Photo from Wiki, taken by Diliff.
One of the coolest things about long distance radio listening in general, and Shortwave radio listening in particular, is that it is like travelling all over the PNW, all over the US, and all over the World -- without ever leaving your chair. You hear the signals bouncing to your radio from hundreds, and even thousands of miles away, coming from stations that may very well be on other continents -- even on the opposite side of the world.
For example, I have often heard China Radio International broadcasting to Europe from Kashgar, Xinjiang, China -- a city and region that is in the far western part of that country, and is on the near opposite side of the world from me --11 time zones away. By the time the Kashgar signals have reached my radio -- whether the signals are coming off the front OR the back of their beam -- they've literally crossed half the world.
Early in the morning on May 26th, I was up early (I was still recuperating from my week long illness), so I switched on my Radio Shack 200629, and clipped the indoor wire antenna to the whip, plugged in my headphones, and tuned around. I tuned into the 20 Meter ham band, which was amazingly in working condition at that hour of the morning (3 a.m.+), and heard some stations calling CQ, as it was a CW (Morse Code) radio contest, where ham stations try to get as many contacts as possible.
I heard DA3DR (a German ham) trying to contact Statesiders on 14055 kHz, and his Morse Code signal had a "Polar warble" or slight "Polar flutter", caused by the Auroral Radio Zone. On 14049 I heard K3LR (located in the NE US) calling CQ, and on 14034 I heard Japanese station 7K1MAN, which was cool to hear, as Japan, like Germany, is pretty far away.
Then I tuned to the 25 Meter SW Broadcast band. I heard North Korea (the Voice of Korea) on 11710, with distortion in their signal (they've been having issues with their transmitters over the past few months... it comes and goes). North Korea is always interesting to hear because their music is well produced, but it's also fairly unique to North Korea -- they'll have lots of chick singers with operatic style vocals, and all sorts of backing, from full orchestras to rock bands with horns and strings. North Korean music -- at least that North Korean music on the Voice Of Korea -- sounds like Mitch Miller or the Ray Conniff singers with a Motown bassist, fronted by female opera singers trying to sound like ABBA.
You get the idea.
On 11780 at around 1050 UTC, it sounded like a religious service in Portuguese, including some folk hymns. The only station that fit was Radio Nacional da Amazonia, and being that it was Sunday morning, I suppose the programming would fit.
I tuned up the band and heard China's national radio network station CNR-1 and VOA's Chinese program battling it out on 11785, and CNR-1 battling it out with Radio Taiwan International on 11730. China often uses CNR-1 to drown out the Voice Of America, Ratio Taiwan and Radio Free Asia, and during mornings it's usually audible here in the NW US, sometimes with snippets of the other station behind it. On 11795 I heard KBS World Radio's (South Korea) broadcast to South America in slightly accented Spanish (1148 UTC)... You get the idea, the bands were lively that morning.
A CHINESE RADIO PROGRAM FOR KIDS
On 11885 at around 1158 UTC (458 a.m. my time) I heard CNR-1 and PBS Xinjiang and a third station all occupying the channel at the same time, with one of them playing some decent music -- and at the top of the hour I heard three separate sets of time 'pips', and all three stations switched off instantaneously, and there was nothing but static. On 11785 there was a Chinese program (CNR-1, I think) with a woman talking in a kid's voice ("Mama! Mama!"), with happy sounding, light music behind her talking -- it was obviously a kid's story.
I've heard this a lot on CNR-1. I've often wondered what the kids' stories are about.
Here in the US, anything on radio for kids is consigned to a few religious programs that might run inspirational kids' shows and radio plays, very early Sunday morning. Otherwise, kids' radio programming left the air when Radio Disney yanked the plug on all of their stations in 2015. Children are just another demographic that Radio finds useless, because there is no money to be made from broadcasting to them.
A lot of SWL's seem to tune past CNR-1, viewing it as just a jamming station to note in the logbook and then ignore. However, I've found some of CNR-1's programming interesting, even if I don't know more than seven words of Chinese (Wuh = me, Ni = you, Wuh-men = us, Ni-men = you all, Zhongguo = China, Dien-tai = Broadcasting, and Ni-hao = "hello"). In the early 2010's, every early morning there was a low voiced dude who always spoke softly and closely to the mic, talking over a music bed of romantic piano. I think it was CNR-1's overnight program. I haven't heard that guy -- or that sort of program -- in eight or nine years. CNR-1 is at least two things: well-produced, and it's got a great signal.
From SWLing Post
ANOTHER TONGUE FROM THE POLYGLOT
After I tired of the kid's show, I tuned my Radio Shack 200629 down a few kilohertz, to11875 kHz, around 5:10 a.m. my time (1210 UTC), and I heard a man talking in a very strange language that I'd never heard before.
Now, having listened to Shortwave for several decades, I've heard a LOT of languages, and learned to ID many of them, and at least ID the region if I can't ID the language. I've heard Spanish, Russian, German, Dutch, Afrikaans, French, Hausa, Amharic, Somali, Tigrinya, Swahili, Portuguese, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Mongolian, Viet, Burmese, Inuit (back when the CBC Northern Service was still on the air a long time ago), Hindi, Urdu, Pashto and Dari. I've heard Punjabi, especially on US AM radio stations that program in Punjabi, and I've probably heard that language on SW as well. I've heard Sindhi on SW. I've heard Tamil (on SBC Singapore, which no longer is on SW). I've heard Tagalog and Malay and Bahasa Indonesia. I've heard Pidgin English (on the Solomon Islands BC and the SW station that used to serve Papua New Guinea). I've heard Fulani and one of the languages spoken in Mali, Bambara. I've heard Arabic.
More than half of those languages I can ID. With the others, I generally can at least ID the continent or region where the language is spoken. Sometimes, though, I am clueless about the language. Burmese always throws me off, as does Mongolian. I never can seem to ID those two languages well. I always have problems ID'ing the Afghan languages Pashto and Dari. They're like a puzzle to my ears. It was the same with this language I heard on 11875. I looked up the frequency on my trusty EiBi SW schedule (a very handy tool to keep on your smartphone or tablet computer).
It turned out that the station I was hearing was Reach Beyond Australia, a religious broadcaster I've heard maybe twice before, beaming a program in a language I had never heard of before: Nga La.
%20800px-Chin_village_ferry%20--%20courtesy%20Wikipedia%20Chin%20article%20photog%20Corto%20Maltese%201999.jpg)
Pic from Wikipedia, photographer: Corto Maltese 1999
EiBi has a "ReadMe.txt" file you can download alongside your Frequency Schedule text file. Both are handy to keep on a tablet or phone. The "ReadMe.txt" has a listing of languages, country codes, and transmitter locations for most of the SWBC stations in the world. You can get the EiBi text files at eibispace.de.
I looked up Nga La in the EiBi readme.txt and it said that Nga La -- also known as Matu-Chin, apparently -- is a language spoken by hill tribes in the Chin Hills region bordering western Burma and India's Mizoram State -- a small area maybe the size of the state of New Jersey, south of India's Assam tea region, and maybe a couple hundred miles east of the Bangladesh coastal city of Chittagong.
And -- get this. Nga La has maybe 40,000 speakers, total, in the World. Some estimates are more like 70,000, if related dialects are included. But you get the idea. Nga La is not a massively spoken language.
Think about it. The people running Reach Beyond Australia are programming half an hour of radio, every day, to a tribal language group that is less than half the size, population wise, than my suburb of 100K people!
I personally wouldn't have know about the Nga La language, Mizoram (although I've seen it on a map before), and Chin State in Myanmar / Burma if it weren't for Shortwave radio. With all the stuff on the internet, I don't think I would have found any info on the language or the region where its people live.
A lot of people, especially SW DX'ers, are really down on religious broadcasters. One SW DX journalist, who has a weekly radio show and web presence, habitually has referred to all religious broadcasters as "hucksters". On the Shortwave subreddit there are fairly frequent references to the religious broadcasters, and the comments usually weigh negative, although surprisingly there are a few guys on there who say they listen now and then out of curiosity -- and they realise that the religious programming on stations like WRMI, WWCR, and WBCQ helps keep the signals -- and the other, non-religious programs -- on the air.
Pic from Wikipedia, Photographer: Nggcha
I personally have no issue with the religious preachers, even if there are some that I do not agree with. I don't always tune into the preaching shows, however. Sometimes they're a little toooooo out there for me. In my view, if one doesn't like the programming, every SW radio has a dial....
But still, these religious broadcasters are important, despite what many may think, because they keep the SW stations on the air, and -- face it: THEY ACTUALLY BELIEVE IN THE SHORTWAVE RADIO MEDIUM. I've even heard some of the religious preachers -- radio veteran Bob Bierman among them -- state that they believe in the medium of Shortwave radio to reach people.
They may not be your cup of tea to listen to, and maybe you disagree with religion, but the religious broadcasters actually believe that the Shortwave Radio medium is valid and useful to reach people with their message. They believe in the SW band as much as we SWL's do. After all, they're paying money to actually use the medium.
And they're doing it even to reach listeners in just one small language group, whose total number of speakers are less than that of an average American city.
And this comes at a time that, right now in the US, there are many who no longer believe in the relevance of Radio, period -- be it FM, AM, or SW. In fact, depending on how one views the data, increasing numbers of listeners in the US also apparently think that Radio is no longer relevant as a medium. The US Radio audience has declined by 10% since 2012, and it may still be declining a certain percentage each year. The big Radio companies that are on the stock market have seen their stock prices plummet, because investors do not see Radio as a terrific investment anymore. Values of the radio stations themselves have dropped -- even many big city FM's are worth less money, when accounted for inflation, than they were worth 20 years ago. Furthermore, advertisers sometimes treat Radio like a redheaded stepchild.
Meanwhile, the religious broadcasters still think that Radio, including Shortwave Radio, is a valid means to reach people with your message.
Some of you may not like the message, but before you knock the religious firebreathers too much, remember -- they actually believe in the medium that you like to listen to.
Anyway, because of the fading on Reach Beyond Australia's signal (after all, it was coming from about 12,000 miles away), I switched my antenna from the Radio Shack 200629 to my Tecsun PL-398, and tuned in 11875 on the Tecsun to see if the Tecsun's DSP would make Reach Beyond Australia's program more readable. It did help. It was one of those cases when the DSP really works wonders in resolving the signal.
I listened closely to the language, which seemed to be a mix of SE Asian language sounds (think Viet or Thai), with a little bit of Hindustani language sounds mixed in. Most of what I heard was a guy talking -- probably preaching. The signal level was SIO 2-352 with fading. The guy stopped talking and there was a folk song -- presumably a hymn -- sung by some girls backed by a small pop band.
Then a guy gave what sounded like a web address.
The clock on my Tecsun hit 5:29 a.m., local time, and 1229 UTC. An older woman started speaking, and she mentioned "kilohertz", so she was probably giving the station's Nga La broadcast schedule.
Then I heard a full sign-off from Reach Beyond Australia: "...Thank you for tuning into Reach Beyond Australia.... on the 25 Meter Band." Right after that, there was the sound of a Kookaburra, and then the signal cut off promptly at 1230 UTC.
The Kookaburra's cackly call was used by Radio Australia before the Australian government pulled the plug on them. It's cool that this religious broadcaster is using the same sound as an identifier.
SO EXACTLY WHO ARE REACH BEYOND AUSTRALIA?
Reach Beyond Australia is apparently an offshoot, or continuation of the old HCJB radio station that was famous for running out of Ecuador in the 1960s-90s. The Australian operation broadcasts in 20 different languages, including some -- like Nga La / Matu-Chin (or just "Matu") -- that I never even heard of. Obviously, they are intent on reaching people in Asia for Jesus Christ.
On their website they say that they are especially interested in reaching out to people in Burma, like the Matu / Nga La speakers, the Rohinga people, and the Burmese people, with daily services in those languages and others like them.
They must think that the Shortwave medium is worth it, or they wouldn't be doing it. On their website are pictures of the antenna farm, near Kunanurra in the Kimberly region of far NW Australia. Looks like a sunny place, and there are more trees there than I had envisioned. Here is a link to their main website.:
The location of Reach Beyond Australia's SW transmitters is just 6 kilometers west of Kununurra, and it's easy to see on a satellite map. Just follow the main road (the Victoria Highway) west, over the Ord River (located right next to the city), and then aim your browser map a bit SW of the bridge that crosses the river. The transmitter site shows up fairly well on a computer mapping app -- a semi-circle of tall towers, which you can spot by their shadows on the ground.
And if you're interested in tuning in this station -- even if it's just to hear the languages, here is their current schedule.:
Although the religous programming coming out of US domestic broadcasters is of marginal interest to most DX'ers, the foreign language broadcasters are a different matter entirely. I've heard Trans World Radio and Adventist World Radio, and their foreign language broadcasts usually have interesting sounding music -- and the fact that a lot of the broadcasts are out of MADAGASCAR is pretty cool, as it's nearly on the opposite pole of the World from me. US religious broadcaster KNLS / New Life Station broadcasts out of Alaska in Russian to Siberia, and they play a lot of cool pop music from the 2010's and the 1980's. And they also broadcast to European Russia from Madagascar, too, and I've heard a few of those broadcasts -- basically coming to my radios from 12K miles away.
Reach Beyond Australia seems similar in scope. They broadcast in interesting sounding languages, and they play interesting music -- usually they seem to be simple church hymns sung by regular folks. Where the station got the girl group singing a hymn in the Nga La language I have no idea. If there are only 40K to 70K Nga La speakers in the world, that's a small population to put together a singing group. But somebody did. Perhaps it was a local congregation in the area.
SHORTWAVE LEADS TO AN INTEREST IN LANGUAGES AND GEOGRAPHY
To bring this back to the first subject breached in this article: Radio has always been a discovery medium for me. When I was a little kid, and when I first heard radio stations from Oregon (which, to a 4 or 5 year old, seemed like a foreign country), I instantly wanted a map to see where Grants Pass was; where was Albany and Lebanon, Oregon? Where was Corvallis? Where was Eureka, California?
MW DXing made me interested in geography, and other places. And then, a few years later, when I discovered the Shortwave band, I was digging through the National Geographic maps that my folks stored on the bookshelf, and then using my big World Atlas. I wanted to see where the Netherlands Antilles were, and where the Netherlands was (after all, Radio Nederland's shows were produced in Hilversum. So I looked it up on the map). I wanted to know the geography of South Africa -- Johannesburg, Germiston, Springs, Boksburg -- I saw them on the map when I heard Radio RSA. When I heard Radio Australia, I pulled up the map of Oz to find Melbourne and Shepparton.
Whenever commentators on Radio Moscow talked about the Soviet republics, I'd pull up a map and see where those places were.
I also developed an interest in languages from hearing them on the Shortwave bands. Like I said, on Shortwave you hear a LOT of different languages, even today.
Although there is a ton of information technically available on the internet, I wouldn't have learned about a language -- Nga La -- that's only spoken by 40,000 people if it weren't for Shortwave radio. And I use the internet daily, like many people do.
I'm not certain how much the truly worldwide reach of the internet really helps people get an understanding of other countries -- be it their geography or languages and culture. I say this in the light of the fact that search engines -- the most basic of research tools -- simply aren't what they were just 15 years ago. The WorldWideWeb has turned slowly into the WorldWide-AI-Boosted-Shopping Mall. Social media connects people, but how much connecting does it really do?
I realize that a lot of the old SW broadcasters have gone online. I wonder if their audience has grown since it's gone web-only. I've never seen the data for it, but I have my doubts that audiences for the online version of Radio Canada Int'l or Radio Nederland are any bigger than they were when they were using the Shortwaves.
Going online didn't help Radio Disney, and they hyped up their stream quite a bit before pulling the plug on Over-The-Air Radio. Their stream barely lasted 5 years. Apparently the listeners didn't follow them over to the streaming site.
The internet is a terrific place, and a great tool for learning and exposure to other peoples and cultures. However I sometimes wonder if it's as effective at world discovery today, as turning on a Shortwave radio can be.
IN OTHER LIFE.....
I'm feeling better than I did a week ago. I'm pretty much recuperated from whatever bug I had. I went out for a bike ride this morning -- the first one in three plus weeks -- and that's progress. My trusty car, however, is simply not so trusty anymore. It appears to be turning into a money suck. The fuel system is fine, but it looks like the temperature sensor is faulty, and the computer that runs the car won't run anything correctly if it doesn't see the right temperature.
This is what happens when you let a computer run your car.
Otherwise, there are a few positives. The weather is improving. As I finish the first draft of this article, it is a sunny morning and it's supposed to be 70F later today.
Weather is OK, and I'm still alive and kicking. Can't beat that, can you?
ONE OF OZ'S BEST EXPORTS, THE BAND DIED PRETTY
I'll close this with a track by an Oz band that I really got into in the 1990's. They're a lesser well-known band, but were one of the best rock bands to come out of Australia. In fact, I first heard of them on Radio Australia: Died Pretty.
Their singer, Ronald S. Peno, had a unique way with words. The words didn't need to be 100% coherent -- the sounds of the words mattered almost as much. I guess Mr. Peno was into poetry, which adopts much the same attitude towards the use of language.
This is their liveliest official video, with a song off Lost, their 1988 album, which was also released in the US. It's called Winterland. Mr. Peno's singing is sort of like Bob Dylan meets Iggy Pop meets Bon Scott meets Jim Morrison:
This is the first song I heard by them, on Radio Australia's Soundabout program, Towers Of Strength.:
This next vid is of the second track on Died Pretty's Lost album, which I played quite a bit in the early 1990's. It's sung by the guitar player and co-songwriter, Brett Myers. It's called Out Of My Hands.:
This track has no active video, but the song is probably one of their best. It's called As Must Have. The music actually was an influence on my own songwriting.... plaintive chords, with a lot of E Minor 7ths. Welcome to the Ronald S. Peno method of lyric writing. Mr. Peno unfortunately left us all in August of last year. Mr. Peno, you had a way with words.
Here's to all this madness, this breeze is blowing cold
The Bible has its new brew, our world has lost its soul....
Well, that's it for now, folks.
Until next time,
Peace.
C.C., June 1st, 2024.
No comments:
Post a Comment