All of the global events of the late 80s and early 90s led to a spike in shortwave radio interest. I remember during the beginning of the First Gulf War one of our local television reporters had a 3 minute piece on shortwave radios, and he demonstrated how they worked using a Realistic DX-440. I found out a bit later that the reporter was a shortwave enthusiast, so he was happy to promote the hobby, although he did tell me that the television producer had the radio around only because it had 10 memory selections, not because of its shortwave capabilities.
When I took a job at Radio Shack after my graduation*, I viewed it more from the lens of an electronics and radio enthusiast. Obviously anybody who has had to deal with Radio Shack over the decades can tell you I was fooling myself, as my naïveté was crushed shortly after starting there. Still, the best part of working at Radio Shack was when one of the ham radio operators dropped by to talk shop. Or when the CB or scanner fans came in for equipment. Or, on those rare occasions when someone shopping for a shortwave radio stopped by.**
After my time at Radio Shack ended (fired for low sales numbers) and I landed a job as a lab tech, I still kept up with shortwave radio.
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| While at UD, a friend gave me their old Knight Kit Star Roamer. I tried and failed to get my dad interested in shortwave; he listened to the radio all the time, but no dice on this. I honestly don't know what happened to the old Star Roamer. This pic is from Boatanchor Pix. |
I joined the North American Shortwave Association (NASWA) and began receiving their monthly bulletins.*** Before that time I only knew of myself and a couple of other people who were interested in shortwave, but here was an entire organization devoted to shortwave radio. I also found the NASWA area on the GEnie online community, and I began participating in their forums.
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| I think I still have some of my old copies of The NASWA Journal around (this is the cover of one of them), but thankfully worldradiohistory.com has PDF versions available for viewing. |
***
During that time, I kept a log of my shortwave listening habits.
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| Yeah, I know. My writing isn't the greatest. |
Nestled among the "official" stations are a few stations that don't fit the mold of a traditional shortwave broadcaster: WFRC and WSKY "Whiskey Radio". Those are pirate radio stations.
As long as radio has existed, there have been people who have wanted to skirt the rules and broadcast on their own. The reasons are myriad, from people wanting to hear their music played on radio (such as John Peel and Radio London of the 1960s), to people broadcasting with a political slant, to people just wanting to do their own thing. I knew of Radio Newyork International and its brief period of "free radio" broadcasting off the coast of New York City, but when I stumbled across this book at a local bookstore,
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| I suppose it was inevitable, but eventually Andrew Yoder was caught by the FCC for broadcasting illegally himself. |
I quickly snapped it up and began reading.
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| From Pirate Radio Stations: Tuning in to Underground Broadcasts (1st Edition) by Andrew Yoder. |
When I realized there was a club that tailored to people chasing pirates and clandestine communications, The Association of Clandestine Enthusiasts (The ACE), I forked over a few dollars for an annual membership.
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| I actually have this copy! I haven't stumbled across it lately, however. From The Internet Archive. |
***
So... why have I never mentioned any of this before? Outside of the obvious answer that this is a gaming blog, and this really doesn't have anything to do with gaming at all. Well, after that high point of the early-mid 90s, I haven't really listened to shortwave all that much.
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| The ICOM IC-R70, well known for being able to suss out faint stations. I bought a used one in 1994, and sold it in 2000 when I bought the Grundig 800. From RigReference.com. |
I got married, changed jobs (twice), and worked all sorts of crazy hours over the years. I became a parent, and as any parent will tell you, that sucks up a lot of your remaining free time. Shortwave radio isn't my only hobby, either, and those hobbies came more to the forefront in the late 90s and beyond.
There's also the little problem of money.
I don't have the money to keep up with all of my hobbies, so I had to pick and choose which hobbies to pay attention to. And in the late 90s, that meant giving up my memberships in NASWA and The ACE. Without that direct connection to the hobby, my interest began to wane.
It also needs to be said that after that mini-boom of interest from the (first) Gulf War, shortwave radio began a steady decline.
I had a feeling that the shortwave boom wasn't going to last, and I was proven right as shortwave radio was eventually eclipsed by the rise of the internet. It took much longer than I thought it would, however, because audio and video communications were still limited by network bandwidth. Downloading the first trailer of The Fellowship of the Ring from ~1999 took most of the evening and night on our dial-up internet connection at home, and listening to the radio over the internet required faster speeds than dial-up. Eventually, however, various forms of high speed internet made their way across the globe, and with this new form of communication the old began to seem an antique.
The major shortwave broadcasters began to dry up. Here's just a few of the stations that you can no longer hear (or hear easily) where I live:
- The BBC World Service stopped broadcasting to North America and Australia in 2001, citing "changing habits", and relying instead on rebroadcasts on American radio stations.
- Radio Deutsche Welle dropped their English service to North America in 2003, and gradually reduced their shortwave footprint over the successive years to Africa only.
- Radio Österreich International (Austria), a favorite station of mine, discontinued broadcasts in 2003.
- Radio Nederland and Radio Poland ceased operations in 2012.
Some of the decline in the older broadcasters is due to the changing technology, but there are other reasons for the ceasing of shortwave broadcasts as well. Chief among them is the energy cost to broadcast via shortwave.
Powering a shortwave station is not cheap. Running a 500,000 watt station takes a lot of energy, and if you don't have extenuating circumstances to keep broadcasting (the Cold War, for example) eventually the bean counters start to get antsy about "throwing money away".
In a post-Cold War environment, the venerable Voice of America Bethany Station --about 15-20 miles from my house-- closed in 1994 and is now a park. The station facility itself is a museum, open to the public.****
***
Despite the decline of the traditional shortwave broadcasters, I kept up with shortwave radio when I could. As I mentioned above, my decline in free time meant that sitting down to actually listen to shortwave radio became a bit of a luxury. Moving to our current house meant I had the space to put up an outside antenna, but that took a back seat to house repairs and kids' play spaces.
And to be fair, I also got more heavily invested in video and board games as well. This blog, for example, came along at the end of the 2000s, but I'd been playing video and board games regularly for decades before that.
Still, I purchased a Grundig Satellit 800 when it was first released in mid-late 2000, because while I couldn't afford one of the $1000 professional receivers (such as the Japan Radio NRD-535 or the Drake R8), I could afford a $500 Satellit 800 which had similar capabilities to those kilobuck receivers.
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| The Drake R8, made in Miamisburg, Ohio. Definitely a "holy grail" radio among those in the hobby. From the late Universal Radio's website. |
I also bought a couple of tube radios along the way, thinking that I'd like to have one to putter around with as the kids grew up and I retired.
Such as the Hallicrafters SX-100:
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| It's much heavier than it looks. |
I've had this radio since 2006, the last time I went to the Dayton Hamvention, and trust me, lugging this thing around was not my idea of fun.
The old tube shortwave radios from the 1930s up through the advent of all transistor models in the 60s are nicknamed "boat anchors" due to their bulk and weight, and while the Hallicrafters SX-100 that I have above isn't the heaviest of those boat anchors, lugging a radio weighing 42 lbs/19 kg back to my car 3/4 of a mile away (~1.25 km) wasn't what I'd call fun.***** However, I'd bought the thing for $100, it worked, and I was determined to get it home as the centerpiece of my listening station.
Funny thing about that... I never got a listening station put together.
I mean, I did get an outside antenna put up, complete with ground rod and lightning arrestor, by running a wire from our porch to the kids' wooden swing set#. That antenna really brought in the shortwave stations, but I never got the space in the basement to get a true listening station in place while that was my home office.
There was also the little problem of Hurricane Ike in 2008, whose remnants of met a cold front coming down from Canada right in the middle of the Ohio Valley, turning what would have been 3-4 inches of steady rain into hurricane force winds over the course of 12+ hours. This area is used to tornados, but the houses and infrastructure here are decidedly NOT built to withstand hurricane force winds. Miraculously, the antenna survived Ike, but a few months later the weakened supports were brought down in an ice storm, and that was that.
By then, my wife had given me an ultimatum to move my home office out of the basement and up into the dining room, as I had a habit of getting bronchitis every winter since we lived in the house due to the chilly and damp conditions in the basement.##
My trusty old DX-440 became my go-to portable radio for the garage and the back porch, and it still behaves like a champ today. The Satellit 800 is still in the basement, and when I'm down there for any length of time I turn it on and listen to FM radio on it. That old Hallicrafers S20R that I first became acquainted with at UD I eventually took home with me, but it needs a complete rebuild, so that's relegated to basement storage for now. But the newer Hallicrafters, the SX-100, went onto a storage rack and stayed there until I began cleaning this Fall.
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| The Grundig Satellit 800, when I brought it out of the basement to listen to while I was repairing the deck last fall. |
When I brought the boat anchor upstairs and put it on the table as you saw above, I plugged it in and hoped that it would fire up. It did, kinda. Several tubes had blown, and it wouldn't shock me if I opened it up and discovered several resistors and caps were in bad shape too, but other parts of the radio did start up and bathed me in a yellowish glow. It is definitely going to be a project for me to restore it to its former glory, but in my retirement years I'm up for the challenge.
Oh, and the SX-100 is now permanently out of the basement. I am thinking about ways to configure my son's old room to create a listening station in there, as long as I share it with my wife so she can have a place to play her guitar.
So I've got a future with shortwave, it's just changed so much over the past 35 years or so that I have a hard time recognizing what it is today.
*Yes, the old Hallicrafters radio came with me when I graduated. I had to store it in my closet for a while until it found a home at my (then) girlfriend's apartment while she was at grad school.
**The worst part about working at Radio Shack? How long do you have, because I've a list...
***One of my History professors at UD strongly suggested to the class that if we were interested in history that we ought to join our local or state history organization. Typically you could join for a pretty minimal cost, and you could then gain access to and support research of all sorts of topics. I took his advice to heart and joined the Ohio Historical Society for several years, and when I got serious about Shortwave listening I joined clubs to support the hobby as well. Hence NASWA and The ACE.
****I bet if you asked the average park goer what the Voice of America was, they'd think you were talking about the Country Music Festival that happens there every year, or that it's some patriotic thing ala Lee Greenwood's "God Bless the USA". Or maybe the album (and lead track) from Sammy Hagar when he was a solo artist in the 1980s.
*****To this day I'm still amazed that I didn't injure my back.
#I used a piece of wood to both use as a makeshift flagpole for the kids so I could run up a pirate flag --pretending you were a pirate on the high seas is a rite of passage, Pirates of the Caribbean movies or not-- and to attach my random wire antenna to.
##The dampness problems were fixed by a dehumidifier. The cold... Well, I need to fix the foundation first before I'll put up insulation on the walls. Yeah, that's not happening any time soon.
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