The Russian invasion of Ukraine greatly upsets me, as my heart goes out to the Ukrainian people. I feel a connection because my father’s family is from Estonia, which also borders Russia and has a long, unhappy history of Russian domination. While Estonia today is a free republic, the assault on Ukraine understandably puts the […]
Archive | Shortwave
Rough Notes: Antarctic Radio Revisited & Jamming Soviet-Era Numbers
A belated happy New Year and welcome to 2022. It’s not quite a New Year’s resolution, but I want to return to regular blogging here at Radio Survivor, at least covering interesting radio stories of note, along with other radiophonic observations. With the Super Bowl coming in just under three weeks you can look forward […]
The Eton Mini Grundig Edition Is My New Travel Companion
One of life’s little pleasures is tuning around the radio dial late at night before drifting off to slumber. I especially enjoy this while traveling, touring foreign radio dials, encountering strange and distant signals. This means that a small portable radio is my constant traveling companion. I prefer to travel light, so said radio must […]
Podcast #190: Radio Spectrum and Transmission Art
Amanda Dawn Christie is an artist enamored with radios and radio waves. The Assistant Professor, Studio Arts at Concordia University (Montreal, Canada) joins us on the show to discuss her most recent transmission art project, Ghosts in the Airglow, in which she created work at the HAARP facility in Alaska. Christie also shares with us […]
R.I.P. Radio Adventurer ‘The Professor’
SWLing Post editor Thomas Witherspoon recently notified us of the passing of “radio zealot” Michael Pool, a/k/a The Professor. I was an avid follower of Pool’s travels in AM radio listening and airchecking that he recorded for WFMU’s Beware of the Blog during the 2000s, and later on his own Radio Kitchen blog until about […]
The Shortwave Radio of the Internet: Low Bitrate Streaming
While updating the 2004 podcast entries for my old radio show “mediageek” I was reminded that I used to post the episodes in both a 64kbps mono “broadcast quality” MP3 and a 16kbps. The reason why I posted such a low bitrate file, containing relatively low fidelity, was to make the show accessible to listeners […]
Radio Review Follow-Up: The Tivdio V-115 – Still Great, But Not a DX Champ
Back in March I released a video review of the Tivdio V-115 portable digital radio. I praised it for being very nice sounding – especially for being so small – having decent reception, and for being able to record airchecks to a microSD card. After using the radio during some travels I decided to record […]
Radio Review: The Tivdio V-115 Records Airchecks on the Go
On a trip last fall visiting my parents in northern New Jersey, during the evening the I tuned around the AM dial and encountered some fascinatingly unique local stations. I wished I could record some airchecks but didn’t have any easy way to do so, and I couldn’t find any sort of online program archives. […]
Glimpse Behind the Scenes at Shortwave Pirate Radio in 1990
As I continue to mine the deeply embedded treasures of YouTube, I’ve dug up another diamond in the rough, a 27 year-old documentary on unlicensed shortwave broadcasting radio. Titled “Inside Pirate Radio,” this hour-long video visits the studio of Radio Wolf International during one broadcast, interspersed with an interview with Andrew Yoder, one of the […]
Art Bell Returns Monday Night, Possible Test Show on Sunday Night
Monday night at midnight Eastern Time is the much anticipated return of Art Bell. Though originally planned to be an online-only show on the Dark Matter network, 21 AM and FM stations and two shortwave stations have now picked it up. Most of the stations are outside major markets, with the exception of affiliates in […]