Radio”, if you fancy a trip down memory lane. 

Others I’ve enjoyed recently include John Doe’s YouTube channel 
https://www.youtube.com/user/RWObservatory which has current recordings of shortwave stations such as the BBC and Vatican Radio plus some older material including  vintage Brother Stair clips – in full preacher mode- from the 1980s.

EDXC 2014, nice in Nice

Nice in Nice (As the Stranglers sang). Photo: Pete Tomsett

How would you like to round off this summer with a few days in the south of France , talking to your heart's content about all things radio? Well, you can if you attend this year's European DX Conference which takes place from 19 to 22 September. See http://edxcnews.wordpress.com/ for details including registration and accommodation. Their main website is at http://www.edxc.org .

There are conference events for two days in the village of Saint Delmas de Tende then two days 80km down the road in Nice. Presentations and talks about DXing plus excursions to Radio Monte Carlo and beyond. If you want to bring a friend or other half who is not as interested in radio as yourself, there are plenty of non radio sights to see too, with a three countries in one day excursion which visits Ventimiglia in Italy, Monaco and of course, Nice. See you there!

Radiograd...

The exhibition of the month for me is at GRAD (Gallery for Russian Arts and Design) in London. 

Work and Play Behind the Iron Curtain shows consumer items from children’s toys, dolls and model Zils, through fizzy pop vending machines (above) to a space age vacuum cleaner, record players, telephones and, of course, radios. 

There are just a couple of radios, a ladies portable transistor and a Red Star Zveda 54, which all good citizens would gather around in the evening in their cramped Stalinist apartment to hear news of bumper harvests and the latest conquests of space.

I am writing more on the exhibition in the Collectors’ Corner feature in August’s Communication- journal of the British DX Club, so I won’t say more here for now, except, do go to GRAD! (Current exhibition is on until 23 August, with 'A Game in Hell'  The First World War in Russia,  from 27 September to 30 November 2014).

Deutsche Welle’s World Cup

Deutsche Welle have always given good coverage of major sporting events and for this year’s world cup they have their own competition (KickOff Tip) too, where you have to predict the scores of each game. It should be fun to compare with others’ predictions, presumably Deutsche Welle radio aficionados as much as football fans, around the globe. 

Of course the station, along with Deutschlandfunk, also pushed the boat out in 1972, 1974 and 2006 when Munich, West Germany and Germany respectively hosted summer Olympics and two World Cups. (The West Germany v East Germany World Cup match, 40 summers ago in Frankfurt on 22 June 1974, was, for me, the epitome of any World Cup encounter I have seen, with its political and poignant overtones -forget the oft-quoted USA v Iran game in France 1998- the both Germanies clash was the ultimate political football game in my book).

Tune into English (or 29 other languages) online and/or on shortwave with Deutsche Welle.

Brazil- World Cup and world radio

Extracts from Radio Websites by Chrissy Brand, for Radio User, 2014

Brazil is in the spotlight hosting the FIFA World Cup so it seemed timely to choose a few more radio stations from this vast and diverse country. I covered some Brazilian radio station websites last year in Radio User, but this month’s selection are different. You can also do a search for "Brazil" in the top left hand box of this blog for other Brazilian radio mentions I have made over the years.

Radio Bras was the international station from Brasilia that once graced the bands with English and many other languages. It has been absent a long time from shortwave. To listen to what passes as Radio Bras these days you can go to http://www.ebc.com.br/ (formerly www.radiobras.gov.br ) but specifically http://radios.ebc.com.br/ This will lead you to a range of the state radio stations such as Nacional Amazonia and Nacional Rio de Janeiro. News, features and music. http://radios.ebc.com.br/nacionalrioam

Tune In gives you several options too. They can be entertaining even if you don’t understand the local language. http://tudoradio.com/player/radio/3127-radiobras-5400

There are a number of radio stations from Brazil that can still be heard on shortwave here in the UK, albeit only in the Brazilian-Portuguese language, and at least five spring to mind. These include Radio Difusora Roraima from Boa Vista. If you struggle to pick it up on its tropical frequency of 4875kHz, or if you can hear it but want to correctly identify it, access the station’s website at http://www.radiororaima.com.br/ Available in Brazil on 590kHz medium wave too, it also has a rarely updated Facebook page at https://www.facebook.com/pages/Radio-Roraima/

Radio Aparacida is a religious station which is broadcast on 5035 and 6135kHz, online at http://www.a12.com/radio-aparecida and with an active Facebook account https://www.facebook.com/radioaparecida Of course there are plenty of other web-based Brazilian radio stations to listen to. One that I especially enjoy is Radio Brasil at http://www.brasilwebradio.com/

Where are they now?

Extracts from Radio Websites by Chrissy Brand, for Radio User, 2014. 

Photo is a 1980 Radio Kiev (Kyiv) QSL card of the Ukrainian capital enjoying a halcyon summer.

Where are they now?

It’s time now to trace down some of the international broadcasters who left us in the lurch as they fell away from shortwave over recent years. RTBF or Radiodiffusion Television Belge no longer has an English language service so you will have to make do with French audio at http://www.rtbf.be/ but you can easily translate their webpages into English which will certainly give you a clear idea of what is happening in Wallonia and the French speaking part of Belgium.

Radio Vlaanderen International was the Dutch-speaking counterpart of Belgium’s external broadcasting output. http://www.vrt.be/ The broadcaster’s main network comprises Radio 1, Radio 2, Klara, Studio Brussel and MNM, with no English speaking station, which is disappointing. But there is a button which translates everything at the site into English. Just as I used to, still do in fact, turn the radio dial to find programmes and DX of interest, I also click around on websites in a similar fashion. I was pleased to find a few minutes’ video footage of Belgium TV celebrating its 60^th anniversary last autumn. Have a look at http://www.deredactie.be/cm/vrtnieuws.english/videozone_ENG/1.1766789

In recent months you may well have wished that Radio Ukraine International was still available on shortwave. Sadly it’s not but you can read and listen to English from Kiev/Kyiv online at http://www.nrcu.gov.ua/en/157/  The station provides over a dozen different English programmes include, such as Hello Kyiv on Saturdays which airs listener’s letters, Ukrainian Diary (a weekly news round-up), Famous Ukrainians, Panorama and music. On a light hearted note, Sports and Fun is about “sports and activities that turn into passion and people who dare to push the limits”.

Polskie Radio from Warsaw is still very much part of my regular listening at http://www.thenews.pl/1,The-News/65,Podcast where there are several podcasts to subscribe to or choose from. I find that a problem with subscribing to so many podcasts is that they then arrive on your computer quicker than I can actually listen to them, so I end up with a monumental backlog. Back when there were just radio broadcasts to tune to, you either heard it or you missed it, and if you missed it there was no guilt. It’s harder for me to press “delete” when an unheard podcast is sitting on my computer- I want to hear everything that is sent to me but there simply aren’t enough hours in the day. There are a few programmes I try to catch from Warsaw including Dateline Poland, Polish Society and Culture and Central Europe Today.

For me there’s nothing like coming in from work, cooking up a stir fry or chilli and while doing so, tuning into news from Europe, such as Polish Radio’s Central Europe programme or Radio Sweden’s daily news. http://sverigesradio.se/  Perhaps it’s because I associate these programmes with exciting cities that I have visited, coupled with the nostalgia of shortwave listening as a teenager. Maybe the food association is that I was comfortably fed by parental home cooking back then. But somehow listening to these stations on a grey day gives me a cosy and happy feeling.

The Tune In app also provides online radio live or archived from many former shortwave stations, and is worth remembering, especially if you want a quick news or culture fix via your smartphone. http://tunein.com/

Other radio blogs

Extracts from Radio Websites by Chrissy Brand, for Radio User, 2014

Start at http://www.hamradiosecrets.com/ham-radio-blog.html where the above photo came from!

Thomas Witherspoon's blog The SWLing Post is somewhere I am sure you visit at least weekly by now- but you should go more often that that. You should sign up fo rte dialy email notification too. One post that you may have missed, which I found a riveting read, gives an insight into the free radio scene in the USA and Europe. Go to http://swling.com/ and find any entry and you will be enthralled.

The DX Novice blog started strongly enough but like many, it soon faded. Cyberspace is littered with promising projects like this one which lost their way. Maintaining the commitment to a regular blog is hard work but there are some nice posts from 2012 at http://dxnovice.blogspot.co.uk/ where the Romanian DXer whose website it is has posted photos of QSL cards and other goodies they received from stations that year. Just as broadcasters wish to hear from their listeners, bloggers too like to receive feedback to prove that there is an audience reading or listening to them. So it’s always polite to leave an encouraging comment on a blog post.

An exception to the “needing feedback” rule is Gough’s legacy website in Australia which is no longer updated. The radio and computing sections will be of interest to readers, including sounds of HF radio, QSL cards, and readings of Gough's 2009 letter to China Radio International, comparing off air and studio recordings. http://goughlui.com/legacy/ It must be rather satisfying to call time on a website and leave it as a legacy. I wonder how much interest this will be to computing historians in a few short internet years?

Garth Mullins states he is a "writer, broadcaster, activist, 3 chord propagandist". I am unsure what the latter is but his website at www.garthmullins.com gives enough clues to his other passions. Based in Vancouver he received the Jack Mullins Journalism award in 2013 for the best features story on radio (http://www.jackwebster.com/dinner/video.php?id=704) This was for his CBC radio piece "The Imaginary Albino". I won't give away any spoilers here so you can hear the programme for yourself at http://www.cbc.ca/ideas/episodes/2013/02/18/the-imaginary-albino

Other interesting documentaries by Garth and colleague Lisa Hale can be found at http://www.garthmullins.com/p/radio.html This includes information on El Salvador underground station Radio Venceremos and an interview with Elizabeth Hay, author of Late Nights On Air, a book about radio in Canada. http://www.elizabethhay.com/?book=late-nights-on-air  The book, published in 2007, is now on my holiday reading list, having read this synopsis: "Harry Boyd, a world-weary, washed-up television broadcaster, has returned to a small radio station in the remote reaches of the Canadian North. There, in the golden summer of 1975, he falls in love with a voice on air".

Ruud Brand (no relation to me) is a Dutch DXer and his YouTube channel is packed full of entertaining DX DAB and FM catches. https://www.youtube.com/user/RBrDX