Tag: HF

Super Tropical Cyclone Yasi, a category 5 storm, came ashore this morning between Cairns (pronounced Cans) and Townsville, Queensland around midnight Thursday (9 am Wednesday, NY time).

Radio Australia carried Australian Broadcasting Company (ABC) Queensland coverage of the storm, which was extraordinary.  Spot coverage, emergency information, sheltering information, updates and calls from listeners in the midst of the storm.  Some of it is pretty intense.  One fellow, John, out in the country all by himself in the height of the storm sounded somewhat forlorn, I hope he makes it.

Due to the size of the storm, wide spread power outages are expected and may last for weeks or months.  As a part of this, there are numerous outages and potential outages in their AM and FM broadcasting chain.  To that end, ABC has two shortwave frequencies available for their Queensland service; daytime (8 am to 8:30 pm local time, 2100 – 0830 GMT) on 9710 KHz and night time (8:30pm to 8 am local, 0830 – 2100 GMT)  is 6080 KHz.

Once again, HF (shortwave) radio gets the job done when local stations, cell towers, and internet connections to dead.  Sometimes it is the low tech answer.

Sounds like some dire prediction, but no, actually it is a good radio show heard on Shortwave, WWCR-2 to be precise.  The show, at least during the weeks that I heard it, consisted of blues and other music that you likely won’t hear anywhere else.  Allan Gray, the host, also often interviews musicians and other persons of note.  I stumbled on this show a few weeks ago while listening to 12,160 KHz on Saturday afternoon. WWCR is touted as “World Wide Christian Radio” and there are many religious shows to be sure.  They also air several secular programs like World of Radio, Golden Age of Radio, DX partyline and Ask WWCR and Info Wars and others.

From reading their schedule, Last Radio Playing can be heard on WWCR-2 Tuesdays at 5pm est (5,070 KHz) , Saturdays and Sundays at 3 pm est (12,160 KHz) and on WWCR-3 at 8 pm (4,840 KHz).  WWRC is located in Nashville, TN.  They have four Continental 418 HF transmitters with a carrier power of 100 KW each.  WWCR-2 uses an azimuth of 85 degrees true and WWCR-3 uses an azimuth of 40 degrees true, both into Rhombic antennas with 14 dBi gain.

Today the show consisted of Christmas Music, which on the AM wide band receiver, sounded pretty good.  Anyway, if you are so inclined, tune in and take a listen.