A PBS mind in an MTV world. Anonymous

Wednesday, May 31, 2006

Short Wave Radio – Is Anyone Listening Out There?

I'm going to reminesce about my late teens and early 20's in India -- about shortwave radio. It is (or used to be) – a free resource for entertainment, religious broadcasts, political propaganda, world events, listening to foreign language broadcasts etc. and gave me hours and hours of entertainment. First, a brief background. It is a radio transmission that occupies its own spectrum of frequencies just as do medium wave (or AM as it is more popularly known in the US), FM, analog and digital television, cellular telephone, GPS etc. Transmissions are typically in the electromagnetic spectrum designated by meter bands such as 13, 16, 19, 25, 31, 41, 45 and 49. It came into prominence during WWII, when people flocked around their home radios listening to BBC make its historical wartime announcements. After WWII, governments found a new use for the SW radio as an effective means of propaganda (or information). You can read all about the technical aspects of shortwave radio here.

What accounted for its popularity during and after the war? Well, very simply it is cheap to produce and transmit, consumes very little energy, a readymade worldwide audience and reach. Moreover, people who listen to shortwave are usually in poorer nations, where electricity is scarce and other electronic goods all the more expensive – relatively speaking of course. For example, we had a vacuum-tube operated radio (made by a company called Bush, I believe). Later on during my college years, I acquired a battery-operated 4-band Philips transistor radio with MW, SW1, SW2 and SW3 (with the frequencies split along the bands mentioned earlier). As an aside, I saw my first TV transmission in 1982, when my beloved city Bangalore got it during Asian games. We didn’t get a TV until 1985!

What I was addicted to was shortwave radio – a constant companion. I listened to all sorts of programming – BBC, Radio Australia, Radio Deutschewelle, Radio Moscow, Sri Lanka Broadcasting Corporation, Radio France International, Radio Canada International, Voice of America, Morse-code transmissions and of course All India Radio. (India was then a tightly-regulated economy, where the Central government following the Soviet model, controlled all electronic media. Radio entertainment for the masses consisted of limited hours of AM/SW radio with music, agricultural programming, official news, a few radio plays and on some rare occasions, English pop music.) Some of my favorite programs were produced by BBC – My Word, My Music, World News, Led Zeppelin’s BBC recordings, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Top of the Pops etc. Late nights, when I studied or read something, you could have listened at a very low volume the crackling sounds of SW.

Some of the Cold War propaganda battles between USSR and USA were indeed conducted on shortwave. For example, Radio Moscow used to jam VOA by mysteriously shifting its frequencies close to VOA and if you were not careful your radio would have drifted over to Radio Moscow. "American-sounding" announcers from Radio Moscow would suddenly talk about a vague version of jazz -- nothing you and I would recognize. Ah, how I wish I could listen again to those shortwave battles of those Cold War years, if not for the reality, at least for the entertainment value! Not for nothing was my nickname “radio-active guy”.

All those lovely things belong now in the crusty dustbin of history. My world has become more and more digital including streaming Internet radio, iPod, podcasts, SACD, DVDs, satellite radio, MP3s and so on. Someday in the not too distant future all this too shall pass we will look back wistfully on today's gadgets. Wonder what the future holds!