I agree...but I think the operators today are doing it just for their egos...and the fact that today they can get away with their hosts saying whatever they want without any repercussions one way or the other! Plus make whatever money they can off of the snake oil, or survival kits or whatever it is they might be selling.
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BBC preparing to close 198 kHz longwave
- Thread starter Mediafrog+
- Start date
And the anticipated cost to replace aging transmission equipment. No need to spend a million pounds if few listen.
The only place where SW would've really worked domestically is alaska.. IF the FCC had allowed domestic SW.
Had someone set up a station in the 40s or 50s, wuith a transmitter site in SE alaska they couldve covered the whole state.
Debunking the rumor that submarines monitor BBC's longwave signal, and if it goes dead, they'll assume Britain has been nuked and launch a retaliatory strike:
Submarines use much lower frequencies in the VLF range, that is, between 15 and 30 kHz. We’re talking wavelengths of 10,000 to 20,000 meters here. Fascinating to listen to this range, as it is sort of a reminder of the beginnings of radio. Slow speed, narrow shift radioteletype is common, and Morse Code works as well.
Some submarine systems have gone down to the ELF range below 100 Hz (not a typo.). That would be a wavelength greater than 3,000,000 meters.
And just like SW everywhere else, there would have been no listeners starting in the 80's.
youd be surprise.d. i genuinely think based upon my 5 years in Alaska and my understanding of media consumption up here and technology limitations, that had alaska started a sw station in the 40s and 50s and kept entertainment value, it wouldve lasted into the early 90s, due to the expense of getting satellite tv started, no real internet in the bush until the 2000s and bad phone service
And who would fund such an expensive system of transmission in Alaska? High-power SW requires expensive, power-hungry transmission systems. Someone has to pay for that, and I can't imagine there would be enough advertisers, or population with SW receivers to justify the cost and maintenance.
You could've probably covered most of Alaska with 10kw.
I dont have those answers, im just saying it couldve possibly be done and worked if the right pieces came together way back when
You'd be surprised. In spite of all the salt water, permafrost, and ice the ground conductivity is crap. Mostly because the ground is made of glacial till. Some 50kW AM stations back in the day required 50kW, because the ground wave was poor.
Not sure if they have shut it down yet but CBU 690 (AKA "CBC British Columbia") in Vancouver, covered just about all of BC at night with a shortwave simulcast in the 49 m band (6 MHz) with I think only about 500 Watts. Although very weak, I could hear it here in SoCal most late evenings. Based on some pix I saw, the xmitter was essentially in a broom closet with a 6 meter beam on a short tower on the CBC Radio studio bldg. It looked like a decent Ham rig!
Wouldn't the signal have had a significant skip zone within Alaska no matter where you put it?
Depending on where you put it and what frequencies you used, possibly.
But what good does that do a station, when you're trying to reach listeners within your designated coverage area?
I was responding to the idea of a 50kw station in SE Alaska covering the whole state. That's not what shortwave does if the transmitter is located in that state, or anywhere close to it.
Juineau in SE alaska is 600 miles from me, 1000 miles or more from the aluetians and 1500 from Barrow.. so i think itd be technically possible
Not if you used Tropical / Regional band SW. Where I lived, the heritage local newspaper a 3 kw SW station on 4923 kHz in Quito and it covered essentially all the country 24/7.
Ecuador has about half the land area of Alaska, so I suspect that 5 kw to 10 kw around 4.8 to 5.0 MHz would cover most of it well.
Forgot about the tropical bands. Would the FCC license a station in Alaska to transmit on those bands, and if so, wouldn't it need to be targeting the tropics, necessitating a huge null to the north, northeast and northwest from that southeastern location?
That would have been CKZU on 6160 kHz with 500 watts. I could hear it in Houston during the wee hours of the morning.
CKZU left the air in 2016 when it’s early-80s vintage Elcom-Bauer transmitter died and the CBC decided not to replace it.
2017 posting about CKZU: Lonely little shortwave station in Canada closed
On the other side of Canada, 300 watt CKZN in St. John’s, Newfoundland closed in 2018. It also operated on 6160.