Somewhat the same situation is going on now in photography, with the growing
popularity of digital. However, I think the same arguments against can be
made as with shortwave. If it's digital, it's somewhat exclusive to those
who can pay, and it requires a fairly steep investment in equipment that is
rapidly superceded. It might be better in performance, but to keep up with
it, the user pretty much becomes a slave to the technology. Shortwave, on
the other hand, just needs a cheap receiver, and it's free for the taking.
Just like an expensive digital camera gives you the picture but takes all
the fun out of actually taking it, satellite radio is good, and just a
button press away, but is there any fun in it? Where's the fun in listening
to "radio" on the internet?

Hopefully, radio will not become like TV, where the good programming is only
available to those who can and are willing to pay for satellite or digital
cable services.

Personally, I find this trend profoundly disturbing... entertainment for the
affluent.

By the way, as has already happened twice to me in the five years, when the
power goes out, so does all that digital junk. But radio still works as long
as you have batteries on hand. Broadcast radio got me through 7 days of no
electricity. There was no TV, no cells phones, no internet. It seems to me
that if shortwave and ordinary broadcast radio did not exist at this time,
we would have to invent it, because you can't rely on anything digital being
there when you need it. During the power failure in the east last summer, I
was on my way somewhere in the car. I couldn't make it because, with no
traffic lights, it was gridlock everywhere. Cellphones were out too. But AM
radio was on, and within less than half an hour, anyone with an AM radio
could know what was going on. Was it a big terrorist attack? No, just a
power failure. But I knew that because as I was sitting in the gridlock, the
radio in my car worked fine. I never thought about it much before the two
big power failures that affected me directly, but I like broadcast AM and
shortwave just as it is.

I want to wrap this up by saying that, in terms of things that you can
actually listen to, I find shortwave is better now than it has ever been. I
don't see a decline at all. If anything, it's the opposite.



"tommyknocker" wrote in message
...
I was just thinking about this today. Has anybody noticed that shortwave
radio has really declined over the past five years or so? We've lost BBC
and Deutsche Welle transmissions to North America, we've lost several
smaller European broadcasters entirely, other stations have drastically
cut back. Are transmitting facilities really going on the blink so soon
after the end of the cold war? Or has everybody jumped on the BBC's
bandwagon and concluded that satellite and internet broadcasting has
replaced shortwave? Any thoughts?