10 May 2012

Radio Nederland and shortwave broadcasts

One of my favorite shortwave broadcast stations back in the 1960s was Radio Netherlands . I still have my QSL card from them somewhere. When testing my shortwave crystal set today I noticed a strong transmission of the Dutch language service today in the 31m band. Little did I realise (until tonight) that this is the very last day ever of transmissions in their worldwide Dutch language service.

The HF broadcast scene is quite a lot different from when I last seriously listened some years ago: there are far fewer English language services to be heard. I guess these days people who want to find out about different countries listen to broadcasts on the internet.

Also, the CW maritime services, which could be perfectly copied sometimes on a crystal set as a result of cross-modulation (the CW sounded like a raspy hiss keyed) are long gone. One of my interests some years ago was seeing how many HF marine coast radio stations I could positively ID on a simple crystal set: the answer was quite a few around western Europe.

In fact SWLing on HF is rather a dying scene I think, although devotees will no doubt disagree.

5 comments:

Paul Stam PAØK said...

Yes it's a end of an era. Cause: cutbacks by the Government. But in the future there will be more space for us on HF.

Anonymous said...

A lot of BBC and DW Shortwave Transmitters have also gone off-air or gone digital.. in contrast to the Chinese! Also rather sorry the 648KHz BBC transmitter in Orfordness with the amazing 5-tower beam has gone. This was great all around Europe. I rather suspect the BBC/UK Government underestimated the number of people that were still listening. I suspect it is more about selling bandwidth than anything else. Hugh G6AIG

GW0KIG said...

Shortwave broadcasting is indeed dying. Most of the major European broadcasters have left Shortwave in favour of the internet. I believe Radio Canada is also cutting back on shortwave in a big way.It is hard to see any future for international broadcasting on shortwave although I do think that total reliance on the internet is a mistake.

73 Kevin

Anonymous said...

Yes, a sad day for Dutch Radio.
Always used to listen to RNW when I was abroad.
Now there's no back-up system in case the internet shuts down...

73 Ron
PA2RF

Anonymous said...

how can the net shut down ?
tis all seperate nodes consists of..