Bring Back Shortwave
114 comments
·March 7, 2025jen729w
In the early 2000s I was lucky enough to travel the world for work. I was a football nut and always carried a Sony radio so I could pick up the BBC World Service.
I vividly remember turning it on late in a Sunderland vs. Newcastle match. I was in central Bogota, Colombia. Struggling for reception, knowing we'd gone 1-0 down early in the match, I can still hear the commentator: "and who would have thought, after going one-nil down at St. James' Park, Sunderland would be two-one up". I shouted out loud like a lunatic. We won the game.
I've strung wire coat-hangers from windows in Nigeria, Ukraine, and Macedonia all trying to improve reception so I could listen to a football match.
There's a romance there that internet streaming will never touch.
don-code
While admittedly not at all the same, there was a certain romance shared by all listeners of a Boston-local FM radio station, WFNX. Whereas many commercial radio stations broadcast with tens of thousands of watts, FNX made do with a Class A broadcast license, limiting them to around 3000 watts of power. This made picking up the station a challenge for all but the closest listeners.
My particular romance was taking a pair of TV rabbit ears and hanging them out the window by the twin-lead cable, much to my mother's chagrin.
cbarrick
In college, I would listen to WPPP in Athens, GA (100 watts). These days I listen to WPTS in Pittsburgh, PA (16 watts).
Low power college radio is great! The broadcasts are always so varied, and there's never any commercials.
deshpand
Growing up in a somewhat remote part of India, I would tune to BBC, Radio Australia to listen to test cricket commentary, on short wave. I have fond memories and owe a lot of my personal growth to SW.
hot_gril
Idk, it was pretty fun when all my friends were huddled around a single phone on the subway to watch the World Cup final on grandmastreams123321.xyz, with a second tab open on soccerplus321123.ru as backup
dfxm12
There's a romance there that internet streaming will never touch.
Simple broadcast rights for one. It's hard to explain to my father why he needs to still pack a handheld radio for the beach because he can't listen to the game by streaming the local sports station on his phone.
42lux
Yep, was my gateway to the world as little boy before the internet/bbs came around.
tomwheeler
Same for me. Beyond the broadcasts, I'd write the stations and they'd reply by sending program guides, newspaper clippings, postcards, and other neat things from faraway places.
Some of the stations even offered language lessons over the air. I learned basic German when I was 12 from the ones on Deutsche Welle. I attempted to learn Chinese the following year from the big shortwave station in Taiwan.
energy123
Access to the internet is like when you use cheats in a game and it ruins the fun.
ricktdotorg
shoutout fellow Mackem! not often spotted on HN!
rawandriddled
Whose keys are these keys? ;)
hilbert42
Those who've had experience with either transmitting or receiving on the HF band and or lower frequencies (≤30MHz) and who've knowledge of ionospheric propagation just know that short, medium and longwave RF bands are still essential in this digital/cable/satellite era for reasons that when all other communications systems have failed then communications on these frequencies will still be reliable.
Moreover, in wartime or during some other major catastrophe when technical infrastructure is likely to be impacted or destroyed then establishing and maintaining communications services on these frequencies is easy for reasons that the technology is low-tech and easy to understand—and there's an enormous amount of engineering experience to fall back upon (about 100 years' worth).
That we even have to raise this discussion is a quintessential example of intergenerational information loss.
Given their strategic importance, governments should put priority on educating the smartphone/streaming generation that these other modes of electronic communication actually exist and that they may even have to depend upon them.
I only need to refer to the current debate over retaining AM-band reception in car radios to illustrate the paucity of understanding. That EV manufacturers are pushing for the removal of the AM band in their car radios is proof-positive of how little the current breed of electronics engineers knows about these frequencies let alone their strategic importance.
digitalsankhara
You covered all the points I was going to make. As part of the pre-internet generation that grew up with radio and a ham radio operator since my school years this is second nature and common sense to me.
It is interesting that governments have long recognised the power of shortwave such that they have restricted what a citizen can do with it. In wartime, ham radio is usually made illegal. The recipient of a broadcast cannot be detected (save some very local factors - meters range) which is why governments around the world still use shortwave number stations to transmit coded instructions to spies.
I suspect the removal of AM radio in EVs is also because the cost to RF shield the car against EM emissions in that frequency range was deemed too high for the audience it would address, and maybe just lazy or engineering too. Agree, very short sighted.
Hell, even the BBC in the UK is closing down local AM transmitters on cost grounds (but I suspect there is political pressure to move the masses to digital UHF infrastructure).
A medium wave/shortwave transmitter is the ultimate in post apocalyptic film memes!
BoxOfRain
> Hell, even the BBC in the UK is closing down local AM transmitters on cost grounds (but I suspect there is political pressure to move the masses to digital UHF infrastructure).
Yeah in a couple of years it'll just be Radio Caroline and various small-time pirates on AM. Even the venerable longwave transmitter for Radio 4 is getting shut down in a couple of months sadly.
Can't help feeling this is all a bit short-sighted, it's not like you can do anything else with those bands and if things go sideways it's a reliable way to reach a lot of people without power. Personally if we can't keep our medium and long wave transmitters on economic grounds I think those bands should be opened to unlicensed hobbyists, it'd be an excellent technical and artistic opportunity that would allow for actual broadcasting rather than just two-way communication. I doubt there'd be a huge issue with interference as few people have the room to put up a 150' quarter wave, and if copyrights were a material issue rights holders would have gone after public SDRs capturing the broadcast bands years ago.
digitalsankhara
Totally agree. Thought about this myself, as a way of having true community radio. A simple hobby broadcast license of low cost might be pooled to cover copyright music only to prevent the types raids of seen on pirate stations (leaving aside what politics can be read into that enforcement). Maybe that would not be such an issue these days, but anyway, there is a lot of Creative Commons content out there.
I love listening to the North Sea pirates on medium wave. So diverse and ecletic!
hilbert42
"…it'll just be Radio Caroline and various small-time pirates on AM. Even the venerable longwave transmitter for Radio 4 is getting shut down in a couple of months sadly."
Even with this shortsighted decision, the size of the UK is such that FM and digital services can provide adequate coverage. But that's not the case for large countries like the US, Canada, Australia, etc. VHF services major population centres with comparative ease but it's essentially impossible for it to do so for vast sparsely-populated areas. This is where LF, MF and HF are effective.
Years ago I recall traveling by car from Sydney to Adelaide (Australia) which is about 1000 miles and the shortest route is to travel diagonally across the country (the longer way would be to travel the coastline where the population is larger and take in cities such as Melbourne).
Traveling cross-country meant going across sparsely-populated areas where local broadcast services were either nonexistent or very patchy (low power—just enough to service a small community). Nevertheless, that proved no problem as the ABC's (the Oz version of the BBC) capital city AM transmitters located in Sydney, Melbourne and Adelaide provided coverage all the way. Even though Melbourne wasn't on route at points along the way its transmitter was stronger than the other two. (I'd note that was the daytime coverage from all three transmitters sans skip.)
It would be impossible to provide that coverage with only three VHF transmittes no matter their power. Frankly, it'd be crazy to switch off AM transmissions in a country like Australia even if one discounted their strategic advantage.
dalke
> such that they have restricted what a citizen can do with it
My grandfather, born in Canada and later naturalized as a US citizen, got his ham ticket back in the 1960s, but, as he wrote: "This was O.K. for one year but to renew & become general I would have to obtain more than just a US passport; It would be necessary to get a certificate of citizenship. This took years and during those years I landed up in the Dom. Republic & got my Ham ticket there without it, HI3XRD."
He later moved to Miami. When Hurricane David came through the D.R. in 1979, he was one of the ham volunteers who helped handle communications from the island.
Oh, and he never got Extra because while he could manage 13 wpm for General or Advanced, he couldn't manage the 20 wpm for Extra.
hilbert42
"It would be necessary to get a certificate of citizenship. This took years and during those years I landed up in the Dom. Republic & got my Ham ticket there without it, HI3XRD.""
Thank you very much for pointing that out. I'm in Australia and I've often pointed to the fact that many countries restricted access to the radio spectrum for many reasons—to limit EMI, for state security and strategic reasons, ensure secrecy of communications, etc.
For example, when I got my amateur ticket whilst still at school in the 1960s I had to sign a Declaration of Secrecy and have it witnessed by a registered JP. The reason was that people such as us could come across important transmissions (messages) of a strategic nature that should not be allowed to fall into the wrong hands.
Come mobile phones, WiFi etc. that changed without any real public discussion whatsoever.
What I find absolutely amazing is how—by sleight-of-hand—Big Tech sideslipped both very tight telephony and radiocommunications laws to violate say privacy on smartphones, and the fact that they've gotten away with it. The smartphone generation hasn't a clue about any of this stuff. Right, once the privacy of telephonic communications was inviolable, now it's a fucking joke.
On the matter of the declaration of secrecy, amateurs could possibly come across unencrypted telephonic communications, ship-to-shore etc., and as deemed secret, they (rightly) were not allowed to act on that information in any way, in fact jail-time penalties applied if laws were violated.
Incidentally, as my Declaration of Secrecy has never been rescinded I'm still bound by its conditions.
hilbert42
"I suspect the removal of AM radio in EVs is also because the cost to RF shield the car against EM emissions in that frequency range was deemed too high for the audience it would address,.…"
The difficulty in suppressing switching noise/RFI is one of the stated reasons EV manufacturers give for removing AM reception. They say that keeping AM will increase EV costs.
If regulators/spectrum management were to agree to their request then that would imply a relaxation of existing EMI emission standards. With thousands of EVs on the roads the noise floor on the HF band and lower frequencies would become intolerable, the band would become unusable.
A while ago on HN I referred to a now-dated NATO communications tech note on interference that said the noise floor on the HF band had increased about 6dB. I went on to mention that about a decade ago I'd mentioned the NATO stats to an engineer from a HF transmitter manufacturing company at a trade show. He responded by asking me where I'd been in recent years and went on to state the noise floor on HF had since increased to about 17dB above the pre-digital switching era.
As I said that was about a decade ago when EVs were still only lab prototypes. If EV manufacturers are allowed to get away with emitting more EMI then the HF bands will become altogether unusable. And no doubt this is a serious problem.
EV manufacturers like Musk have enormous power and what worries me is that spectrum management authorities around the world will cave in further to pressure and relax EMI standards even more.
That increase in the noise floor from 6dB to 17dB was the result of spectrum management caving in to commercial pressure from the 1980s onwards. This was the era of deregulation and EMI regulations were loosened—EMR/noise testing etc. was not only relaxed but further outsourced.
It seems to me those who've a vested interest in the LF/MF/HF bands and want them preserved/saved from interference need to join forces and make concerted efforts to save them. An unlikely alliance of say the military, amateur radio (IARU), broadcasters and others speaking in unison to governments/ITU is what's needed to save these bands.
BTW, I once held an AR license which I got whilst I was still at school.
baskinator
A ham technician license is pretty easy to obtain in the US, and a handheld radio can be had for cheap. HF takes a little more hardware though.
MandieD
Bonus: all of the US license exams can be taken online, proctored by three volunteers watching you on your laptop and second mobile device camera.
Cthulhu_
And I believe you don't even need a technician license for just listening in.
DrillShopper
You do not!
You can get started for as little as $17: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B074XPB313
For the other amateur radio operators on the site, the UV-5Rs from the main Amazon seller all comply with spurious emissions regs - the ones from AliExpress are hit or miss. Plus searching YouTube with 'Baofeng UV5R' will turn up a ton of material including explaining why people should care about the spurious emissions.
chasd00
I have a yaesu ft65 and every now and then turn it on. I listen to an automated voice dispatching fire trucks in Dallas TX. They’re pretty busy as something comes across about once a minute. Heh I turned it on while typing this and “emergency child birth” just came across. Man, glad I’m not dealing with that at 7:30AM Monday morning.
kube-system
> ionospheric propagation [...] will still be reliable.
...for varying definitions of 'reliable' :)
hilbert42
Yep, an issue with 'old fashioned' comms.
But modern comms will switch bands or 'glide' frequencies in sympathy with the changing ['fading'] MUF, etc. and can do so automatically (using OWF in conjunction with IPS also helps). Combine that with modern encoding/digital modulation and say DRM of the right kind—Digital Radio Mondiale—for audio etc. and it's pretty damn reliable.
Want better? Diversity TX/RX and or multichannel via in-band and or cross-band into comparators etc.
JKCalhoun
> Britain and most western countries have put all their eggs in one large basket: that of digital communications. In a time of global conflict, this could be a risky and painful prospect.
There's a scene in The Garden of the Finzi-Continis (1970) where a man (Jewish) is listening to the events of WWII play-out over shortwave. He is living at the moment in relative safety but he understands from what he hears that change is afoot in his country.
At the risk of sounding like a prepper, it was clear to me then that having a radio capable of long distance reception was a very valuable thing to have around.
II2II
There is a difference between being prepared and being a prepper. Having the means to receive outside information is being prepared. Listening to it day and night because you think your government is out to get you is being a prepper.[1]
[1] Unfortunately, many exceptions apply.
jordanb
Being a prepper is a consumer activity.
Conversely trying to prepare for things that could occur by, for instance, getting first aid training, ham radio license, etc. is a communal activity "how could I be an asset to my community in times of trouble?" I think it's telling that in the cold war the "prepper" activity was putting together civil defense groups. In this century it's building a bunker full of guns and spinning fantasy about protecting your hoard of stuff from the mob.
blitzar
My plan for the apocalypse is to take down a "prepper".
toast0
Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they're not out to get you. :p
Cthulhu_
The Dutch government updated their "prepper" guide the other day, basically asking everyone to make sure they'll be alright for up to 3 days (was 2) in case of calamities - weather events, utility outages, etc. It's pretty standard stuff - water (3 liters/day/person), food, radio / powerbank, flashlight, candles, first aid kit, blankets, hygienic products, etc.
lutusp
More astonishing than knowing what HF radio can do, is to notice how empty the HF bands are compared to past decades.
During my around-the-world solo sail (1988-1991) (https://arachnoid.com/sailbook/), I relied on two-way HF radio for many things no longer present, including open-water phone calls. But that absence represents a choice, not a necessity. Here's an easy receiver project: "Create Your Own Open-Source Software-Defined Radio" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iXNgPYVpTng).
Receiving is cheap and easy. To transmit on these bands, you must get a Ham license. But that's easier than it was -- Morse code is no longer required.
I can remember what I thought when I first heard about the Internet -- that it would make Ham radio look slow and stupid by comparison. I was never so wrong about anything in my life (not for a lack of eager candidates).
bobsomers
There has been a bit of a shortwave revival in recent years, with activities like POTA (Parks on the Air) and SOTA (Summits on the Air) getting people back onto the HF bands. For those unfamiliar, POTA encourages people to get out to State and National parks, set up a portable radio (usually shortwave), and make as many contacts as they can in a short time. If you make 10 contacts, you’ve “activated” the park. The activator submits their logs to the website, and everyone they talked to gets credit for “hunting” that park.
Whoever designed the POTA website… it’s uncharacteristically brilliant for the amateur radio community. There are gazillions of metrics you can track about which parks you’ve hunted and which ones you’ve activated, progress bars for every state, all sorts of awards and “achievements” for various operating times, modes, repeats, etc.
It’s turned portable shortwave operating into gamified crack, except these are real skills that are valuable during an emergency. Having the equipment is one thing, but the regular practice of knowing how to quickly set it up and operate it anywhere is invaluable.
ggm
I used to get the woodpecker, and some very ominous semi-continuous monotonous hums in human hearing ranges with occasional tweedle. And the lincolnshire poacher. Or, something very like it.
This was 70s Edinburgh, with a long-line antenna strung from my window to a tree about 50m away. I tried to make a dipole out of it, not sure it really worked. The radio was WW2 bomber surplus store, about 15U high and probably some precursor to a 19" rack width. you swapped out brick sized tuning blocks to reset it's frequency bands and then used a blade-overlap condenser tuner. I also used bakelite headphones, no soft foam. Hardcore! We had a better one downstairs with a vernier which tuned more accurately, consistently and it did MW for BBC radio. When FM became more common we got a small philips and it sat next to it, doing the hard work.
Shortwave picked up a lot. I was too young to understand what QSL cards would be about otherwise I would have some.
frrlpp
Wow, that would be a National HRO receiver. Quite capable radio.
ggm
I think it was a variant of what in the UK is called R1155E RAF Receiver 10D/1332
If not exactly that model, very similar.
tacet
>very ominous semi-continuous monotonous hums
could be buzzer perhaps https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UVB-76
ggm
Too modern. But similar intent perhaps
Cthulhu_
QSL cards (just looked it up) look like a fun hobby to send or receive, but probably moreso if you live somewhere remote or exotic (not me, I live in peak Dutch suburbia).
donatj
I had a shortwave radio as a kid in the 90s in Minnesota. I never picked up much with it. Some Mexican stations, weather broadcasts, and when the ionosphere was right BBC World Service. On exceedingly rare occasions I could even pick up stations from South East Asia.
As a lonely and somewhat isolated child, these fleeting glimpses of the wider world were nothing short of magical.
thenthenthen
Shortwave is magic, I recently made this [0] receiver and it is so much fun (in Europe I received about 10 stations with it on a random wire)
y33t
I love the idea of shortwave but all I ever pick up are Jesus channels.
AnonymousPlanet
I'm in Europe, so it's mostly Chinese propaganda in various languages that you pick up on shortwave around here. There's exactly one American broadcast you can get here and that is, you guessed it, a Jesus channel.
cloudbonsai
It would be funny if a prepper spent $100+ on an emergency radio receiver, and took all the trouble to ensure it's reliably working. Then, when the apocalypus day finally comes, all they can listen to is a jesus channel.
ForOldHack
Jesus!
kanbankaren
There are other broadcasts too. You just have to listen during certain periods as they mayn't be up all the time. The website above allows you to figure out what you can receive at your location.
TylerE
That website is broken. When you drag the dot it says to reload the page for the change to take effect...and then when you do the dot snaps right back to africa.
II2II
It works under Firefox. That said, I don't know how reliable the predictions are. My SWR is packed away at the moment.
null
criddell
I have a shortwave receiver and it is all weird Christian stuff.
Even if that were my thing, I probably wouldn't listen because it all sounds awful. Is there something about shortwave that limits the audio fidelity?
johnflan
How do they finance those radio stations?
Jtsummers
Probably the same way a lot of that stuff gets funded, a rich true believer or a bunch of less-rich true believers donating. I used to live in a town where one of the largest landholders was selling off land a few acres at a time. He had a couple thousand acres (had been farmland, but the city had grown since that time and it was not that profitable as a farm) and was able to sell it at something like $25-50k/half-acre lot. Neighborhoods went up, he got money and funded a lot of missionary activities (primarily in Africa, as I understood it). You get someone like that to bankroll a radio station, they could probably set up an endowment to keep it running for quite a while. The land the station uses and towers, if owned by the station, can be rented out for more income as well.
JKCalhoun
SDR has started me on the path of exploring the radio spectrum, I encourage anyone who is interested in radio who has not tried it to get a cheap SDR dongle and give it a spin.
_whiteCaps_
That's what got me into amateur radio - with your SDR you can receive signals from the ISS repeater, and watch the frequencies change due to the Doppler effect.
_def
You can even try some websdr servers, it can be really fun, even/especially(?) if you don't really know what you are doing
nubinetwork
A lot of publicly available websdr's have a limited frequency range due to the hardware used, or political reasons, I wound up buying a limesdr myself because nobody nearby has the ranges I want.
euroderf
Having a shortwave (with a decent antenna) is fun. You twiddle the dial and find all kinds of goodies. Pretty soon you'll be scouring teh interwebz for programming schedules.
sneak
I have never been able to pick up anything on my SW radio with its integrated antenna.
What am I doing wrong?
lormayna
The easiest antenna for SW listening it's just a long wire in an high position, clipped to integrated antenna with crocodile connectors. Easy, portable and very effective.
the-grump
It helps to be high up and to have an unobstructed view.
An antenna extension (https://www.dxengineering.com/parts/sgn-ant-60) would help.
Even better would be an active antenna. I have only heard great things about the MLA30+ though I don't own one myself.
WWCR (4840) has always been the easiest broadcast for me to pick up in the US.
sidewndr46
Height isn't going to make any real difference for shortwave reception unless you're seriously high up and putting up a very efficient antenna like a dipole. At that point it's kind of moot, as you don't need an efficient antenna anyways to receive shortwave.
rpcope1
The MLA30+ is ok if you throw away the crappy bias tee power injector that comes with it and replace the coax with something a little more durable.
There's other gear like the cross country wireless loops that aren't much more expensive that perform much better, at least in my experience.
lutusp
> I have never been able to pick up anything on my SW radio with its integrated antenna. What am I doing wrong?
If the radio and its antenna are indoors, that's the problem. As a test, take the radio outdoors to an open area. You should see a big improvement.
To make that change permanent, install an outdoor long-wire antenna that runs inside and connects to the radio. The wire can be invisibly thin and still do the job. Your neighbors don't need to know about your retro pastime.
thenthenthen
Check for noise sources (tube lights, solar equipment) as well. A friend had an old thinkpad and the psu brick was so noisy, it was blanking out my radio within 6-10 meters…
ChainHacker
IIRC Ethernet over the Main Electricity can interfere with Shortwave as well.
lysace
Cheap LED light bulbs...
https://archive.is/a5lqU