[Crackling static noise] ...Ping...ping...ping..."Heading, zero, niner, four"...ping. I awoke one night to these strange  sounds  emanating  from  the  adjacent  living  room.    I  was  only  eight  years  old,  it  was  three  in  the morning  and  my  seven  year  old  brother  had  grandma's  multi-band  receiver  on  the  floor  blaring  away, beckoning  me  to  join  in  on  his  contraband  discovery.   We  obviously  weren't  supposed  to  be  up  that  late,  let alone messing with this  cool-looking rig with its  spinning time-zone disc, light up multi-band dial  and selector knob  pointing to  icon  symbols  including  a football,  sea  ship  and  cop  car [the  photo  below  shows  a  receiver I own that is closely related.]  What were we hearing?  It wasn't a broadcast station, or that one that counted the time.  This one appeared to us to be some genuine submariners on a maneuver.  To our kid ears it seemed mysterious and forbidden, like we were eavesdropping on the military.  I can't say for sure if that's what it really was but it seemed to go on for a while and it definitely piqued our interests.

       That chance audio encounter and subsequent inheritance of that special transistorized marvel would foster my continued love for radio and eventual interest in the Amateur Radio hobby.  Shortwave radio, or in other words; the enjoyment of listening to radio signals from other parts of the world, no doubt was the catalyzing  pastime of a mass of our Hams.  I'm sure many of you recall 'DXing' distance stations every night on AM transistor radios just the same, or maybe it was a relative's CB rig with all its slang-rich southern-drawl and heterodyne whines.  And did you own a pair of kid's walkie-talkie's?  Ever listen intently to the static  to see if anyone else out there had them too?  No matter where you did your globe trotting, you're most likely  reading this article because you too made your way to the Ham bands via the world bands.

       I suppose it takes a certain personality to really dig the shortwave thing.  Within an SWL(Short Wave Listener) lies at least some small thirst for the adventure of exploring the unknown.  Tuning through the world band dial is a blind affair as the bounty to be uncovered is random and unpredictable in nature and exponentially affected by the permutations of time of day, day of the year, frequency, programming schedule and most of all, propagation.  Image one's self being air-dropped into a strange land, where stranger customs and languages abound.  There might be immobilizing feelings of disorientation and fear, but it's inevitably overridden by a certain exhilaration and intrigue as you adapt to your surroundings.

       In the classic fictional Japanese anime film, "Royal Space Force: The Wings of Honnêamise" [Gainax/Bandai Visual, 1987,] the main character Shirotsugh, faces the challenges of being the first human to try to go into space.  Amidst the complexities and anxieties of launching a mostly untested rocket and capsule design into orbit, nearly being killed by a warring rival nation on the launch pad, once aloft, he takes a moment to marvel at the earth below through his window and notes, "City lights... I wonder where they are? They really do look like stars."  He then takes a moment more to tune through his broadcast receiver, sampling the tastes of the international radio banquet below.  It must have surely captured his mind's attentions from everything else. I'd like to note an interesting point; the view of this astronaut's world was missing one thing;  the same thing missing from your shortwave's radio dial: borders.

       For those of you not born in this century, you may have noticed a difference in what you hear (or lack thereof) on the shortwave bands than when you were younger.  I'll speak more on this fact in a bit, but how this change came about is this: you guessed it, the Internet.  As more and more foreign countries choose to use the Internet as their medium for international outreach, the less and less broadcast stations there seems to be available for SWL's to catch on the air.  Some of the 'big guns' remain, but unless you're into domestic religious televangelism, the rare and small exotic fishes of the radio sea have pretty much thinned out.  If there is some redemptive Internet influence on the shortwaves, instead of having to thumb through outdated copies of Passport to World Band Radio or praying to the ionosphere gods for manna, these days there are a few sites to aid in a desperate SWL’er’s search.  Two great sites to check out are: http://www.short-wave.info/ and http://shortwave.hfradio.org/ where you can find current frequency and time listings and other great resources.

Enter the Garden

       An interesting web site and Android app recently sprung up a few years ago which allow users to spin a virtual globe, clicking on representative green dots which spawn live Internet-streaming radio stations from around the world.  The site's designer, Jonathan Puckey, in collaboration with the Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision, was working a research project for a museum installation called Transnational Radio Encounters, intended to teach the concept that radio crosses borders while exhibiting radio of different languages.  Puckey states, "Like, radio itself, of course, doesn't know about borders.  It's a signal that travels as far as the signal strength goes."  The genius came when  they decided to make the project a website instead of an installation.  Check it out now at:

http://radio.garden/ or download the Radio Garden app at Google Play.

       You can catch Puckey's interview with NPR at: http://www.npr.org/2016/12/18/506045527/jonathan-puckey-s-radio-garden-knows-no-borders  and he nails my point above exactly, "Yes, I really like the idea that you can get lost. Like, you don't know exactly  where  you're going. Like I tried, for example, to find San Francisco the other day and actually had a hard time pinpointing it because I'm so used to actually seeing a map and sort of knowing exactly where I need to go - really enjoy this sort of fact of sort of getting lost."  You see, on this map there are thousands of dots representing the originating  locations of streaming radio stations, at least 8,000 represented there.  All you have to do is hover over the dots or click on them to play the stations and in between you’ll hear a bit of pre-recorded radio static to enhance your virtual radio experience.

              The app may occasionally have a few bugs to be worked out but thousands of users are now enjoying a quirky new way to explore the world of radio.  "New" to many and it lacks the organization an instant commercially-driven gratification of your big-time radio apps, but the concept should seem very familiar to seasoned SWL'ers.  Now, these other Internet services still reign supreme, such as ShoutCast with its [50,000+] online stations.  iHeart Radio and TuneIn are the most popular smartphone live radio apps and many have switched to jukebox-style apps including the likes of Spotify, but despite   the ample selection, to me, there are some major drawbacks; including restrictions on listening to some stations based on payment system and clumsy navigation systems based on genre and popularity ratings.  Radio Garden is still a diamond in the rough at this point, but where it lacks in selection it makes up for in fun and experience - you are the astronaut who can pluck the fruits of radio from anywhere you orbit.

       What sells me on a fancy new app is the experience, and I have one in particular with Radio Garden; I found myself panning the globe view over where I roughly knew where Russia was [no borders.]  To me, Russia was Moscow, St. Petersburg and a few of the other Eastern Bloc republics like Georgia.  I moved the target circle over a dot on a nondescript plot of land and found myself listening to Radio Chanson, in the city of Ufa, Russia (the capital of the Republic of Bashkortostan.)  Chanson is a relayed Russian music network but there were obviously local spots as well.  I got into the folksy tunes and found myself (for fun) touring the city streets virtually using Google Maps Street View.  There's something sobering about pretending to be 'dropped' into a foreign place and taking on the mindset that you are really stuck there and having to explore the neighborhood to survive.

       I found myself looking up Ufa on Wikipedia and then watching a series of YouTube Vlogs entitled "Real Russia" by a young fellow with a thick accent named Sergey Baklykov.  He speaks in English and he actually [used to live] in Ufa where he showed you around explaining cultural fixtures and the price of grocery items.  Not just a green dot on a map or some spot on the radio dial, Ufa is a living metropolis with a million-plus people.  It's been so easy, recently, to color an entire society with the tinge of politics, [to lump in the politer side of any society with that of it's government's more evident faults,] but these are real people too!  With radio, the attractive unfamiliar becomes the comfortable familiar - radio is really a tool, (or a bridge) to reach out to distant peoples, places and cultures - a world really without borders.  We "Hams" already know this, don't we?

       Internet "killed the radio star"... The lines of what "real" radio is have been blurring for over two decades.  Radio [and even consumable audio media] is not what it used to be, especially on the world bands.  There are less stations of Meaningful and insightful content and many countries cannot rightly justify the capital expenditure required to erect and maintain a million-watt shortwave transmission site, not to mention the studios and contributing news agencies.  It makes more fiscal sense to switch over to the now-preferred and superior-audio-quality format of what the vast majority of listeners are actually using [and have been for a while,] in particular, smartphones and satellite radio.

       As so with our local US FM stations, commercialism and capitalism pays the bills [to fill the bellys] and foreign stations now play mostly music with less English-targeted programming, news and propaganda.  Maybe that's a good thing.  Propaganda is harder to propagate against the tide of social media, [unless it employs it.]  Take it or leave it, the HF broadcast bands are becoming a ghost town for world interest and Internet music-focused streaming is here to stay.  But the Internet is still not ‘wireless’ you say.  Believe it or not,  shortwave facilities have been relaying content to remote transmitter sites via landlines since World War II.  Your cellphone is wireless, so what’s the definition?  [If you've looked up at the night sky just after dusk recently, you may have noticed a stream of gimmering Elon Musk test satellites which promise, after the launch of thousands of more, high speed Internet to the poorer and mores remote masses of the entire world... except Communist China.]

       Well, what about Amateur Radio?  If you search online you'll find a few SDR (Software-Defined Radio) Amateur Radio websites.  Hams around the world have installed special receivers that allow multiple users to use their rigs as if they were there.  Users can set many of the same reception parameters and filters just like on a real rig.  Is it fair or ethical, as far as the hobby is concerned?  This is up for debate, like spotter nets and faux online CW QSO platforms, but Hams, by nature(and FCC mandate,) are ones for expanding their own technical universe.  I'm not worried myself because it's also in our own best interest to preserve the old technological foundations of our hobby.  World Radio is a "gateway drug" which might, if you're lucky, get your kids hooked... on Amateur Radio!  The demise of shortwave radio has been greatly exaggerated and the same is definitely true for Amateur Radio.

       It was my late grandmother who let me borrow her shortwave receiver after I posed an interest in it and it was my younger brother who helped launched my career in searching the great radio unknown.  It's safe to say these days, that handing a world band receiver to a child is not the best way to induce the spark of Amateur Radio intrigue.  The technological bar has been set higher with  smartphones and "unlimited data plans" tucked away in every child's pocket.  To that effect; I recently got three of my kids into using the Radio Garden site and app with one of my daughters declaring that "Tallahassee radio stations really suck!" [Some three years later as of the original writing, she has performed in a handful of local 'alternative' rock bands. ...Interesting.]  Hmmm, that same sentiment, for those who know me got me to where I am in Amateur Radio today.  Just maybe...

Now go out and see what's ready to pick in your garden!

Updated 07/10/20

(c)2020 Copyright - Michael A. Maynard, a.k.a. K4ICY