Shortwave Radio Listening for Beginners

Website Design by VE4AKW Ron M.

CONTENTS

Weather / Marine Fax Introduction. Receive text, ocean maps and low altitude Earth video shots from a Shortwave radio set using your computer.

Software Downloads for Shortwave Radio. Discussion and Links to some nice software.

Listen to Pirate Radio Stations on Shortwave Radio although they have a tendency to operate of AM and FM frequencies too.

Intercept Slow Scan Television pictures from Amateur Radio Operators sending back and forth using a "slow" form of signals emulating regular television principles. With the right program, you can see them on your computer with only an audio cable.

Build a directional Shortwave Loop Antenna for the shortwave bands and the broadcast band. ade loop antenna for the short

Project: Building a long distance 2n222 transistor regenerative receiver using modern components . The sensitivity of this little unit can rival any mediocre set on the market today.

Shortwave Antennas. A bit technical material for reviewing.

Project: This is a tiny little project , actually the interface needed to hook your computer to your Shortwave set. There is abundant software on the net which needs this little interface to digitize the audio to make it the computer able to process it. It's actually easy to make and costs just a few buck with new parts.

Listen to World Wide Broadcasts of Foreign Radio Stations all over the world in many languages. Many countries transmit with huge amounts of power and carry English language broadcasts to North America.

Try and tune an online Web Controlled Shortwave Radio. The receiver sits alone at a remote location, and through a Web Site, you tune it and it will send you back what it is recieving at the setting you set on the dial. This is part of the future of shortwave. Web Controlled Radio.

SWARL Shortwave Radio Club of Canada. There are many Shortwave Radio Clubs in the world if you use your search engine to discover them.

Your Passport to World Wide Listening of Broadcast Stations, Amateur Operators, and Exotic Digital Signals You Can Decode With Your Computer from Ships at Sea, Relayed Satellite Weather Photos and Low Altitude Earth Shots As Well As Radio Teletype, Marine Fax, and Slow Scan Television.

No License Required to Listen and Intercept these signals. A great way to become accustomed to the spectrum and perhaps becoming a Ham Radio Operator one day.

Shortwave listening (abbreviated SWLing) is tuning for stations located on shortwave frequencies, usually thought of as those from 1700 kHz (the upper limit of the AM broadcasting band) to 30 MHz (the lower limit of the tuning range of most scanner radio). In between those two frequencies, a simple, low cost shortwave radio is capable of letting you hear news, music, commentaries, and other feature programs in English from stations located round the world.

Most of the larger nations of the world broadcast programs in English especially for North American audiences, and transmit them on times and frequencies for best reception in North America.

But why bother listening to shortwave in this era of communications satellites and cable television news channels? Perhaps the biggest reason why is that SWLing can give you a unique perspective on events that you simply cannot get from American media. If you watch coverage of an event in Moscow from CCN or CBS News, you get the American perspective on what is happening from an American journalist. If you listen to the Voice of Russia, you get the Russian perspective from a Russian journalist. As you might expect, the two interpretations of the same news event can be quite different.

Shortwave also lets you get foreign reactions to and interpretations of American news events. For example, in 1992 I was fascinated at how other nations attempted to understand the presidential candidacy of H. Ross Perot. Even European democracies like Britain and Germany seemed bewildered by his candidacy and popularity; they could not understand how someone could declare himself a presidential candidate and achieve such popularity outside of a political party system. Moments like that help you appreciate the profound cultural and intellectual differences that exist between ostensibly closely-linked nations.

While no one knows the exact number of shortwave listeners (SWLs) in the United States, most estimates place the number in the millions. SWLs range from teenagers to retired persons to David Letterman, who has mentioned on several occasions how much he enjoys listening to shortwave, particularly broadcasts by the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC).

Of course, not all shortwave stations broadcast in English. If you’re studying a foreign language—or want to maintain your proficiency in one—shortwave radio will offer you an unlimited supply of contemporary practice material. If you enjoy music, shortwave will let you hear sounds you probably can’t find in the even the most specialized record and CD shops. Ever heard a lagu melayu song? It sounds like a cross between Indian-style instrumentals and an Arabic vocal style, and it’s very popular in Indonesia. You can hear such songs over the various shortwave outlets of Radio Republic Indonesia. The so-called "world beat" popular with young people had its origins in the "high life" music broadcast by shortwave stations in Africa. Other SWLs arise before dawn to catch the haunting huayno melodies coming from stations in Bolivia and Peru. Some SWL music fans have compiled tape-recorded libraries of folk and indigenous music from shortwave broadcasts that many college and university music departments would envy!

Most stations operating on shortwave frequencies are not broadcasters, however. Ham radio operators have certain frequency bands set aside for their use, and you can hear them "talking" (by voice, Morse code, radioteletype, etc.) with friends around the world. Aircraft flying international routes, ships at sea, and military forces are also big users of shortwave. In fact, some SWLs ignore broadcasters altogether and specialize in trying to hear such "utility" stations.

Utilities include

Rtty - Radio Teletype - decoding of Amateur Radio Operators using Baudaut, Ascii, and other Digital formats of communicating using keyboards, computers, and radio wireless for communication .

Commercial Radio Teletype , gov't and marine service, and global weather services.

Wefax - Weatherfax - the abiltiy to read in real time weathermaps relayed from satellites to high power world wide shortwave transmitters and decoded on recievers.

SSTV - Slow Scan Television pictures which are broadcast by Amateur Operators worldwide.

Navtex - Marine, Ship , Text Interception

Pirate Radio Transmitters - the intriguing gaul of many a wannabe broadcaster.

Another specialty within SWLing is "DXing," in which the goal is to receive faint, distant, and otherwise hard-to-hear stations. DXing on shortwave is like panning for gold; DXers patiently work through noise, interference, and fading to hear a low powered station deep in the Amazonian basin of Brazil or somewhere in the Indonesian archipelago.

DXing is a manifestation of shortwave’s biggest weakness—the fact that shortwave reception is highly variable compared to the AM and FM broadcasting bands. Reception of a shortwave station on a given frequency will usually vary greatly with the time of day and season of the year. Shortwave reception is heavily influenced by solar activity as indicated by the number of sunspots visible on the Sun. Solar flares and storms can disrupt shortwave reception for hours and even days. Fading is also common on the shortwave bands. While shortwave can offer you listening you cannot find on your local AM and FM stations, it unfortunately cannot offer you the same reliable reception or audio quality.

Modern High Quality

Shortwave Reciever

Full digital control with the abillity to hook up to a PC for computer control of the set. The complex sets today have married computers to the sets, and actually run on built in mircoprocessors. One does not need such an elaborate set to enjoy the hobby of listening to signals or intercepting the utility stations worldwide.

Geos Weather Satellite

Images the Earth taking pictures of cloud cover, hurricanes, infared imaging, and land masses. Some weather satellites relay signals to Earth to a station which rebroadcasts the signals out in real time on the shortwave frequencies for mariners to view data and sea storms in the making. Many countries have satellites covering the entire earth.

The Earth
High above the Earth which is bombarded by Cosmic rays of the sun, ionized layers of charged particles are created in layers and act as a "reflective" mirror for a myriad of radio signals. If the layers are charged heavily, radio dropout will occur. At the best times, the ionized layers reflect radio waves all over the world, sometimes multi-hopping around the globe. This was the mainstay of the ability to hear stations overseas many thousands of miles away . As in the past, so it is today. Certainly not FM quality or as stable with the fading and fluttering at times, it remains and exotic form of hobby using a well set up listening post to hear the weak and unusual from all parts of the globe. Many stations will actually send you a nice acknowledgment card that you heard them if you send a letter explaining what you heard, and how well they were recieved. This is called QSL'ing.

Satellite View of the Earth received on a PC.

Most images on the shortwave radio are in black and white, but one can still get the detail on good days when the reception is good. The quarter Earth shots are extremely interesting to watch evolving on a PC. Armed with this, and an interest in weather instruments, many become amateur meterologists as a hobby.

Email