Listening To A Ghost.

Since it's a nice evening I decided to take my Grundig G5 shortwave portable outside and tune around a bit, hoping to avoid a bit of the indoor electrical noise.  As I turned the dial I came across a preacher that sounded familiar.  I assumed it was Pastor Pete Peters with his Scriptures For America program and sure enough that's who it was.  Peters, a believer in the racist Identity brand of Christianity, was a fixture on shortwave when I was a heavy listener in the early '90s.

But when I typed "Scriptures For America" into Google I got a surprise.  Peters died in 2011.  I'd been listening to a ghost!  Or, rather, even though he's dead the miracle of audio recording allows Peters to keep spreading his racist claptrap from beyond the grave.  Too bad.  Incidentally the show didn't note that Peters has died.

The church Peters ran in LaPorte, Colorado, apparently only has 100 members.  I wonder where they've been getting the money to pay for his broadcasts all these years, along with their other activities. 

Still Transmitting.

A lot has changed on shortwave over the years.  Many stations familiar to long time listners have dissappeared completely.  Others have greatly reduced their schedules, especially to the industralised world.  They unfortunately assume that if you live in such places you'll listen online.  But there are still some familiar sounds to be heard.  While tuning around the bands I cam across a familiar voice.  It was Arnie Coro, still hosting his longrunning show DXers Unlimited on Radio Havana Cuba.  He still sounds pretty good.

It's not much of a surprise that Coro is still aorund given that Radio Havana Cuba is largely stuck in the past, just like US-Cuba relations are.  It was interesting to hear the RHC newscast refer to NATO troops as "occupying troops" and the Taliban as "resistance forces," read by someone with a North American accent.  Probably some Canadian, or maybe some really adventurous American, who thinks they're helping to "fight US imperialism" instead of helping prop up a decrepit Communist dictatorship that needs to go.  Cuba has no more reason to like the Taliban than the rest of us, but the enemy of my enemy is my friend and all that.  The whole thing was tedious decades ago, and gets even more so as the decades go on.  Unfortuately I doubt even the Castros dying will change things, as American policy has given the Cuban regime no reason to lighten up..

Aviator Flys Back.

My ownership of a Grundig G6 Aviator portable shortwave receiver has ended. I took it back for a refund today. There were just too many annoying little problems with it. This included a loud tone when tuning to 1330 khz and using the supplied AC adapter, and a lack of signal strength when using just the whip antenna on batteries. The adapter actually increased signal strength on some frequencies, but it also greatly increased the noise, even more so that just the noise increase from what is an electrically noisy environment anyways. I had hoped Saskatoon being a pretty low signal strength area might help with the overload problems some users have experienced, but that really doesn't matter if you can't hear a frequency anyways. The reported problems with FM stations "breaking through" into the air band range held true here, including local country station 92.9 The Bull smack dab on 118.3 mhz, the primary tower frequency for John G. Diefenbaker Airport. You could hear the tower when they transmitted, but who wants to sit through distorted country music while waiting to hear them? Fortunately Future Shop took it back with no problems. I decided not to exchange it for another unit because I didn't want to go through the trouble of getting another one only to face the same problems. My advice for anyone interested in this unit is to buy it from a retailer that will let you return it if you find it doesn't work in your listening environment.

Saskatoon Shortwave Boom?

I got rather a surprise recently when I discovered the local Future Shop is actually carrying a usable shortwave radio. It's the Grundig G6 Aviator, one of the radios sold under the Grundig name in North America by the Eton company. Selling at just a hair under a hundred bucks before taxes this small radio has continuous coverage from 150 kilohertz to 29.999 megahertz, single side band demodulation, and covers the AM aviation band from 117 to 136 megahertz. Given the price I figured I'd buy one, and I'll probably have more to say later, as I'm probably going to keep it.

But what is even more interesting is that the one I bought was the last one on display in the box, apparently part of a batch of ten they received. Two different Future Shop personnel told me these radios have sold very quickly, which frankly is a surprise to me. Is there suddenly a bunch of people interested in shortwave in Saskatoon? Or does it have something to do with these units being labelled as the Buzz Aldrin Edition, commemorating the 40th anniversary of Aldrin's role in the Apollo 11 mission? If the latter I wonder if they won't see some of these returned by people who didn't really know what they were getting into buying a shortwave receiver. As I've noted before shortwave reception is not like receiving local TV and radio stations no matter how powerful the station is, so it's not hard to imagine some people thinking their radios don't work properly when they don't produce a signal like Saskatoon stations CKOM or C95.

Interestingly the Grundig shortwave product lineup in North America is different from that in Europe, since Eton actually uses the Grundig name under license and has products produced for them directly. Grundig's "world band" line outside of North America is actually composed of rebranded products from respected Taiwanese manufacturer Sangean. The Yacht Boy 80 for example is actually the Sangean PT80.

Deaf Ears.

I mentioned in a recent post my nostalgic revisting of shortwave radio. After that I dug out my old receiver and have been taking the occasional listen, such as tonight. But tonight is not a good night to tune the bands. Propagation is terrible right now, so there is little to hear. We're at the low point of the sunspot cycle, and at such times shortwave radio propagation is at it's weakest, and tonight reflects that. Unlike local AM and FM broadcasts shortwave broadcasts, even from the most powerful transmitters aimed directly at you, are not guarenteed listening. You can turn on a familiar frequency at the right time and hear nothing. I wonder how many receivers have been returned over the years by newcomers who didn't realise this and thought their new radios were broken.

I switched to the longwave band, and did hear what sounded like voices. But it soon became obvious this was a mixing product, a false signal created by two strong signals mixing in the receiver's circuitry. After all local talk show host John Gormley isn't heard on longwave, and it would be a miracle to hear a broadcast station from those parts of the world that do have longwave broadcasting on the ferrite antenna in a shortwave portable in the middle of North America. In North America longwave is limited to navigation beacons.

My radio is a circa 1991 example of the Sangean ATS803a. This receiver was one of the most popular units of the late '80s and early '90s due to its reasonable price to performance ratio. Not only was it sold under the Sangean name but also as the Radio Shack Realistic DX440 and several other lesser known names. I remember reading at one point the suggestion that the '803a, and its predecessor the '803 were based on Sony's ICF 2001. You can read one take on the '803a here.

Sony Canada Says No To Shortwave.

Back in the early '90s I did quite a bit of shortwave listening. Once the Internet came along it began to suck away my time, and that, combined with the noise that the computer generates when I have it on, resulted in my receiver becoming largely a clock radio. But of late I've been interested in picking up a cheapy shortwave or two for some audio mangling, and that got me poking around online tonight for info them. I spent a good time here reading receiver reviews getting a bit nostalgic for the hobby again. But when I visited a couple of Canadian dealers that offer shortwave receivers for sale I noticed that neither carry Sony products. Curious, I checked out Sony's Canadian site. To my surprise nothing was to be found. Sony has long been in the shortwave biz, with some of their portables having reached legendary status in the hobby, such as the ICF2010. Apparently Sony has discontinued most of its shortwave product line, but a look at the US Sony site showed the SW7600GR was still available in the US. I guess Sony Canada wasn't getting enough demand for those products to keep even one model in stock.