Bring Back Shortwave

https://archive.is/a5lqU

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.

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.

> 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.

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.

The UK's last remaining shortwave transmitter site has a power output of nearly 3 megawatts across ten HF transmitters. For all the romance of shortwave, it's an incredibly inefficient way to serve an ever-shrinking listener base.

I can see the case for analog radio as an emergency communications system in regions with unreliable infrastructure. I can see the case for limited-area shortwave transmissions to serve populations with poor domestic media. I really struggle to see the case for throwing vast amounts of RF in the vague direction of the ionosphere, on the off chance that someone in the Pitcairn Islands wants to hear the cricket scores.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Woofferton_transmitting_stat...

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.

I love the idea of shortwave but all I ever pick up are Jesus channels.

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.

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).

Honestly if we could just make the pirates around 6950 a little more tacitly legit (I mean it's clear the FCC doesn't care, but a little more wink wink nudge nudge might be cool), that would go a long way towards a shortwave revival. Some of the most fun listening is pirate broadcasts in the shortwave bands. Maybe even something like non-commercial ham-esque licenses that also allow people to play music?