Iridium Saved From Fiery End (Interactive Week) -- The prospect of Iridium's satellites burning up in the atmosphere produced about as much fanfare as the launch of the engineering feat two years ago. Industry insiders eagerly detailed how the extraordinarily expensive satellites would burst into flames and break apart before any pieces might fall to earth. It may be disappointing to some, then, that a consortium led by a former Pan American World Airways president will keep the constellation intact by scooping up the reported $6 billion Iridium project for comparatively spare change - a mere $25 million.

Posted 20:56 UTC

Anyone hearing the Voice of the People of Kurdistan on 6995 kHz around 0330 might hear a URL in their opening ID. The URL is kind of mangled, but is sufficiently close to the following: <http://www.aha.ru/~said/dang.htm>

Posted 12:56 UTC

WORLDWIDE DX CLUB Weekly Top News 494 for November 22, 2000, compiled by Wolfgang Büschel, has been posted.

Posted 12:26 UTC

Liz Cameron has put together an extensive explanation of the various languages you might hear on the radio from the perspective of a DXer. It's fascinating stuff. She's also got a neat article about Pidgin languages, such as Tok Pisin from Papua New Guinea or Haitian Creole. I occasionally hear Creole on a local station from New York, although Liz says it's tough to find on shortwave. About the only thing missing from these pages are a reference of what kind of announcements you might hear in the various languages (something that Richard E. Wood included in his 1969 classic book Shortwave Voices of the World).

Posted 03:55 UTC

The November edition of Sheldon Harvey's Radio HF Newsletter has been posted, filled with more than enough links to keep you busy until the next update of NASWebLog.

Posted 00:06 UTC

FCC Proposes Subletting Frequencies: "Looking for greater efficiency, federal regulators proposed rules Thursday that would allow companies to sublet frequencies licensed to them by the government. If approved, the effort to create a secondary market would mark a sea change in how the government manages commercial use of the airwaves."

Posted 20:55 UTC

Andy Sennitt: "WWDB was as much a part of Philadelphia life as pretzels and cheesesteak sandwiches. But I don't go to Philly much these days, so why get upset? I'll tell you. I think it symbolizes a worrying trend." [I just had to post this; I love Philly cheesesteaks....]

Posted 06:45 UTC

The Radio Netherlands Technical Schedule for B00 is fairly well-hidden (you have to know to go to the Media Network pages), which was a bit of an annoyance, since I wanted to find out how much longer they'll be QRMing Guinea on 7125 kHz. I have to say that much as I love Radio Netherlands, speech in Dutch does not add anything worth having to the wonderful music that Radio Guinea plays. If you live in Central or Southeastern Europe and you get the same effect, you might want to suggest to RNW that they find another home for their broadcast so I can listen to my music again. :-)

Posted 06:38 UTC

Radio Netherlands, Radio Boost to Economy: "There are 98 community radio stations now on air in South Africa, reaching an estimated 3.2 million people. They provide an important function, giving information to local communities and often remote settlements. The government wants to offer more licenses but many existing stations are finding it difficult to produce quality programmes with very limited budgets."

Posted 06:28 UTC

Looks like Dave Frantz has sold WGTG. Looking at their web site, the station's call letters will be changing to WWFV, and they're selling air time to all comers for $25/hour. They've registered two domains, wwfv.org and wwfv.net, but visiting them right now just brings up the generic Network Solutions "this domain is under construction" parked domain page. (Thanks Pete Costello for forwarding a post to rec.radio.shortwave that had the credit "rec.radio.shortwave via Mike Terry, BDXC-UK via DXLD".)

Posted 06:20 UTC

Issue 56 of Martin Schöch's Clandestine Radio Watch newsletter has been posted.

Posted 12:52 UTC