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 […]
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 […]
Perhaps you are like me and you have wished that you could go back in time and spin a radio dial and just listen to and browse the full radio spectrum from another time and place. Our guest on the show, Radio Anthropologist Thomas Witherspoon, is building a website for just such a thing. It’s […]
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 […]
Family Radio-owned shortwave radio station WYFR is slated to resume broadcasts on December 1, following the sale of the station facility to Radio Miami International (WRMI). As we reported earlier this year, WYFR ceased broadcasts on June 30, 2013. Many in the shortwave community were saddened by the loss of this historic station, as it […]
The Daily Telegraph reports on an exclusive look at the BBC World Service’s annual audience numbers, and they’re looking quite good for the British international broadcaster. Worldwide the service reaches 192 million people a week across all media types, up 11.8 million from last year. The World Service’s Persian and Arabic TV services have over […]
Al Jazeera reports on the unlicensed Radio Free Sarawak which is making itself a thorn in the side of the Malaysian government, broadcasting independent voices in the run-up to general elections in that country. Sarawak is a former British colony located on the island of Borneo. The station is operated by expatriates out of studios […]
State broadcasters around the world have been cutting back on their shortwave transmissions over the last few years, typically attributing the reductions to a combination of budget challenges and declining listenership. With the start of April and the beginning of the 2nd quarter the Voice of America and BBC just trimmed shortwave broadcasts. Citing budget […]
Looking for an alternative perspective on world news on your FM dial? If you live in Chicago or Washington, DC you can now tune in the Russian government’s Voice of Russia service, which began broadcasting English language programming at the beginning of March on the HD2 channel of WTOP-FM in DC, a news-talk station, and […]
There are reports from Zimbabwe indicating that the crackdown on independent radio is stepping up. Shortwave station SW Radio Africa reports that police in the town of Rusape went on raids of opposition party supporters looking for shortwave radios (via SWLing post). However a member of parliament said that the police found no radios. According […]
