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SHORTWAVE LISTENING

The ham radio bug bites in many different ways, but probably sinks its fangs into most people when they innocently begin listening to distant broadcast stations.

Typically, the "disease" starts with your staying up late at night listening to AM stations a thousand or more miles away. Then it becomes worse when you read somewhere that if only you had a shortwave receiver you could tune in regularly to the BBC from London . . . or to Radio Moscow . . . or to broadcasts from dozens of other exotic places.

So you borrow that portable with all the shortwave bands from Uncle Joe—or buy an old Hallicrafters receiver at a garage sale—and start to listen. And you find that, if anything, it's really more fun than you thought it would be!

Tired of the biased news reporting doled out at night by your local stations? Try shortwave . . . and select the bias of your choice!

A MIXED BAG

In many parts of the world there is no local broadcasting service, and shortwave serves as the news and entertainment mainstay. Shortwave broadcast signals—like ham signals—are able to travel long distances because they are reflected back to earth by a layer of the upper atmosphere called the ionosphere. While hams are limited to a transmitter power of 1,000 watts maximum, most international broadcasters blast out with at least 100,000 watts and get additional "reach" with big, expensive antenna systems. The end result is some pretty good listening, even with inexpensive receivers and simple receiving antennas.

Shortwave broadcasting is a very mixed bag. Most stations are government-run. Radio Moscow and the Voice of America are, as you might expect, weapons of ideological warfare for the superpowers that operate them. On the other hand, shortwave gives even small nations like Luxembourg and the Netherlands the means with which to speak to the rest of the world. In addition, a few stations are operated by religious groups and private organizations.

News and current affairs programming are what turn me on most and the BBC is a rich source of both. It recently, for example, broadcast an interview with E.F. Schumacher (the author of Small Is Beautiful ) in which he described in detail his concept of an "intermediate technology". In general, the BBC's coverage of problems and happenings in the Third World also seems much more thorough than radio or TV coverage on this side of the Atlantic.

My favorite Canadian news program—"As It Happens"—is heard on CBC AM and FM here in Canada, but is transmitted via shortwave to the U.S. and the Caribbean. The program consists mostly of longdistance phone calls placed to individuals currently "making news". (Hearing a person react without notes or script in a telephone interview sure helps me to fill in the spaces between the lines of a news story.) The show is aired from 5:30 to 7:00 p.m. Eastern time and its frequency as I write this is 6085 kHz . . . even though it may move to 9625 or 11835 kHz as the days get longer.