The AM Forum

Radio Station HCJB, "the Voice of the Andes," said it will air its final English-language broadcasts on international shortwave radio from Ecuador on Saturday.

I suppose you could partly blame satellite radio and streaming audio via the internet.

I used to listen to Radio Canada, BBC, Radio France International and other foreign broadcast stations over shortwave.  The domestic commercial stations were too boring to listen to for anything other than for local news.  In the 70's, with more programming available over NPR, I started listening less to SWBC and more to public radio on FM, but I would still occasionally tune my general coverage receiver from the ham bands and monitor a broadcast or two.

Then as countries round the world one by one began having financial crises, one of the first things to go was their government subsidised shortwave broadcasting service.  First, it was Radio Canada, then the BBC and Radio France International.  I rarely hear Radio Australia or Radio New Zealand any more, either.

With a high speed internet connection, I can get those same stations with much better fidelity (even at 20kb/sec) than I usually could over shortwave, with all the QRM and selective fading.

As went RCI, BBC, RFI, now goes HCJB.

But don't despair.  There are still plenty of Bible beaters on shortwave nowadays.  In fact, that's about all there is to listen to in English at times.

But none of the current crop of Bible beaters have the class that HCJB always displayed.

Hi Don:

Thanks for the posting.

In the last year, I have had a hard time finding stuff to listen to on the SWBC bands. I miss the old times when I used to hear many interesting shows. Wish I taped more.

Hopefully I'll be able to hear this broadcast later today or tonight.

Internet progress I guess!

73,
Dan
W1DAN

According to their schedule, they packed it in early this morning.

http://www.hcjb.org/docs/radio/HCJB_A06_Sched.pdf

It was one of the very first stations that many of us heard on shortwave.


Sam  /  KS2AM

The loop antenna was developed at HCJB wasn't it?  High altitude and high power led to the antennas invention.....

Yup. They were the first commercial to use an El-loopo because of severe corona problems.
Wasn't that Moore, W9???.

There's a similar issue here in Colorado with the use of 230KV cross-country transmission lines.
They've got huge corona problems, so they hold the voltage down to 115 KV where lines need to cross high mountain passes.