Learn About Shortwave Listening (SWL) for Beginners (#352)

[Music] hello auggies worldwide i'm dave kessler amateur radio call sign ke0 og and today we're going to explore shortwave listening or swl this is something that hams don't often engage in but a lot of the public does and i have a friend named valerie who has just purchased a shortwave radio and wants to know how to use it so i thought well my goodness why don't i do an introduction to shortwave radio this might also be useful to you if you're studying to get your technician license and you'd like to tune around on the bands outside the handbands just a little bit and see what's available out there so let's dive in to shortwave listening i put a few charts together to remind myself of some things to say so let's dive in first of all what is shortwave listening or swl and yes some people pronounce it swill but we'll just call it swl or shortwave listening shortwave listening is listening to a radio for news information and entertainment and here's the key part from all over the world okay now although the term includes shortwave in the title the bands used are long wave medium wave and shortwave medium wave is your normal am broadcast band long wave is like an am broadcast band in europe it's not used that much in the western hemisphere so long wave medium wave shortwave these names go back to the earliest days of radio when they thought this covered all of radio long wave medium wave shortwave okay well then when they started to go beyond that in world war ii that era we ended up with well what do you call something that's above high frequencies which is shortwave uh you call them very high frequencies and they went on to ultra high frequency super high frequencies and so on until they came up with other names but anyway these are the bands they go back to the earliest days of radio now often shortwave listener radios these days also include an fm receiver fm in much of the world has a broader band a bigger band than in the us the u.s ban starts at 88.1 that's 88.1 megahertz by the way and goes up to about 107. long wave is used much more in europe the interesting little story here the beatles uh couldn't get the latest music on bbc because it was a very conservative organization and didn't play the cool stuff so they would listen on a long wave to europe where people were less stuffy about the kind of music they listened to and they got much of their early inspiration from listening to long way from europe what can you hear on a shortwave radio well what most people are thinking of when they think of shortwave radio is shortwave broadcasting these are programs sponsored by governments around the world such as the bbc from the uk the voice of america armed forces radio which is a u.s uh thing which the u.s broadcasts to its troops around the world radio moscow radio north korea radio japan radio everything there's lots and lots and lots there there's many more there are fewer since the cold war has ended because one of the big purposes of the big shortwave stations during the cold war was to convince people on the other side that they were wrong and people on our side that they were right of course on the other side they tried to like radio moscow they tried to convince us we were wrong they were right and so on now in addition to that you will also hear privately sponsored shortwave stations such as religious stations people want to take their ministry to whatever means they can to reach as many people as possible now there's some interesting pirate radio stations these are radio stations that are unauthorized by any government sometimes they're done from ships just offshore and so on and needless to say since these guys are not government or not government sanctioned they can say some amazing things and they often won't be on the air for very long they keep popping up though now you'll hear other stations like time stations if you can imagine listening to wwv all day you'll just hear it constantly tell you the time and if you're on a ship at sea and your gps isn't working or something like that you can listen to wwv and get the current time the number of users for this have really gone down uh in fact it almost got cut from the budget this year but it's still going strong a lot of people use it utility stations are non-broadcast stations for example aircraft over the oceans carry hf radio hf is the same as shortwave and that way because of the long distances involved the aircraft can talk to their companies they can talk to the faa or to the france or wherever they want to talk to there are point-to-point services especially in the developing world where there is no infrastructure i remember when i was in the philippines on my mormon mission that there was a company called rcpi radio communications the philippine islands and they had a morse code set up and every town and village had its little rcpi office and you could send telegrams anywhere else in the philippines or for that matter in the world and they would use hf radio to do that ship to shore used to be strongly over hf and also on long wave but nowadays is mostly satellite spy stations show up you'll hear these referred to sometimes as number stations and where a voice will just be endlessly reading off uh numbers or maybe numbers and letters often these are government sponsored stations sending coded instructions to their spies because unlike the internet or the phone system you can't trace where your broadcast is going to so people can listen to this without getting hooked up in such a way that they can be found another thing on shortwave radio that you can listen to are radio hams amateur radio has several different bands in the shortwave region and you can listen into these and of course maybe you'll find it so interesting that you get your ham license so that you can join in with the rag chewing or the contest or the dx-ing or the public service or many of the other things that ham radio does now i will note that many of these things like ship to shore has moved to satellite a lot of the information dissemination is moved to the internet although of course in the internet it gets lost in all the noise but a lot of things do this there are a lot of advantages to shortwave radio i'll touch on some of them later now shortwave radio goes back a very long ways this is marconi right here a picture from wikipedia and he would transmit from england and then see how far away he could get to to hear this he would go down to the cape verde islands or um i think one time he took his yacht to beirut and uh just to see how far radio would go those were the very early days of radio and people were very impressed by how far radio could go of course you know in about 1903 i think it was he was able to transmit from the united kingdom in wales all the way to canada in the in north america and then from there could go via telegraph proving the tremendous reach of shortwave radio of course the big climax was in 1912 when the marconi station aboard the titanic put out its sos call and many other ships were able to hear it because they all used marconi systems and a very very interesting history of radio he is shown there with a spark station and also with a little paper tape i'm not sure if it's a transmitter or a receiver but it would be using the morse code the by the way i'll point out it was not using the american tele american railroad code which was the original morse code but using a version of the morse code that had been modified by german experience which is now called the international uh morse alphabet number one um and is what hams use on the air now how do these how does this information get across the ocean without using any infrastructure without having to have a cable under the oceans or a telephone line or something like that well the answer is certain radio waves when sent and i show it here in france right down over here when they go up in the air they meet something called the ionosphere which is just a layer of the atmosphere that's been bombarded by radiation from the sun and it becomes a little bit reflective toward radio waves and then comes back down who knows where actually scientists do nowhere they've got a lot of information on this but comes down to where you are and uh you can hear it now i just want to introduce you while we're talking about the ionosphere to an interesting little phenomenon because you'll hear this term a lot when the rays go out from an antenna they hit the ionosphere which is up about here some pass through and go out so that martians and jovians can listen to our tv signals and then the rest is reflected back down to earth there's a region in between that that explains why sometimes you can't hear radios that are nearby because they if they go up at this angle they go out into space and then when they start to get reflected back they're a thousand miles away this is called the skip zone and it just means that sometimes you won't be able to hear radio stations that are close so the various radio broadcasters tend to place their transmitters around the world if you're listening to london the signal may not be coming from london it could be coming from the caribbean in order that they can get the right signal to you now i want to introduce you to a shortwave radio i picked up this picture of a generic shortwave radio from wikipedia there are three things that are important on here that enable you to find stations and toward the end i'll give you some internet addresses that you can go to to get actual station information about what's broadcasting when what language it's in where the transmitter is and so on so that you can determine what you can listen to the first thing is called the mode in this here it's am for amplitude modulation this is the same mode as listening to an ordinary am broadcast receiver except it's on shortwave okay this is the frequency expressed in kilohertz 3980 and i'll talk a little bit about frequencies in the next chart and then down here is the band and oddly enough the band is in meters and the frequency is in kilohertz or megahertz and does that confuse people of course it does we'll talk a little bit about that the frequency of a station a transmitter think of it as an address on the airwaves where you can find a particular station on the radio dial it tells you what your radio is tuned to right now each station has a different frequency although yes there are more stations than there are frequencies and so you sometimes get some interference between them and so on sometimes that interference is deliberate if somebody is jamming something like the russians are jamming radio free europe or something like that but it's just an address it's a number that you're going to punch into your radio so you can tell your radio where to go to find the station it is expressed in kilohertz or megahertz now note the weird capitalization conventions that's a small k a big h a small z and in megahertz it's a big m big h small z now this 38 50 kilohertz is the same as 3850 3.850 megahertz much of shortwave is done in kilohertz so you'll see this when you get up above uh 10 megahertz it becomes 10 it becomes like 13850 and that becomes a mouthful so they might give you one 3.850 but mostly you'll see it in kilohertz the um frequency is always shown on the radio dial in in this example 3980 okay it's always shown on the radio dial often radios have memories where you can store your favorite frequencies and give them names for example bbc or radio france or radio japan which is nhk nippon hoso kyokai i think um i've undoubtedly butchered that which is why it's just called nhk but that's radio japan there are all kinds of stations out there okay frequency is the address now a band your frequency is the address then the band is the street the address is on it's measured in meters it's left over from the old days when people used wavelengths in meters instead of frequencies in hertz so you get the two combined now shortwave broadcasters tend to clump into bands and you'll have your best luck finding unknown shortwave broadcasters by going through these bands ham operators have their own bands too which are separate mostly from the shortwave broadcasters let's look at the shortwave bands this is from wikipedia the two that are in yellow are the most popular where you will find most of your shortwave stations under certain circumstances you will find lots of stations and other bands if you happen to live down near the mexican border or you are in south america you'll find shortwave broadcasters on what we call the tropical bands these bands are called that because it's stations in the tropics that tend to use them often these broadcasters are not trying to broadcast to some other country but it's used domestically now the problem with am as you know is during the daytime you can only hear it in the city where the transmitter is it doesn't go beyond that but if you go up like the 120 meter band the 90 meter band and so on you can that band can cover a whole country like ecuador or something like that so people need shortwave radios to listen to it but they can listen to it in their own language one of the things about listening to this if you get like oh around sunset or maybe early in the morning and you listen through these bands you can hear some of these broadcasts now what's interesting about it is they broadcast to the musical taste of their local citizenry which can be very different from the music that you hear in the united states so if you want to hear cool latin music this is where you go the 49 meter band from which contains addresses from 5900 to 6200 kilohertz is a very popular band and the 31 meter band which goes from 9 400 to 900 kilohertz is also heavily used the other bands up there are very useful when the ionosphere is good the sun works in an 11-year cycle and right now it's at the bottom of its cycle and the cycle is determined by the number of sunspots oddly enough sunspots put out a lot of ultraviolet radiation which excites the ionosphere so that you can hear around the world whereas when the sun is at a low ebb you don't have so much ionosphere here and you have to use lower frequencies okay so these are different bands as the sun gets more excited in the next four or five years you'll hear some of the shortwave broadcasters up here now i will tell you right now that most of your luck listening to these will be at night sometimes you can hear things in early in the morning like from australia if the path between us and the transmitter is in the dark but these are where you can start i'm going to show you some websites in a minute that will give you some specific frequencies that you can tune to now there are something called modes and that's not a disease it's just the name of the way the information is transmitted you're familiar with amplitude modulation because your am radio uses am amplitude modulation almost all long wave medium wave and shortwave broadcasting is am so you set your radio for am now of course uh as as i will mention a little bit later on most shortwave radios have the fm band your fm broadcast band built into so you can listen to the local stuff during the day now you'll see this phrase single side band or ssb sometimes lower side band or upper side band sometimes the switch that gets you there is marked bfo bfo stands for beat frequency oscillator it's a very very old term but it is still used you can also use this mode to listen for morse code if you want to i'll give you a little tip sometimes on the am signals if you're having trouble hearing them or there's interference you can try single sideband to listen to it sometimes it comes through better sometimes there's something called drm for digital radio monday alley used by very very few shortwave broadcasters in spite of the hype there are very few shortwave broadcasters who use it it may or may not be available on your radio if it is and you can get a drm station it provides high quality audio note this does not stand for digital rights management it's digital radio mondiale or however that is pronounced it's not an english word there are also digital and utility modes which include things like you can get weather maps over hf if you use your computer to decode them radio teletype paktor saitor and so on you can explore these later after you get used to your radio they're called utility modes and they're not in the shortwave broadcast bands usually now we gotta talk about the time okay in radio radio ignores national boundaries it also ignores time zone boundaries so in shortwave radio the entire world is on a single time zone and that happens to be the time in greenwich england just outside london because that's where it started it's a type of time known as universal coordinated time but note that the acronym is utc not uct utc there are reasons for that don't worry about them it's often called zulu time the military uses that the faa uses that it's often stated as being synonymous with greenwich mean time the brits use greenwich mean time actually gmt and utc are very very slightly different from each other by tiny tiny fractions of a second so for practical purposes for shortwave listening it's the same time now utc is expressed in 24 hour time for example three p.m is 1500 in military time or gmt not gmt 3 p.m locals 1 500 local but utc i want you to notice utc does not observe daylight savings time so utc is year round time sort of like arizona you go down to arizona and in the southern and middle parts they do not observe daylight savings time they do up north in the in the indian country you may want to set up a chart so you can look up the utc from your local time you'll need two charts one for your local daylight savings time and one for uh standard time now be beware that the utc date may be one day different from the local day for example here in colorado 6 p.m on monday mountain standard time is o 100 or 1 am tuesday utc okay so when utc rolls around to 2300 as soon as it rolls past zero you're now into the next day if you'd like to know what the utc time is right now go to time dot is slash utc let me show you what that looks like like this okay so here uh it it was january 18th when i took this chart um and it was 22 53 and 44 seconds coordinated universal time or universal coordinated time can hear it all different ways coordinated universal time i think it's a little more common okay so there's a time dot is it will give you the time in any time zone now this may come as a surprise to many americans but there are large parts of the world that do not have the top of the hour aligned with us for example india is 30 minutes off from the top of the clock other places in asia are like 15 minutes off or 45 minutes off this is why we need a universal time and why we use utc here are some websites that will really help you get started or www.swling.org dot com gives you a nice intro to shortwave listening it also contains a good list of shortwave radios and there's some reviews in there now note it is possible to pick up on um amazon really cheap little shortwave radios you know 100 bucks 50 bucks 25 bucks and they're worth what you pay for them you want a radio so that when you punch in a frequency it goes right to it and you don't have to piddle with the dial or something to get that in there now if you are a ham and you have an hf radio note that your ham radio can often be used as a shortwave listener receiver look for a button on your radio or a band slot that's got gen and that's how you get to the what's called a general coverage receiver okay and i did a video on that uh fairly recently another website that's extremely useful very very useful almost mandatory is www.shortwaveschedule.com the capitalization is not important web addresses are uh the part before the dot com is is case insensitive uh this lists all shortwave broadcasters worldwide all of it of course in utc and the frequencies are usually in kilohertz in case you just punch them right into your radio now most of these you won't be able to hear because the programming is being beamed to some other part of the world and please note every language on earth is represented by some shortwave station somewhere so for example if you know german you were raised in germany but came to the united states you can tune in german language broadcasts and just to you know listen to home kind of thing by the way voice of germany is called deutsche welle which is i guess german voice another article i'd like to point you to is on wikipedia look up shortwave radio there's a nice overview in there with more detail that you'll find helpful also if you'd like to learn more about ham radio you can go to www.arrl.org that's the american radio relay league dot org and learn more about ham radio that way now i want to show you just a little bit about these websites i mentioned swling.com that's this one right here and i want to read this right here this is from thomas witherspoon as quoted in the toronto star shortwave radio has little regard for distance and no regard for political borders nor for who and how many join you to listen this apparent information dinosaur travels at the speed of light streams information wirelessly on affordable handheld devices it's virtually immune to censorship and leaves no tracks sensorial attempts to jam it are largely unsuccessful and can usually be bypassed radio is moreover faster than the internet radio is straightforward and effective and in the developing world still absolutely vital it often functions as a form of life support for rural and impoverished communities for example offering life-saving information when disaster strikes like earthquakes or tsunamis so i i mean this is one reason people like listen i remember one time there was a lot of stuff on the news about a problem the u.s was having with japan and i listened to the news and oh yeah yeah okay well i tuned in to radio japan nhk and got quite a different point of view and i went oh now that's interesting also prior to the first gulf war i would listen to bbc which i considered to be the lone voice of truth and a worldwide swamp of disinformation um it uh was talking about the build-up to the gulf war whereas the american media was kind of ignoring it and then when the gulf war hit when iraqivade invaded kuwait i've been listening to this i was expecting it it was clear it was going to happen but seemed to come as a surprise to many americans that's because i was listening to bbc so here is the shortwave schedule.com i just asked it you can go live station show me these are all the stations that were live at the time i pushed this these are all long way stations down here but notice all the many uh languages that are available or if you're listening and you've got a frequency you can put in the frequency here so that you can see what's on that frequency right now and identify the station that you're listening to you can also look for specific stations to see for example if you want to listen to radio havana cuba which is always good for a laugh or even more radio north korea they've got some of the wildest stuff on there you ever heard it's just absolutely amazing they talk about the capitalist running dogs and stuff like that it's just a hoot okay so in summary the shortwave listener can hear amazing things on the air often your best listening is at night by the way so if you listen to uh our u.s media whether it be um cnn or fox or nbc or abc whatever and you're not satisfied with only hearing about what happens in the usa you can listen to broadcasts from other countries now i will point out that the bbc does not broadcast much shortwave to the usa but you can get it on siriusxm it's channel 120 and on january 6th that's how i heard about all the hoof raw i was in my car and just punched in the bbc and got some very straight information about what was going on good shortwave listening radios are in the three hundred dollar price class of course you can use your ham radio hf radio for this too but you may find that the 300 dollar price class gives you a nice radio where you can punch in the frequency directly and so on uh they'll often have built-in whip antennas that often work very well or you can attach that to a piece of wire that you just throw outside for an antenna don't go to amazon and get the 20 radio they're very difficult to work with what you hear is sort of by guessing by golly you can't go to a specific frequency they aren't built very well they're not sensitive and so on uh you'll you'll quickly grow tired of it and it'll be twenty dollars wasted and then you'll wanna go look at a good radio but the point of it all is to have some fun a lot of the foreign broadcasters want to hear from their listeners and they will often give an address you can write to you can give them a report on what you heard from them and they will send you a kill sale card which just shows you know radio sweden such and such a time yes that's in fact what we were transmitting sometimes they'll send you little stickers or a a little flyer with frequencies and so on radio japan used to send out reports that you could fill out and send back and so on it's just lots of fun on shortwave listening well there we go we've had a nice look at shortwave listening that video was a bit long but kind of covers the subject i wanted to get enough in one video that if you've never done this before you've got some idea where to start you've got a website on how to you've got a website where you can find the frequencies and that swling.com website also lists various different kinds of radios that you can get and you know if you just turn on the shortwave radio and tune it randomly you'll probably find nothing but if you go to the specific bands that i laid out in here you can usually pick up some interesting stuff so give it a try take a look at it if somebody gave you shortwave radio for christmas or whatever give it a try you may find yourself upgrading your radio but there you go so this is a little different from ham radio you can listen to ham radio on your shortwave radio and sometimes it's just people chewing the fat other times it's people who are doing um communication support or maybe helping run a road race or something like that you know all kinds of things are on ham radio and you can also get a feel with time for when signals from certain parts of the world start to come in to where you can hear them and sometimes you're just interested in the information you want to know what these people have to say so go give it a try if you'd like to help support this channel please go to dcasler.com support where you can find a variety of ways to look at it also you can go to ke0og.netnote.net slash training to find out information about ham radio or you can go to a r r l.org and find information out about ham radio and also i would enjoy it if you would subscribe and click like and until we next meet now this is a term from ham radio that means best wishes it dates all the way back to the american railroad telegraphers 73 which means best wishes so 73 and we'll see you later [Music] you

Channel: David Casler

Views: 103,626

Rating: 4.9352188 out of 5

Keywords: ham radio, amateur radio

Id: vYX3y9GZDdg

Length: 39min 20sec (2360 seconds)

Published: Mon Jan 18 2021