For your listening pleasure: over three hours of mostly music and commentary from the Voice of Greece. Recorded Sunday, June 23, 2013 on 9.42 MHz starting around 23:00 UTC.
Click here to download the full recording, or simply listen via the embedded player below:
Halley VI: The British Antarctic Survey's new base (Source: BBC)
Every year, the BBC broadcasts a special program to the forty one scientists and support staff in the British Antarctic Survey Team; the show containsmusic requests and, most notably, personal messages from back home to the team of forty one.
The British Antarctic Survey celebrates today (their longest, darkest winter day) with the same enthusiasm as Christmas. The BBC noted:
The base commanders rise early to cook breakfast for their staff, presents are exchanged, there are sports and even, weather permitting, a mad streak in the snow! Feasting continues before they gather round a shortwave set to listen to the traditional broadcast packed with greetings from their family and friends back home together with music requests and messages from the British Antarctic Survey and a few celebrities. Finally the Antarctic horror movie The Thing is screened. For those who know the plot, perhaps it is just as well there are no longer sledge dogs in Antarctica...
Here is the recording of the BBC World Service's thirty minute broadcast to the British Antarctic Survey. I was able to receive a relatively strong signal at 21:30 UTC on 9,890 kHz from the World Service's Wooferton transmission site.
Click here to download the full recording as an MP3, or simply listen via the embedded player below:
On Tuesday, June 11, 2013, Greek Prime Minister Antonis Samaras called for the complete closure of the Greek National TV and Radio broadcaster, ERT.
The Voice of Greece went off the air, just like its national radio and TV counterparts, well before the announced midnight deadline. But around 22:44 UTC, the VoG came back on the air–at first with a few audio/technical glitches–and broadcast ERT protest coverage throughout the night.
The following recording was made on June 11, 2013 on 9.42 MHz, around 22:44 UTC, the moment when the Voice of Greece began transmitting audio again. Here’s a four hour recording beginning only a few seconds beforehand:A few days ago, I posted a recording of the Voice of Turkey that noticeably lacked coverage of the Gezi Park protests.
Friday, I recorded VOT’s English language broadcast and was surprised to find that they actually mentioned the protests (admittedly, without it’s due weight) in several news items. I’m very curious how future VOT broadcasts will cover news of yesterday’s riots in Istanbul as police cleared crowds of protesters with water cannons and tear gas.
Click here to download the full recording, or simply listen via the embedded player below:
Jan Oosterveen submits this recording and writes:
The following is a recording of PCJ International's first shortwave transmission for Europe on 5.955 kHz.
This recording was made in the Netherlands. I used a Software designed radio located at Technical University Twente in the eastern part of the country. Also the antenna is loacated in Enschede at TU Twente.
To access this SDR use this link http://websdr.ewi.utwente.nl:8901/
The antenna is a very small active one. You'll also find a description of the antenna there.
The following recording was made on 5,955 kHz at 13:00UTC on June 09, 2013:
This two hour fifty three minute recording of Radio Australia contains: the ending of an AFL game between North Melborne and the Gold Coast, the news headlines, two full hours of Saturday Night Country and (a bit for the history books) Radio Australia's first Radiogram at 25:00 in the recording (click here for more info).
This recording was made on June 8, 2013 starting around 12:00 UTC on 9.58 MHz:
Gezi protest in Kızılay Square, Ankara (Source: Wikimedia Commons)
Turkey has been in the world headlines now for well over a week. In case you're not up-to-date, here's a summary of what has happened:
On May 28, 2013, about fifty environmentalists led a small protest in Istanbul to oppose the replacement of Taksim Gezi Park with a reconstruction of the Taksim Military Barracks. The protests escalated when the group occupying the park was attacked with water cannons and tear gas by the Turkish police. This event led to riots, which were soon widespread; the protests, meanwhile, broadened their scope into full-fledged anti-government demonstrations across the country and even into the Turkish diaspora across the globe.
Yesterday, I turned to the Voice of Turkey on shortwave radio to hear about the active protests currently ongoing throughout the country...
But what did I hear? The only mention I heard of the Gezi Park protests in the Voice of Turkey's English language service were in a passing Turkish press report on the reaction to the protests by the US Secretary of State, John Kerry. The item, moreover, was completely buried in their broadcast and certainly not something upon which they elaborated in the least (listen, beginning at 12:50 below).
I've always loved listening to the Voice of Turkey, but events like this remind me of the simple fact that many international broadcasters are still very much the mouthpieces of their governments.
Of course, Turkey certainly would not win an award for press freedom; not even close. Reporters Without Borders list Turkey as a country with a "Difficult Situation" with regards to press freedoms, ranking them 154th out of 179 countries in their 2013 Press Freedom Index. To put this in perspective, Finland and the Netherlands occupy the top two spots as models of press freedom, the USA is number 32, and North Korea and Eritrea occupy the bottom spots (numbers 178 and 179, respectively) obviously countries without press freedoms.
I'd like to think that the news readers at the Voice of Turkey would rather give this news the attention it deserves, or at least offer the Turkish government's perspective on the demonstrations. Instead, what we heard was...nothing. And we heard that loud and clear.
Indeed, the world is paying attention to the lack of news coming out of Turkey right now. Time Magazine posted this article article yesterday, which begins:
As epic clashes between anti-government protesters and riot police turned downtown Istanbul into a battle zone last weekend, the country’s two main news channels had, well, not much to report. One ran a documentary on penguins. The other, a cooking show. To many Turks, their silence was symptomatic of the self-censorship Turkey’s media have practiced under Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s tightfisted 10-year rule. Penguin T-shirts, penguin jokes and penguin costumes now abound — the bird has become a symbol of protesters’ frustration with the mainstream media.
One of the most amazing things about shortwave radio is that by really listening, you can hear the unfiltered voices of regional broadcasters, the clandestine organizations, and the media representatives of their respective countries.
If this story had broken twenty years ago, moreover, I would have heard it as a headline from every respected international broadcaster. Then, upon turning to the in-country "news source," as I attempted to do yesterday when I tuned in the Voice of Turkey and was subjected to a total lack of news, I would therefore be instantly made aware of what the Turkish government didn't want me to hear.
Unfortunately I feel we've lost a bit of this comparative news consumption, not just because of the exodus of many trusted radio broadcasters from the field, but because we've been trained to consume news in (palatable) bites. Our attention spans and interest seem to have diminished to the point that we now often rely on our news sources to interpret for us. A sad fact...especially considering politically-evolving countries like Turkey still need our attention, interest, and thoughtful support.
Listen to the same Voice of Turkey broadcast I heard yesterday, by downloading the off-air recording or by listening via the embedded player below:
Jan Oosterveen submits this recording and writes:
"In the 1980's I often drove from home to the Radio Netherlands Flevo Transmittersite to make a clean recording of Happy Station."
"Also on October 4 1987 I was there. After the recording, the tape kept running also on the radio I was tunig around until at 21:28 I heard a very strong carrier coming from the transmitter building on a frequency not used that time: 9.850 kHz."
"I kept listening and there was an announcement of a Dutch transmission with frequency announcements in Dutch not mentioning 9.850 kHz."
"After the time signal suddenly a program for Indonesia started. How strange. The day after i called Continuity at RNW and I was told that I had picked up a non published frequency they used at that time to feed the transmitter in Madagascar because there was an outage on the satelite feed. But the engineer had made a mistake by sending out the wrong statiion-id. So it turned out i had a very unique recording. You must be aware that in this period no one actually used the internet for feeding a relay station."
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