RadioBanter - Middle East SWL

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Hi

I was just wondering if there are any SWLs in the middle east?
What's it like to be a SWL there?

Happy New Year

Mike in the UK

Mike wrote:

Hi

I was just wondering if there are any SWLs in the middle east?
What's it like to be a SWL there?

Well, the food is different.

dxAce
Michigan
USA

Thanks Great Geoff

I have mailed you off list.

Mike.

"Geoffrey S. Mendelson" wrote in message
...

Mike wrote:

I was just wondering if there are any SWLs in the middle east?
What's it like to be a SWL there?

dxAce wrote:

Well, the food is different.

Is it? We have MacDonalds, Dominos, Pizza Hut here. We did have Dunkin'
Donuts
and Starbucks, but they went out of business. :-)

As for SWLing, it is very different. Here I am at the intersection of
eastern
and western Europe. Depending on many factors, sometimes I hear signals
from
the east, sometimes from the west, sometimes both.

There are lots of local stations but most are in Arabic which I don't
understand.

There are no receivable time standard stations. The 80 meter ham band
ends at 3850 and 40 meters at 7100, so the broadcast stations in the
higher parts of those bands come in loud (meter pining) and clear.

Since we are in relatively the same time zone e.g. GMT+2, the programs
make more sense. The evening news is in the evening, etc.

A few stations from the Orient, but I don't pay attention to them.

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. :-)

Nothing on LF, though about 8 or so years ago I was able to receive
something on 208 kHz. It was an Arabic broadcast and no, it was not an
image or intermod.

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.

FWIW, the numbers stations I hear are NOT groundwaves.

Geoff.
--
Geoffrey S. Mendelson, Jerusalem, Israel N3OWJ/4X1GM
IL Voice: (07)-7424-1667 IL Fax: 972-2-648-1443 U.S. Voice:
1-215-821-1838
The trouble with being a futurist is that when people get around to
believing
you, it's too late. We lost. Google 2,000,000:Hams 0.

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.

Yep, they are the new Radio Moscow!

wrote in message
oups.com...
I suspect you could listen to Radio China International while standing
on the surface of Mars. And you could choose from around 12 different
frequencies.

Steve