Many thanks to SRAA contributor, Russ Edmunds, who has kindly shared another collection of mediumwave airchecks (click here to check out all of his contributions).
Russ notes that the reception location was Blue Bell, PA using a Hammarlund modified HQ-150 and a 4' air core amplified loop.
Russ also shares details about each recording in the following table. All recordings have been embedded below:
(Image by Rich Post, K8TAD)
Many thanks to SRAA contributor, Dan Greenall, who shares the following recording and notes:
Notes: Radio Rabaul on the island of New Britain, PNG, was a rare visitor to my radio shack in 1971. I was able to make this brief recording (along with one of Radio Bougainville submitted separately) using an open mike in front of the speaker on the Hallicrafters S-52.
Broadcaster: Radio Rabaul
Date of recording: 10/21/1971
Frequency: 3.385 MHz
Reception location: Ancaster, Ontario, Canada
Receiver and antenna: Hallicrafters S-52 using a longwire antenna
Hallicrafters SX-99 Dial
Many thanks to SRAA contributor, Dan Greenall, who shares the following recording and notes:
Notes: The morning of October 21, 1971, provided some of the best reception of Papua New Guinea stations in the 90 metre band that I ever experienced. These stations were rare visitors to my headphones but I was able to make a couple of short recordings of two PNG stations that morning, and they have survived to this day on that same audio cassette (now 51 years old). This one of Radio Bougainville begins with a local chant followed by announcement on the hour. The station ran 2.5 kw and their signal made it over 13,300 km to my receiver that day. The recording of Radio Rabaul on 3385 kHz will be submitted separately. Audio quality is passable considering the recording was made using an open mic to the speaker of the Hallicrafters S-52.
Broadcaster: Radio Bougainville
Date of recording: 10/21/1971
Starting time: 1100
Frequency: 3.322.5 MHz
Receiver location: Ancaster, Ontario, Canada
Receiver and antenna: Hallicrafters S-52 using a longwire antenna
Many thanks to SRAA contributor, Matt Todd, who shares the following recording and notes:
Audio recording of Shortwave Pirate going by Wolverine Radio. This was recorded December 25, 2021 at 0056UTC on 6969khz in Hugo, MN. The broadcast consists of a few minutes of the Barenaked Ladies song Testing One Two Three being play and then a male voice announcing a frequency change.
Broadcaster: Wolverine Radio (Pirate)
Date of recording: 12/25/2021
Starting time: 0056 UTC
Frequency: 6.96 MHz
Your location: Hugo, MN
Receiver and antenna: SDRPlay with a wire loop antenna around the perimeter of the attic
Mode: Single Side Band
Many thanks to SRAA contributor, Lee Herterich, who shares the following recording and notes:
1962 shortwave listening revisited.
Shortwave listening tape recordings from 1962. Included are the BBC, Montreal, Italy, Radio Moscow, Austria and the voice of America. The recording begins and ends with the BBC's Holiday Music Hall.
Receiver location: Wellesley Hills, Massachusetts USA
Receiver and antenna: Lafayette KT-200 receiver and folded dipole antenna
Many thanks to SRAA contributor, Tony King, who shares the following recording and notes:
TAHITI: Opening announcement in English 6035 khz 1981
Floating Uros Islands at the Lake Titicaca in Peru photo made by rouichi/ switzerland
Many thanks to SRAA contributor, Tony King, who shares the following recording and notes:
PERU: Radio Juliaca, Juliaca Peru July 1959. 5015 kHz OAX7X OAX7Z The station came on the air this month and this would appear to be a test transmission playing old time western tunes, mix experiments, and regular ID's. This caption was rebroadcast on Keith Glover's Radio Australia's Mailbox programme the same month as an item of interest to DX listeners.
Photo by Ingo Schulz on Unsplash
Many thanks to SRAA contributor, Tom Williams, who shares the following recording and notes:
Recorded by Short Wave Listener WPE9JEL from Crown Point during the 1960s. Receiver: Hallicrafters SX-110, Antenna: Random Wire. There are some duplicates that were not edited out - sorry about that.
Many thanks to SRAA contributor, Russ Edmunds, who has kindly shared another collection of mediumwave airchecks (click here to check out all of his contributions).
Russ notes that the reception location was Parsippany, NJ (in a garden apartment) using a Hammarlund modified HQ-150 and a 4' air core amplified loop.
Russ also shares details about each recording in the following table. All recordings have been embedded below:
Many thanks to SRAA contributor, Russ Edmunds (WB2BJH), for sharing this collection of mediumwave airchecks dating from 1969 to 1978. (Click here to check out all of Russ’ contributions.)
If you’ve subscribed to the SRAA podcast, you might only automatically download the first of these recordings. I would encourage you to view and listen to all 29 recordings on this dedicated Shortwave Radio Audio Archive post.
Click here to download a spreadsheet with full details of each clip.
The 70's were a tumultuous time in Chile but one of the more positive things to come out of that era was a powerful and professional sounding National voice under the Pinochet regime. The Voice of Chile was a byproduct of that era and I was blessed to find a very clean recording of them from the Spring of 1979. Received on the west coast on my DX150B and a simple inverted-L antenna - recorded on an old mono cassette recorder from Sears that was bought in 1971!
Many thanks to SRAA contributor, Colin Newell, who notes:
December 4, 1978 0800 UTC - one of my most cherished recordings - anything from PNG was a treat and this was at a time (clearly) when their transmitters were running properly.
Colin recorded this broadcast from his home in British Columbia, Canada. It is, indeed, a treat to hear PNG once again:
(Source: North American Pirate Radio Hall Of Fame)
Many thanks to SRAA contributor, Colin Newell, who shares two recordings from the late 1970s of the pirate radio station RX4M The Voice of Clipperton.
Colin recorded both of these station IDs from British Columbia, Canada, using his cassette recorder. Colin also notes that he may be the only person to have ever recorded RX4M off-air. RX4M was inducted into the North American Pirate Radio Hall Of Fame in 2011. The following is an excerpt from an article written by Andrew Yoder on the NA Pirate Radio Hall of Fame site :
RX4M (Radio Experiment on 40 Meters) put in more time and hours to overcome obscurity, only to quickly fall back into obscurity, thanks to a pirate-unfriendly location in Washington State. Even by the mid-‘80s, few DXers or pirate listeners had heard RX4M, and few remembered it.
The first difficulty for RX4M to overcome was the poor communications of the late ‘70s. When the station began broadcasting in August 1979, there was no Internet and all DX news either was discovered via monthly bulletin or magazine, meaning a minimum delay of two months for information to be reported.
The next problem was the Pacific Northwest. At the time, very few shortwave DXers and almost no pirate listeners were located in the region. Some young pirate listeners were networking in southern California, toward Los Angeles, but even that was a long haul from the Seattle area.
Despite a nightly broadcast schedule and boasting two transmitters (20 and 100 watts), no DXers in either NASWA or the Newark News Radio Club (two of the largest shortwave clubs of the time, and two of the best for pirate news) reported RX4M until April 1980 on 7370 kHz.
The few listeners who remember RX4M know it as possibly the only North American pirate to operate with a regular shortwave station, like a licensed outlet. It was on nightly from *0550-0630* UTC with a variety of programs produced by different station staff: News with Tony Giles, Post Office Box 80 with Aaron Richardson, DX Forum with Mickey Anderson, Let’s Talk Technical with Larry Adams, and the Good Morning Show with Jerry Nelson. Other time slots were filled with old-time radio programs, such as Burns & Allen, Jack Benny, Fibber McGee & Molly, Sherlock Holmes, Fred Harris & Alice Faye.
[...]RX4M, the Voice of Cliperton, was never heard again and no shortwave pirate since has adopted its style. At a time when many DXers were bitterly anti-pirate, many reporters said that RX4M programming sounded very professional.
SWLing Post reader and SRAA contributor, Frank, writes from Germany:
First let me say that I enjoy your blog a lot.
After a 2005-13 hiatus, I have rediscovered a childhood hobby and your reviews have helped me find my way to the post-Sony portable shortwave radio markets.
First, I obtained my “childhood dream” radio (Sony ICF 2001D), because at the time I made these recordings I was still in school and 1300 DM would have equaled over 1 year of pocket money, so a Supertech SR16HN had to do. I thought I got some fine results with this Sangean-Siemens re-branded receiver then, using a CB half-length antenna, a random wire, and much endurance.
I kept regular logs throughout the years, wrote to 50 international and pirate stations for QSL and compiled this cassette.
A few years before I got that trusty SR16HN, however, I recorded a few number stations (such as G3, Four Note Rising Scale etc) with an ordinary radio cassette recorder, and in 1991 I put them onto this tape as well. The other recordings are done with the same radio placed right in front of the SR 16HN.
Feel free to make use of these recordings. Most of it are the well-known international state-owned shortwave stations of the past; plus European pirates; plus number stations; and at the end, a few (off-topic) local Am and FM stations interval signals.
As I said, this collection I made shortly after the Wende/reunification period, when all former-GDR state broadcasters changed their names, sometimes more than once.
Please continue your good work on the blogs! Weather permitting I am often outside cycling and always have the tiny Sony ICF 100 with me (which I call my then-student’s dream radio of the later 90ies).
Many thanks to Anthony Messina, for this recording of the Voice of Korea sign off on 15.180 MHz using his Grundig Satellite 750 with External Solarcon in Haddon Heights, NJ USA. Anthony comments:
"Recorded using a panasonic tape recorder to do it the old fashioned way. At the end I mention exactly what time I recorded this."
The Shortwave Radio Audio Archive (SRAA) is a collection of shortwave radio recordings that you can download or listen to as a podcast. The collection grows every day and includes both historic recordings and current recordings from the shortwave radio spectrum.
The goal of this site is for shortwave radio enthusiast to have a place to store, archive and share their radio recordings with the world.
Click here to learn how to contribute and archive recordings.
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