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description= Originally a pair of views on gaming, it s now musings by Redbeard on video games (mainly MMOs), board games, RPGs, and other geeky hobbies.;
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august, mmo, rpg, the, 27, 2025, tuesday, 2024, podcasts, blogroll, links, my, adventures, over, airwaves, part, wednesday, 26, saturday, 31, thursday, june, 23, 2016, pages, reference, youtube, channels, blog, archive, blogs, in, mothballs, past, pc, contributors, labels, on, beautiful, blue, danube, this, is, london, nothing, lasts, forever, just, an, ambulance, chaser, working, away, as, memes, go,
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up internet connection at home and listening to the radio over the internet required faster speeds than dial up eventually however various forms of high speed internet made their way across the globe and with this new form of communication the old began to seem an antique the major shortwave broadcasters began to dry up here s just a few of the stations that you can no longer hear or hear easily where i live the bbc world service stopped broadcasting to north america and australia in 2001 citing changing habits and relying instead on rebroadcasts on american radio stations radio deutsche welle dropped their english service to north america in 2003 and gradually reduced their shortwave footprint over the successive years to africa only radio österreich international austria a favorite station of mine discontinued broadcasts in 2003 radio nederland and radio poland ceased operations in 2012 some of the decline in the older broadcasters is due to the changing technology but there are other reasons for the ceasing of shortwave broadcasts as well chief among them is the energy cost to broadcast via shortwave powering a shortwave station is not cheap running a 500 000 watt station takes a lot of energy and if you don t have extenuating circumstances to keep broadcasting the cold war for example eventually the bean counters start to get antsy about throwing money away in a post cold war environment the venerable voice of america bethany station about 15 20 miles from my house closed in 1994 and is now a park the station facility itself is a museum open to the public despite the decline of the traditional shortwave broadcasters i kept up with shortwave radio when i could as i mentioned above my decline in free time meant that sitting down to actually listen to shortwave radio became a bit of a luxury moving to our current house meant i had the space to put up an outside antenna but that took a back seat to house repairs and kids play spaces and to be fair i also got more heavily invested in video and board games as well this blog for example came along at the end of the 2000s but i d been playing video and board games regularly for decades before that still i purchased a grundig satellit 800 when it was first released in mid late 2000 because while i couldn t afford one of the 1000 professional receivers such as the japan radio nrd 535 or the drake r8 i could afford a 500 satellit 800 which had similar capabilities to those kilobuck receivers the drake r8 made in miamisburg ohio definitely a holy grail radio among those in the hobby from the late universal radio s website i also bought a couple of tube radios along the way thinking that i d like to have one to putter around with as the kids grew up and i retired such as the hallicrafters sx 100 it s much heavier than it looks i ve had this radio since 2006 the last time i went to the dayton hamvention and trust me lugging this thing around was not my idea of fun the old tube shortwave radios from the 1930s up through the advent of all transistor models in the 60s are nicknamed boat anchors due to their bulk and weight and while the hallicrafters sx 100 that i have above isn t the heaviest of those boat anchors lugging a radio weighing 42 lbs 19 kg back to my car 3 4 of a mile away 1 25 km wasn t what i d call fun however i d bought the thing for 100 it worked and i was determined to get it home as the centerpiece of my listening station funny thing about that i never got a listening station put together i mean i did get an outside antenna put up complete with ground rod and lightning arrestor by running a wire from our porch to the kids wooden swing set that antenna really brought in the shortwave stations but i never got the space in the basement to get a true listening station in place while that was my home office there was also the little problem of hurricane ike in 2008 whose remnants of met a cold front coming down from canada right in the middle of the ohio valley turning what would have been 3 4 inches of steady rain into hurricane force winds over the course of 12 hours this area is used to tornados but the houses and infrastructure here are decidedly not built to withstand hurricane force winds miraculously the antenna survived ike but a few months later the weakened supports were brought down in an ice storm and that was that by then my wife had given me an ultimatum to move my home office out of the basement and up into the dining room as i had a habit of getting bronchitis every winter since we lived in the house due to the chilly and damp conditions in the basement my trusty old dx 440 became my go to portable radio for the garage and the back porch and it still behaves like a champ today the satellit 800 is still in the basement and when i m down there for any length of time i turn it on and listen to fm radio on it that old hallicrafers s20r that i first became acquainted with at ud i eventually took home with me but it needs a complete rebuild so that s relegated to basement storage for now but the newer hallicrafters the sx 100 went onto a storage rack and stayed there until i began cleaning this fall the grundig satellit 800 when i brought it out of the basement to listen to while i was repairing the deck last fall when i brought the boat anchor upstairs and put it on the table as you saw above i plugged it in and hoped that it would fire up it did kinda several tubes had blown and it wouldn t shock me if i opened it up and discovered several resistors and caps were in bad shape too but other parts of the radio did start up and bathed me in a yellowish glow it is definitely going to be a project for me to restore it to its former glory but in my retirement years i m up for the challenge oh and the sx 100 is now permanently out of the basement i am thinking about ways to configure my son s old room to create a listening station in there as long as i share it with my wife so she can have a place to play her guitar so i ve got a future with shortwave it s just changed so much over the past 35 years or so that i have a hard time recognizing what it is today yes the old hallicrafters radio came with me when i graduated i had to store it in my closet for a while until it found a home at my then girlfriend s apartment while she was at grad school the worst part about working at radio shack how long do you have because i ve a list one of my history professors at ud strongly suggested to the class that if we were interested in history that we ought to join our local or state history organization typically you could join for a pretty minimal cost and you could then gain access to and support research of all sorts of topics i took his advice to heart and joined the ohio historical society for several years and when i got serious about shortwave listening i joined clubs to support the hobby as well hence naswa and the ace i bet if you asked the average park goer what the voice of america was they d think you were talking about the country music festival that happens there every year or that it s some patriotic thing ala lee greenwood s god bless the usa or maybe the album and lead track from sammy hagar when he was a solo artist in the 1980s to this day i m still amazed that i didn t injure my back i used a piece of wood to both use as a makeshift flagpole for the kids so i could run up a pirate flag pretending you were a pirate on the high seas is a rite of passage pirates of the caribbean movies or not and to attach my random wire antenna to the dampness problems were fixed by a dehumidifier the cold well i need to fix the foundation first before i ll put up insulation on the walls yeah that s not happening any time soon blaugust2025 posted by redbeard at 6 00 am no comments email this blogthis share to x share to facebook share to pinterest labels blaugust2025 adventures over the airwaves shortwave tuesday august 26 2025 my adventures over the airwaves part 1 this is london i was inspired to start writing about my history with radio after a comment by shintar about my usage of the term dayton hamvention in this post and after far too many words i ve broken it out into multiple parts i m not sure how far this will go or if i m going to post these on successive days or not but we ll see i m old enough to remember my parents having a radio with a shortwave band on it i don t think it was this exact model as ours was covered by a leather case that matched the leather handle you see above still between these ge models and the radio shack patrolman series of portable radios you get the idea ours was a model similar to the one shown above and it resided in our kitchen dad would take the radio outside when he sat on the back patio and read while listening to 700 wlw broadcast cincinnati reds baseball games with marty brennaman and joe nuxhall in the radio booth marty and joe from the reds glory years from the notorious meddler s post on the two when it wasn t outside the radio s place was atop the refrigerator so my mom could listen to the radio while she cooked all i knew about that little section marked sw was that whenever i tried to listen to it there were no audible stations i figured it was busted and as long as my parents didn t think i broke the radio i never called attention to it a couple of years later i asked my mom about that sw band and she told me it was for listening to radio stations from all over the world that sounded intriguing but i remembered my experience of trying that band in the past and i left it alone then the pope got shot i was at my catholic grade school when it happened and being the dutiful catholic i prayed for the pope s recovery after the announcement on the intercom one of the teachers or maybe it was one of the nuns i can t remember who happened to mention that we might get more information from shortwave radio rather than our local television stations so when i got back home i tried in vain to find anything on that shortwave band defeated i left it alone but mom told me that she d never gotten any stations to come in either so that was what i thought of shortwave radio some radio band that basically was a waste of space my dad eventually replaced that portable radio a couple of years later with one that had vhf television audio instead of a shortwave band to him that was far more useful fast forward 7 8 years later and i was in my sophomore year at ud just beginning work as a lab assistant in a physics professor s research lab part of my duties involved working on the lab bench that the professor had acquired from the department of electrical engineering and to say that drilling and tapping holes in steel weren t a lot of fun is an understatement so to pass the time i looked around for a radio to listen to surely in this room with all of this junk there had to be something tucked away in one corner there was the radio in question didn t have those aluminum wings on the sides but otherwise this is the model the s20r sky champion circa 1939 from ebay at first i wasn t exactly sure if it was a radio at all but the bands on the main tuning wheel gave it away i plugged it in and turned it on and nothing i made sure the radio was on the regular am band and still there was nothing coming out another of the professors in the department saw me fiddling with the radio and took pity on me you need to set the switch on the right to rec he told me oh i flipped that switch and like magic the radio came to life there s a small bit of wire in the back for an antenna he added but this was part of the ham station we had in the building a what an amateur radio station the professor who ran it passed away before you started here so we dismantled it your freshman year he pointed out another device next to it from ebay this is the transmitter but don t turn it on unless you ve got it hooked up to an antenna or it ll fry the circuits i made a mental note of that tuned into one of the local am stations on the hallicrafters radio and got back to work when my day ended i went back to the radio and began flipping to different bands surely if there was any radio that might receive shortwave stations it was this one lo and behold something came out of the radio it was in spanish but it was better than nothing i got an actual shortwave signal so knowing now that shortwave radio wasn t a myth i did what i usually do when confronted with a problem i was eager to know the answer for research i went to a bookstore at the mall and roamed the stacks until i finally found what i was looking for in the electronics and hobbies section i then visited the radio shack at the mall and picked up another book so i had this as my haul if you re old enough and into science electronics you might recognize the publisher of the one on the right tab books yes it still exists as an imprint of mcgraw hill education the radio shack book was very light on details but it did provide a basic framework on shortwave radio the other one the complete shortwave listener s handbook was much better overall it provided me with real details as to how radios worked and more importantly how shortwave radio worked i also learned that those old portable radios such as the one my parents had were terrible for shortwave reception the book also explained how the shortwave bands were active at certain times of the day the higher frequencies in the morning afternoon and the lower frequencies in the evening night and broadcasters would take advantage of those differences to change the frequencies they broadcast based on the time of day finally the book recommended the world radio tv handbook to get access to the current listings of shortwave frequencies okay i thought back to the bookstore i couldn t find the world radio tv handbook but i did find something that looked like it might be almost as good i haven t kept all of them but a few are worth keeping for sentimental value as the cover says the 1989 passport to world band radio in it s own way the passport to world band radio was even better than the wrth because there were easy to follow reviews reviews of shortwave stations both reception and content and there was a huge section in the back showing the shortwave band activity in a graphical format if you zoom in you ll see some old stations such as radio moscow and radio yugoslavia from the 1989 passport to world band radio using the 1989 passport as a guide i learned to surf the bands and listen in while i was working the professor i worked for finally tired of hearing shortwave all the time and told me to listen when he wasn t around i also learned that in the absence of a real antenna just using random wire as long as you can make it is your best bet so i did what any self respecting student would do cut some wire from the huge spools in the basement storage of sherman hall the basement that at one time was a student run nuclear reactor and ran it out of a second floor classroom and down to the...
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