How bad does Radio Cairo sound?

[SomeRadioGuy]

They've been this way for at least a decade or two.. theyre even worse than Cuba or Iran on SW.

Take a listen to their Turkish language service on 9850khz from a Cairo transmitter site to the middle east at 1843UTC on April 8th in alaska:

Radio Cairo 9850khz turkish 1843UTC Fri Apr 8, 2023 1843UTC.mp3

drive.google.com

 

[Mediafrog+]

Radio Cairo has been a running joke in SWDX circles for decades. Horrible, unintelligible modulation as well as long periods of dead air or being off completely.

I’ve been listening to shortwave since the mid-1960s, and the last time I heard consistently good broadcast quality out of Radio Cairo was probably in the mid-1970s. It started deteriorating in the latter years of the Sadat regime and has been all downhill since then.

The station is a victim of the same ills that plague Radio Havana Cuba: incompetent engineering and indifferent management.

 

[CTListener]

Radio Cairo has been a running joke in SWDX circles for decades. Horrible, unintelligible modulation as well as long periods of dead air or being off completely.

I’ve been listening to shortwave since the mid-1960s, and the last time I heard consistently good broadcast quality out of Radio Cairo was probably in the mid-1970s. It started deteriorating in the latter years of the Sadat regime and has been all downhill since then.

The station is a victim of the same ills that plague Radio Havana Cuba: incompetent engineering and indifferent management.

I started in the shortwave hobby about the same time and can't recall R. Cairo ever sounding good. Its North American service was on 9475 and always sounded muddy and undermodulated.

 

[crainbebo]

Radio Damascus was horrible too. When they operated on 9330 or 12085 (? I think) it was usually a whining hum noise and some faint audio mixed in, in whatever language they had at that time. Their signals weren't very audible in the Pacific NW. Radio Cairo is very distorted and often breaks up. Your recording is better than some I've heard. It's still pretty audible. Even North Korea had/has better audio than Syria or Egypt.

 

[SomeRadioGuy]

Radio Damascus was horrible too. When they operated on 9330 or 12085 (? I think) it was usually a whining hum noise and some faint audio mixed in, in whatever language they had at that time. Their signals weren't very audible in the Pacific NW. Radio Cairo is very distorted and often breaks up. Your recording is better than some I've heard. It's still pretty audible. Even North Korea had/has better audio than Syria or Egypt.

ACtuallllly... NK is starting to slip... I've heard horribly overmodulated distorted audio from them quite a bit in the last few months and often times have heard very faint audio from another language service in the background of whatever language im currently tuned to form NK