Showing posts with label All India Radio. Show all posts

All India Radio can be heard in English on shortwave once again

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Thursday, May 21, 2020
All India Radio office in New Delhi. Photo by Sanjeev Verma
When I returned to the shortwave bands two weeks ago I was sad to learn that All India Radio had suspended its overseas shortwave transmissions at the end of March, owing to the COVID-19 lockdown imposed by the Indian government. It was also being reported that AIR National Channel – a more difficult catch in Europe compared to the External Services Division (ESD) broadcasts – was running on reduced power. However, it seems that we can now hear AIR's English language news bulletins once again, on the same frequency where a limited number of non-English language ESD broadcasts were announced to be broadcasting two weeks earlier. The transmission takes place daily at 1500 UTC on 11560 kHz and is only 30 minutes long. The mixture of English and Hindi suggests that it is a high-power relay of AIR National Channel programming. Below is a recording of this transmission made on May 21st, 2020 with a PocketCHIP handheld Linux computer, AirSpy HF+ Discovery and a YouLoop passive loop antenna. The antenna was positioned on the balcony of my current QTH in London.

Submission to the Shortwave Archive: All India Radio

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Wednesday, August 07, 2019

All India Radio recorded in London, UK on August 5, 2019 at 1759 UTC on the frequency of 9445 kHz using SDR#, AirSpy Mini, SpyVerter and DX Engineering NCC-1 phaser connected to two Wellbrook ALA1530S+ antennas (positioned indoors) to mitigate severe local man-made interference. The transmitter has a power rating of 250 kW and is located in Bengaluru, India. The news bulletin mentions the presidential order under Article 370 relating to Jammu and Kashmir, issued on the day of the broadcast.

Tecsun sessions in a London park: Radio Fana, Voice of America, AIR National Channel

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Thursday, August 16, 2018


On August 6th, 2018, while recording the 22 and the 19 meter bands outdoors using my ultra-portable spectrum capture set-up, I decided to dust off my trusty Tecsun PL-680, hook it up to a simple long wire external antenna and use this rather sensitive radio to venture out to the opposite end of the shortwave spectrum: the 49 meter band. After tuning around for a few minutes I came across Radio Fana on 6110 kHz, which is one of Ethiopia's national stations broadcasting in the Oromo language. Below is my recording of it, starting at 1800 UTC, which I have also shared on the Shortwave Archive.


Radio Fana's transmitter is located in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. The transmission is non-directional and typically has a power rating of 100 kW. Reception improves markedly around the 30 minute mark in the recording.

At 1900 UTC China Radio International's blowtorch signal eclipsed Radio Fana's transmission, so I continued exploring the nearby frequencies. By chance, I stumbled across an English news bulletin from the Voice of America on 6080 kHz that alluded to what Radio Fana had just been reporting in Oromo (namely, the unrest in the Somali province of Ethiopia that resulted in the resignation its regional leader):


After listening to this news bulletin I decided to jump across to the 31 meter band and quickly found myself listening to this rather nice song on All India Radio's National Channel on 9380 kHz:


After spending the past few months mostly recording portions of the shortwave spectrum outdoors with my various software defined radios I had forgotten how much fun it is to use the Tecsun PL-680 radio, the sensitivity of which easily rivals that of most of the SDRs I have used so far. I'll be sure to use it more often to discover what's happening on the bands while I'm making outdoor spectrum recordings.

DRM vs. analogue transmissions of All India Radio

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Tuesday, February 16, 2016
The other day, while scanning the bands, I heard a hum on 7550 kHz that was characteristic of DRM. I fired up my NewStar DR111 (which hardly gets any use nowadays, after Radio Exterior de España ceased their digital transmissions) and tuned in to the frequency. The receiver locked onto the signal immediately and "REGULAR SERVICE" came up on the text display. I had tuned into the General Overseas Service of All India Radio. The signal was very stable without any dropouts, but the sound quality was terrible. I switched back to my Lowe HF-150 and adjusted it to the first analogue frequency of All India Radio I could remember, which happened to be 9445 kHz. I kept switching back and forth between the audio outputs of the two radio receivers and could not believe the difference in quality - the analogue signal was so much better! Below is a recording of this difference: the first 30 seconds are the DRM transmission, and the rest is the analogue signal.



I then recalled that I had encountered this discrepancy in the quality of AIR's transmissions once before and tweeted about it. Below are the tweets comparing the DRM transmission on 7550 kHz to the analogue signal on 11670 kHz back in May 2015.


The reason this surprised me so much was that All India Radio didn't always sound so bad in DRM. Here's a recording I made in October 2013 on a Morphy Richards DRM receiver:



It turns out that the reason for this drastic change is the fact that All India Radio now combine two audio streams in one DRM feed (one stream per language service), as noted by Andrea Borgnino on Twitter:


It's a very cool feature of the DRM standard but unfortunately leaves around 9kbps of bandwidth per stream, resulting in rather terrible audio. The ironic part is that I don't even know how to select the second stream on my DR111 unit and would have to use one of my SDRs together with Dream to take advantage of it. I hope AIR revert to better quality DRM feeds in the future.
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