Tag: censorship

Golos Ameriki

The Voice of America; expended goodwill edition.

Radio Liberty and Radio Free Europe were The main sources of Western information behind the Iron Curtain during the Cold War. While the VOA, RFE, and RL used HF, there were also FM relays in the mix. If you wanted to know what the US Government’s position was on any topic, VOA, RFE, and RL were the information sources.

I wrote several articles about this in the past:

So what happened? Why has the current administration shuttered those services?

There are several good reasons why many government broadcasters have reduced or eliminated shortwave:

  • Fewer people care about the US Government’s position
  • Changes in geopolitics
  • Reduced listenership to HF Shortwave Broadcasts due to technical difficulty
  • Large double-sideband AM transmitters are expensive to operate and maintain and therefore are a target for reducing expenses
  • HF transmitter sites require a lot of land and physical infrastructure, which is also expensive to maintain
  • New distribution technology is easier for the end user and less expensive to operate

Many people, particularly young people, do not know the difference between an over-the-air broadcast and an internet stream. Buying a special receiver, putting up some indoor or outdoor antenna, then tuning around several different frequency bands to find something worth listening to, seems like a lot of work. These days, there are few shortwave broadcasts worth listening to, especially in the English language.

The BBC greatly reduced HF distribution of The World Service starting in 2005, favoring more internet-based distribution. Radio Canada International completely went off the air in 2012, scrapping its extensive transmitter site in Sackville NB in 2014. Radio Australia signed off in 2017. Deutsche Welle mostly left the HF band in 2011 while reducing its FM in 2016. The Voice of Russia ended HF broadcasts in 2014.

The only state-owned shortwave broadcaster that has expanded is Radio China International.

VOA Greenville B has some very old transmitters. The newest units date from the late 1980s or early 1990s. The oldest are the two original Continental 420As, dating from 1960, and are original to the building. When I visited there in 2017, two transmitters were on the air, the BBC and the AEG broadcasting at half power to Cuba and Africa respectively. The rest were shut down. The Continentals were difficult to change frequencies on because of the Doherty modulation. The GEs were long in the tooth, but at least serviceable due to the stock of spare parts from site A. I think the overseas sites in the Philippines and Sao Tome are similar.

Many have pointed out, and rightly so, the Internet censorship issue. Terrestrial radio broadcasting is often the best or only way to circumvent the suppression of information. Kim Elliot pointed this out in his Radio World article “Why we need Shortwave 2.0” All of those points are valid.

What can be done? Implementing DRM30 as a worldwide HF broadcasting standard would be a step in the right direction. DRM30 can send ancillary data, including Radiogram type news bulletins. DRM30 is much more energy efficient than DSB AM because there is no carrier, which wastes half or more of the transmitted power on a carrier that contains no information. Instead of a giant transmitter site, with curtain arrays, a more distributed transmission system with several frequencies on the air at the same time uses lower-powered transmitters, simpler antenna systems such as Rotating Log Period Arrays (RLPA), or non-directional vertical towers. This would require some changes to the FCC rules, but now is the time for that.

TV’s ATSC 1 has something called a “Transport Stream ID,” (TSID) which is a unique number assigned to each broadcaster. Wide-band SDRs are capable of scanning across many HF bands. Implementing something similar for DRM30 HF broadcasts would not be that difficult. Shortwave Listeners just program the HF TSID to lock onto the digital broadcast of their choice, if it is available. This would make HF Broadcasting available to most non-technical people looking for information. Most of this can be done with existing technology. However, DRM still (almost 2 decades later) lacks receivers. There is a development on that front as well: RF2Digital support module. The point is that there are many good ways to improve the technology, keep HF broadcasting relevant, and bypass attempts at internet censorship.

What will be done?

Speaking of Radio…

I was talking to a friend from Russia about history, my job, and various other things that are going on in my life. I received this reply, which I thought was interesting on a number of levels:

I’m glad we are on the same page about the era of the ‘cold war’. We were interested in your life even more than you in ours. We had almost no sources of information except for ‘The morning star’ which is a newspaper of the Communist party of Great Britain. The Voice of America and the Liberty (or Freedom, I have no clue because for us it was ‘RADIO SVOBODA’) were extremely hard to tune on. All foreign broadcasts were jammed. So to listen to the station you should maximize the volume up to the limit which was dangerous. Soviet houses are not at all soundproof and your neighbors could easily rat on you. Since that time I’d been dreaming of a small radio with could receive a clear signal from abroad. Of course we have the Internet broadcasting now but they often use old recording instead of live air and the signal depends on your data carrier. You should be online, you should have an app and unlimited data on your contract, your phone should be charged all the time. Too many conditions. Unfortunately a lot of foreign sites are banned here and the trend is to make this number bigger and bigger.

I find that perspective interesting.  We take for granted our ability to listen to information and listen to different points of view, even those we don’t agree with.  There are still trouble spots in the world and some people are not as fortunate.  It is very easy to block internet traffic and there are several countries that currently block access to some or all of the internet, for the safety of their citizens, no doubt.  Ideas are dangerous.

VOA/RFE transmitter site, Biblis Germany
VOA/RFE transmitter site, Biblis Germany. Photographer: Armin Kübelbeck, CC-BY-SA, Wikimedia Commons

In the last ten to fifteen years, many large government shortwave broadcasters have reduced or eliminated their programming favoring an internet distribution model.  This is a mistake.  It is very difficult to successfully jam terrestrial radio broadcasts.  Shortwave Facilities are expensive to develop and maintain, there is no doubt about that.  However, as the Chief Engineer from Radio Australia (ABC) once told me “HF will get through when nothing else will.”  Ironically, ABC has eliminated its HF service on January 31, 2017.

It seems to me that a sort of “Shortwave Lite” version of broadcasting might be the answer.  Use more efficient transmitters with lower power levels closer in to the target areas.  Such transmitters could be coupled to rotatable log periodic antennas to target several listening areas with one system, thus greatly reducing the number of towers and land required.  Solid-state transmitters with a power of 10-50 KW are much, much more efficient than their tube-type brethren.

DRM30 (Digital Radio Mondiale) has not gained widespread use in the MF and HF bands.  Like its HD Radio counterpart, the lack of receivers seems to be one of the adoption issues.  As of 2017, there are only four DRM30-capable receivers for sale not counting software plug-ins for various SDRs.  That is a shame because my experience with DRM30 reception has been pretty good.  I have used a WinRadio G303i with DRM plug-in, which set me back $40.00 for the license key (hint for those nice folks at the DRM consortium; licensing fees tend to quash widespread interest and adoption).

CFRX, Toronto coverage map, average HF propagation conditions
CFRX, Toronto coverage map, average HF propagation conditions

Finally, I have advocated before and still advocate for some type of domestic shortwave service.  Right now, I am listening to CFRX Toronto on 6070 KHz.  That station has a transmitter power output of 1 KW into a 117-degree tower (approximately 50 feet tall) using a modified Armstrong X1000B AM transmitter netting a 15-32 µV received signal strength some 300 miles away.  That is a listenable signal, especially if there is no other source of information available.  The average approximate coverage area for that station is 280,000 square miles (725,000 square kilometers). That is a fairly low overhead operation for a fairly large coverage area.  Perhaps existing licensed shortwave broadcasters should be allowed to operate such facilities in domestic service.

The point is before we pull the plug on the last shortwave transmitter, we should carefully consider what we are giving up.