Friday, July 14, 2006

Adventures in shortwave: last night's Radio Habana Cuba


The Professor, a DJ at New York City's independent radio station WFMU, has a fantastic series in his regular blog about listening to old-time radio: that of long-distance AM radio and shortwave. He ends up posting audio clips of various shortwave stations you can hear. While it sounds boring, it's actually quite interesting. I offer up a 5-minute clip of Radio Havana Cuba from last night, with their regular news report. Cuba's propaganda station always highlights how the US is "actively conspiring" against Cuba or some random nation. Volume is a little low on the clip, so you might need to turn it up.

This clip was recorded from an ancient vacuum tube radio, a 1940's era Hallicrafters S-40A, in the Ryerson Astronomical Society's office. The signal-to-noise ratio wasn't anywhere near what is was a week ago, but it's ok. (I have a lot of recordings from that night to process).

P.S. Looking for the manuals to the S-40A? Bama.sbc.edu has 'em.

2 comments:

weatherall said...

Greetings! I found your post by searching for shortwave radio on technorati.com. What time and frequency did you use for your RHC reception? Mainly I am wondering what the interference could be. Both times I've heard interference in the RHC signal, it was from BBC:

* RHC on 6000 khz, BBC on 6005 khz
* RHC on 11760 khz, BBC on 11765 khz

Dean W. Armstrong said...

Hi, this was 9550kHz or 9820kHz (can't remember which) at 2:30 UT. Part of the interference was from a strong domestic religious station next door. I have a great recording without interference from a few nights prior to this one. I recorded tons of stuff, including the BBC, which is very hard to hear nowadays.