Geoffrey S. Mendelson wrote:

There are no receivable time standard stations.

That I always found annoying... There's no radio station for those
inexpensive auto-set radio receiver clocks to use either. You can set
a clock against the hourly Kol Israel time pips. Hopefully other
countries have at least one radio station with accurate time pips on
the hour.


higher parts of those bands come in loud (meter pining) and clear.

On the other hand, the steel reinforced concrete and stone facade
doesn't exactly help portable radios with internal antennas. Getting
some sort of antenna outside makes even more of a difference than in
the US type housing construction. Probably due to the "centrally
located between 3 continents" issue, I found quite a bit of adjacent
channel interference for stations I wanted to listen to, last time I
listened there a few years ago.

VOA comes in loud and clear. I used to think their party line was "America
is perfect, everyone else is not", then I started to watch Fox News. :-)

During the Gulf War, one of the VOA frequencies had Radio Bagdad in
Hebrew, instead of the VOA! I gathered that it wasn't the VOA which
was doing that! I walked into the VOA office and had an interesting
conversation and "tour" (it's a tiny place) with Charlie Weiss (the
correspondant at that point). Back in 90-91 they still had loud
teletypes in the VOA office. The teletypes have been replaced by PCs a
while back now.


It seems like no one regulates AM and FM broadcasts, you you get stations
all over the dial, sometimes fighting for the same channel. We do get
BBC on 629 and 1323 am, but I get a better signal on shortwave.

.... and the VOA on MW for a couple of hours in the wee hours of the
morning...
VOA MW English was cut back for Arabic.