WORLDWIDE DX CLUB Weekly Top News 475 for July 25, 2000, compiled by Wolfgang Büschel, has been posted.

Posted 18:58 UTC

Motorola Sues To Stop Sale Of Radio Software On EBay: "Motorola said Monday it has filed lawsuits in several states to stop the sale of its radio service software on the online auction website eBay. The software is a computer program used with IBM-compatible computers to program Motorola's two-way radios. Motorola licenses the software to its partners and customers on a restricted basis." (Reuters, via TechWeb)

Posted 18:45 UTC

WORLDWIDE DX CLUB Weekly Top News 474 for July 18, 2000, compiled by Wolfgang Büschel, has been posted.

Posted 13:21 UTC

Birds of a feather (The Economist): "Cluster II's virtual satellite consists of a quartet known as Salsa, Samba, Tango and Rumba. These craft will study the interaction between the solar wind (the breeze of electrically charged particles emitted by the sun) and the earth's magnetic field. Instruments on board each of its satellites will measure the magnetic field, electrical current and number of charged particles within the tetrahedron. Such detailed, small-scale measurements of a three-dimensional region of space would be impossible without satellites flying in formation."

Posted 13:19 UTC

Peel unplugged (The Guardian): "Peel pours a glass of red wine and tells an anecdote about some terrible cheapskate Radio 1 football competition during which he was trapped in a Gothenberg hotel with a flatulent prizewinner with whom he had to share a room, and a gang of English hooligans who ate all the goldfish from the tank in the breakfast lounge." (Thanks Daniel Say for posting this link to the swprograms mailing list.)

Posted 22:47 UTC

Okay, everybody, sing along!:

The sun is a mass of incandescent gas
A gigantic nuclear furnace
Where hydrogen is built into helium
At a temperature of millions of degrees

Posted 15:12 UTC

Hang on! Looks like the roller coaster's headed back up:

IPS Space Services: "HF COMMS FADEOUTS EXPECTED DURING DAYLIGHT HOURS FROM 20-23 JULY 00. IF COMMS DIFFICULTIES EXPERIENCED TRY A HIGHER FREQUENCY BAND"

Posted 15:11 UTC

Media Network has posted Tom Sundstrom's review of the new Grundig Satellit 800 Millenium. Rather than post an excerpt to give you the flavor and maybe spoil the surprise, I'll just let you read the whole review yourself.

Posted 02:40 UTC

Mark Connelly has no trouble hearing stuff on medium wave in the middle of summer at the height of solar maximum that the rest of us would have trouble hearing in the dead of winter at solar minimum. (See his Summer 2000 Road Trip report for proof....)

Posted 12:59 UTC

Clandestine Radio Watch 49 has been posted. It covers a lot of stuff, but particularly notable is the information about Ethiopian and Eritrean clandestines.

Posted 12:51 UTC

Geomagnetic storm dies down, few reports of damage (CNN/Reuters): "NOAA said on its Web site that the storm, which hit at 10:40 a.m. and was the largest solar radiation storm since October 1989, was classified as severe-to-extreme with potential effects on radio, communications, power systems and aviation."

Posted 20:29 UTC

Radio turns out to be toy for affluent: "Although some of Freeplay's radios still go to the developing world - aid agencies distributed 40,000 radios in Kosovo last year and 7,000 in Mozambique this year after floods devastated South Africa's impoverished neighbor - 90 percent of the sales are in industrialized countries, most of that in the United States." (Thanks Dan Ferguson on IRC channel #swl.)

Posted 03:06 UTC

WORLDWIDE DX CLUB Weekly Top News 473 for July 12, 2000, compiled by Wolfgang Büschel, has been posted.

Posted 02:25 UTC

Universal Radio says that production units of the new Ten-Tec RX-340 super-receiver started shipping this month, so if you're the kind of person for whom too much radio is just enough, you may want to head down to your local radio emporium and pick one up.

Posted 02:21 UTC

Can Digital Kill the Radio Star?: "Sirius and competitor XM Satellite Radio believe that, like cable TV, customers will pay for niche channels that match their interests and include little or no advertising. 'Traditional radio isn't doing the job in servicing customers,' said William Kidd, satellite analyst at investment firm C.E. Unterberg, Towbin."

Posted 02:49 UTC

That Wacky Trevor Okay, this isn't shortwave, but it is what Trevor Baylis, inventor of the fabled wind-up radio, is up to lately: "Baylis is wearing a pair of experimental boots with soles made from a piezoelectric material, which generates high voltages of electricity when compressed. A companion, John Grantham, an engineer with Texon International, is wearing boots with a tiny dynamo built into the heel. Depending on the outcome of the desert trials, Baylis plans to commercialize one or both technologies. Baylis has co-launched a startup, the Electric Shoe Company, to bring power-generating footwear to market, possibly within a year."

Posted 02:41 UTC

The homepage of Clandestine Radio Watch has been updated. CRW issue 048 covers clandestine activities in the 2nd half of June, and there's a special edition with all the news about the Radio VoP for Zimbabwe in CRW 048e, rounded up from a number of sources to provide as full a picture as possible.

Posted 02:34 UTC

Samoan Radio Journey (Southern Pacific DX Resource): "We turned a corner on the Cross Island Road, and there sat a stumpy little radio tower, almost hidden in the misty rain. High in the hills behind Apia, the Afiamalu Pass is the location used by 2AP for many years. As Alan Roycroft, even today still remembered in Samoa as the founder of radio in the islands, once said 'the engineers were fed with kava before deciding to put the transmitter at Afiamalu.' No longer used, the mast looms lonely, surrounded by sodden fields of high grass and tropical ferns and approached along a muddy track."

Posted 00:42 UTC

Radio Casts a Wider Net. Sunday's Bergen Record (Bergen County, New Jersey) had an article about how the net is turning local stations into international broadcasters: "A bright blue bolt of lightning shot out of the dark sky and struck the tower of Digital 102.7 WJSE, killing the small Atlantic City station's signal. Thinking their broadcast had been signed off for the day, the station's staff began to leave. Then it hit them: There were potentially thousands of people worldwide tuning in over the Internet and listening to dead air. The disc jockey jumped back on the mike. 'Hey, Australia, we're doing this for you!'"

Posted 04:45 UTC

Our Pal John Figliozzi, author of the Worldwide Shortwave Listening Guide and of the database behind the WWW Shortwave Listening Guide, was interviewed on this week's edition of Radio Australia's program Feedback. If you hurry, you might still be able to listen to it on demand (streaming or by ftp) from the WRN server (at least until about 0830 UTC today). The program starts about 32 minutes into the file, and most of the program is devoted to the book and John. (Thanks to posts by Larry Nebron and Glenn Hauser to the swprograms mailing list for alerting me to this.)

Posted 02:23 UTC

Sprechen Sie Deutsch? Martin Schoech points out that the Kurzwellenring Süd has posted the July edition of its online newsletter, NTT Aktuell. It's all in German, but even if you don't speak the language you should be able to parse out some useful information.

(Thanks, Martin, for all the links today. I guess I don't have to do any work until tomorrow, hi.)

Posted 15:38 UTC

WORLDWIDE DX CLUB Weekly Top News 472 for July 6, 2000, compiled by Wolfgang Büschel, has been posted. (Thanks again, Martin!) Also, it appears that I missed Top News 471 for July 1, 2000. I guess not everyone subscribes to the idea that things slow down in summer. :-)

Posted 15:30 UTC

Speaking of Martin Schoech, his QSL Information Page has been updated, and you can download the information from the pages so you can use it without being connected (something that's particularly important outside of the US, where net and phone access tends to be charged by the minute, rather than at a flat rate as is the case here). The downloadable information reflects all changes made to the pages as of July 8th, so they're up-to-date. (Thanks again, Martin!)

Posted 15:26 UTC

Juichi Yamada has been busy lately, producing two issues of Jembatan DX, the Japanese newsletter covering Indonesian DX. Number 97 was issued on June 25 and has a listing of addresses for RRI stations. Number 98 is short but sweet, mostly just loggings, and was issed on July 2. (Thanks Martin Schoech for pointing these out.)

Posted 15:21 UTC

USA Today Random numbers on shortwave add up to one thing: Spies!: "Decades after the Cuban missile crisis sent a generation of schoolchildren scurrying to 'duck and cover' beneath their desks, strange apparitions of that era linger on. Long into the night, these phantoms babble incessantly over shortwave (also known as world band) radios, emitting strange sounds and rattling off what seem like random numbers."

Posted 02:40 UTC

9525 kHz is much better for Fritz here in eastern North America now that it's after 0000 UTC.

Posted 01:12 UTC

Just a quick reminder that Fritz Love Radio, the voice of this weekend's Love Parade celebration in Berlin, is on shortwave this weekend only. They've got a page listing the frequencies they're broadcasting on. I'm hearing them right now on 9405, but there's a lot of ute QRM. Then again, maybe that's just part of the techno music. :-)

Posted 01:05 UTC

Joe Buch tells the swprograms mailing list that the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation's program As It Happens will have a segment in Friday's program devoted to the resurgence of hate radio in central Africa, this time in Congo.

Posted 04:03 UTC

NASWA member Walt Fair has joined the NASWeb team by writing and hosting a database of loggings from our print bulletin, the NASWA Journal. Thanks, Walt! Hopefully the page is reasonably self-explanatory, but I'll explain it anyway. The Country field is for NASWA radio countries, so some stations may not show up where you expect them. For example, Papua New Guinea is broken up into a number of radio countries, so searching for Papua New Guinea comes up with some of the loggings, but others may appear under New Britain, New Ireland, or simply Papua. The "Choose band" pop-up menu populates the frequency fields for users with Javascript-capable browsers; alternately, you can enter a frequency range yourself.

Thanks also, of course, to our hard-working log column editors, Sheryl Paszkiewicz and Wallace Treibel, and to all the members who submit the logs that appear in the database.

Posted 02:43 UTC

Media Network: "The media scene in Jordan is about to undergo a fundamental change. After decades of strict government control, King Abdullah II is taking steps to open up the media. In the first project announced under the new directive, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) plans to help set up the first independent community radio station in the Kingdom."

Posted 22:01 UTC

Media Network has started up a weblog (of sorts) of their own.

Posted 21:56 UTC

The Guardian: "The BBC [is] transferring its content on to the internet, building its brand online and gaining great respect around the world; 40% of BBC Online's traffic comes from overseas." But not everyone is happy about that....

Posted 21:33 UTC

Ed Mayberry has posted the July edition of his International Listener webzine. News this month includes a summary of the fuss over the Darwin transmitter site in Australia, the VOA's Angola office under attack, the transformation of Sheldon Harvey's Radio H.F. business from a storefront to a mail-order and Internet operation, and the proverbial Much More.

Posted 02:49 UTC