Endangered Shortwave Stations

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Sunday, April 24, 2016
Last week, when talking to my friend and fellow shortwave archivist Thomas Witherspoon about using software-defined radios to capture and preserve parts of the shortwave spectrum, he and I suddenly stumbled upon an idea: creating a curated list of endangered shortwave radio stations. We could use such a list, we thought, to focus our own efforts and those of the community on archiving the transmissions that were the most likely to disappear in the near future.

Shortwave Radio Audio Archive endangered stations page - http://shortwavearchive.com/endangered/
Thomas went ahead and quickly put together a draft version of this list, available here, and I added a few items to it. However, it's difficult to get up-to-date information on the stations' closure plans, as the organisations that sponsor shortwave broadcasters usually don't give much notice when deciding on funding cuts, so we will have to figure out a way of keeping it current (perhaps we can also use this list as a point of contact for whistleblowers?).

The list has already helped me to prioritise my shortwave recording activities. For the past four days I have been using my indoor SDR set-up (FunCube Dongle Pro+, MacBook Pro running Windows on VMWare and SDR#, plus the entire anti-interference set-up, described in one of my earlier posts) to record a small window of the shortwave spectrum that contains two critically endangered stations: the Voice of Greece (9420 kHz) and All India Radio (9445 kHz). These are late evening transmissions that I can't capture from the park for practical reasons. Some effort was required to tune the equipment for stable indoor reception:
The effort has already paid off, however: having recorded close to 14 hours of the Voice of Greece, I noticed that the station went off the air again last night. VOG is known for its irregular broadcasting hours, so not much surprise there, yet it's hard to predict when it resumes its programming. Hopefully, fellow enthusiasts will get in on the act and record the broadcasters that are teetering on the brink of shutdown. What stations do you think are critically endangered? Please leave your thoughts in the comments section!

About the author

This blog is written by a shortwave radio enthusiast based in London, UK. You can follow him on Twitter at @LondonShortwave

7 comments:

  1. Old Film Guy26 April 2016 at 13:08

    Kudos for your efforts - between you and Thomas, and the audiences you both reach, the archives will likely grow exponentially. Cheers!

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  2. mfahey2 May 2016 at 09:28

    Good stuff London Shortwave! I record heaps of spectrum - i am quite addicted to it. The logic being we are in the final decades of non-ip media delivery, and spectrum allows people in the future to recreate a unique experience that has long been forgoten. I record lots of AIR externals and domestics, also a lot of Radio Australia (local quality reception here) plus the Australian ABC domestic shortwave services. I will target stations on the list too, in the not too distant future (lless than 10 years?) we will have the capablity to store massive spectrum files in the cloud and play them back just like we can save audio in the Shortwave Audio Achive.

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    1. London Shortwave3 May 2016 at 11:17

      Thanks Mark! Those are exactly my sentiments and predictions too, so let's keep the archiving effort going. Apart from anything else, it's huge fun. I grabbed an hour of the 31m band on Sunday at about 18 UTC, outdoors. Heaps of activity: AIR national channel and the overseas service, Thailand, Vietnam, Indonesia, North / South Korea, Japan via Meyerton, New Zealand, The Philippines, Morocco, Saudi Arabia... all very audible. And with each new station in the spectrum, the amount of context grows that much more.

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    2. London Shortwave3 May 2016 at 11:24

      P.S. in fact, it's already quite a challenge to explain how non-IP information delivery can work over long distances to anyone born after 1985.

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  3. peppermint lounger3 May 2016 at 10:46

    Thanks for the post. The Australian Government is about to hand down its 2016/17 budget tonight and has foreshadowed another round of cuts to the ABC. The new head of the ABC is an ex Google executive and Murdoch hack so a nuanced response may not be forthcoming. These are dark days for Radio Australia and it may not survive another year.

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    1. London Shortwave3 May 2016 at 11:09

      Thanks rubbersoul1991, we'll be looking into this ASAP.

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