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Antenna Wire Stranded
The Wonderful World Of Shortwave Radio
Welcome to the wonderful world of shortwave listening (SWL). Test your aural comprehension of foreign languages; listen in on news from abroad, or on varied opinions and interests of ordinary people around the world; test your political IQ by evaluating your country through an outsider's eyes then cast a more discriminating eye on domestic and geopolitical situations: it's always interesting to hear the news reports about your country from foreign professionals abroad. Listen in on historical and cultural events as they occur in distant places, 24 hours a day without leaving the comfort of your bedside, in English and indigenous languages too.
There is nothing expensive about shortwave radios. In autumn of 2009, I bought a Coby paperback-novel-sized AM/FM/ SW radio for only $16; several years ago in the heart of downtown, I was buying them at $8 and $10. And there are always the elegant and immortal Grundig world band radios, available in so many styles, sizes, functions, and price ranges, some costing not much more than $16. Grundig makes the best ones; they are the choice for travel, office or living room. Coby products give a surprisingly fine performance at extremely low prices; I prefer to carry a miniature Coby AM/FM in my briefcase when I'm on the go and under pressure. I don't mind damaging or losing one since they cost so little to replace.
Listen to direct broadcasts from Cuba, Germany, Canada, Japan, Spain. Hear a German orchestra in Vienna play Mozart or Beethoven- live!
There is much excitement in scanning the airwaves to catch the diversity of ideas, subjects and interests presented in broadcasts. When reception is good even the least expensive model can bring in broadcasts of weak signals from the remotest places in the world (this pursuit as a pastime is called "DXing"). Shortwave listeners can also receive 2-way communications between amateur radio operators in both oral and Morse code forms.
Reception is technically best at night, when the thought of broadcast waves travelling through night skies over mountain and sea adds an element of drama to SWL and the comfort of radio community. In SWL at night, I love that mysterious hollow echo-like quality of broadcasts. It's as though they are coming through a tunnel. Perhaps this effect comes about because in their long and rugged journey through by no means empty space, wave packets that were transmitted in phase arrive at your receiver slightly out of phase, which means that you hear one sound coming from two different locations at once, hence the echo effect.
Radio Shack or any good electronics store will sell you a shortwave radio antenna. It's a six to ten foot long few strands of copper wire covered in plastic, wound on a small flat spool. Hang the spool near or in your window, attach the free end of the wire to your radio's telescopic antenna, and tune in to a broadcast. For only a few dollars the SWR antenna optimizes reception; without it reception is weaker, even at night. The difference it makes is amazing. You can make your own simple "wire antenna" with a scrap wire from discarded headphones: just hang one end of a long strand of wire on a tack over your window, and expose about one inch of the copper strands at the other end. Wrap these around the tip of your radio's telescopic antenna. Sometimes I wrap a few thick rubber bands around my portable radios to help insulate them against shock or breakage if they should fall.
Listen to the effects on reception of the ionosphere, the vast layer of earth's atmosphere that reaches from about 50 km (30 miles) from earth's surface to about 500-800 km (400-600 miles) depending on the amount of daylight. It's on the nearby sub-layers that shortwave propagation depends.
Ponder the fact that radio waves are a form of electromagnetic radiation like light, and therefore travel at three hundred million meters per second (186,000 miles per second). Sound waves travel at different speeds through different materials: air, water, wood, steel. The denser the material, the faster they move through it. But a radio wave is not a sound wave.
Create an oversimplified but very useful image by picturing short waves as sinusoidal (S-shaped) waves of energy undulating through space and ranging from about 10 meters in length (10 yards or 30 feet) to about 100 meters (100 yards or 300 feet). That's rather long, actually, but to be useful to radio, transmitted waves must have a comparatively high energy meaning a high frequency, energy and wavelength being inversely proportionate to each other. Communication waves of very low frequencies like what are used for maritime or navigational purposes, are astonishingly long, in the range of 1000 m (1 km or three-fifths of a mile) to 10,000 meters (10 km or about 5 miles).
I really hope you enjoy this essay, reader, and the calming, reasonable pastime of shortwave listening. That would encourage me to compose a future one on the topic of shortwave radio, for instance: the physical characteristics of radio waves (their length and energy or frequency); the simple architecture of the atmosphere, how it propagates SWR waves, and the two problems it presents to SWL (fading and interference); the uses of shortwave radio (military communications, 2-way communications by voice or by Morse code as a hobby and for use in emergencies, clandestine broadcasting, etc.); what radio waves are (they include visible light, TV and microwaves too) and why we use that part of the electromagnetic spectrum. These are the five or so basic subjects related to shortwave radio.
It's a very simple study, really, a repetition of a few facts over and over again. DXing.com (http://www.dxing.com) is an established and regularly updated website by Mr. H. Helms that includes everything and more about SWL. So don't go out and spend a lot of money on books. Use your local library, or type "shortwave listening" into your search engine to find something that suits you.
About the Author