The AM Forum

The BBC is operating, in English

15.735 Mc.    1600-1800 GMT and
5.875 Mc.     2200- 0000 GMT

The above info hasnt been confirmed by me, so, FWIW.

klc

  I have found them on quite a few places at various times since the Ukraine Invasion.

6125
7285
11810
15735
17640
17830

I have yet to hear them on 5875
I can receive 198Khz here if I can null out the NDB beacon from North Carolina.
I wonder when the other Cold War broadcasters will restart up again.


Steve

It could well be a while until the shortwave broadcasters get back up and running.  Many have dismantled stations.  About 15 years ago I was involved in replacing all the HF curtains at the BBC Middle Eastern Relay Site on Cyprus.  I think we had 28 curtains facing all around the compass., fed by a dozen transmitters through a big switch matrix.   It was my job to tune the curtains to be better than 1.35 SWR across the full design octave, and this had to be done with high power network analyzers as other arrays were active on site at all times.  I've been back to Cyprus on other business since then and the site is totally dismantled, flat.   Other sites of other broadcasters have been allowed to languish.
On a happier note, I'm soon to travel to the Pacific and tune up a big curtain for the VOA.  I realize that it's "old school", but short wave gets through even when the government objects. 
73 de Norm W1ITT

Hopefully governments around the world realize during this BS that shortwave IS valuable and gets the message through.

Also, the jamming stations are mostly gone as well.  Although those won't be hard to bring back.

BBC is beaming directly to Ukraine atm using one of their stations.  And WRMI has brought back a feed of Radio Ukraine for a time, since the invasion.

Fuck Puton.

--Shane
WP2ASS / ex KD6VXI

I suspect that the Beeb is using their station at Wooferton in England to broadcast to Ukraine.  It would be a nice easy hop.
Regarding jammers:  A couple decades ago I was traveling over Romania doing upgrades on their network of medium wave AM broadcast stations.  They got new solid state transmitters that were rather stuffy about antenna impedance compared to the old Commie rigs that would load into anything.  I had to retune a base network from about 75 ohms down to 50 ohms, non reactive.  After twiddling I realized that I needed about 18 microhenries of series inductance on the input side.  I asked the fellows on site what there might be to scrounge.  They took me to a back room where sat an old transmitter.  We found a nice rotary inductor of sufficient size to cannibalize out of it, installed it in the antenna cabinet on ceramic spacers and everything tuned up swell.  I asked the guys what that transmitter was.  They told me that it was a frequency agile jammer to jam Radio Free Europe during the good old days.  Every city had one so that they were able to put out lots of microvolts over the population.
Heck, jamming is easy.  Just listen to some of our fellow hams on 40 meters.  But 500 kw and big curtains will burn through it much of the time.
73 de Norm  W1ITT

I wonder if SW listeners of past will know that some SW stations are back on the air?  Being back on the air is one thing, getting the listeners back or aware that SW stations are back on the air is another. 

Which stations?  I'd be interested in passing the info along to others.

You aware of any list showing which ones made a comeback?

--Shane
WP2ASS / ex KD6VXI

https://swling.com/blog/2022/03/ny-times-bbc-revives-shortwave-radio-dispatches-in-ukraine-and-draws-ire-of-russia/

Even though few of the general population has shortwave capable radios....  There is a large amount of people who will remember shortwave as well as current ham operators.

If the word gets to those few, it can and will be spread word of mouth.

Russia is currently blocking some of the western social media sites, western news organizations, etc.  They are relying on their own dns servers, etc.
Shortwave can be used to give the population other dns server addresses, etc.  Ways to bypass other methods of censorship as well (VPN, etc).

Russia has a very high tech capable government when it comes to the ability of controlling the internet. Having shortwave xmitter getting word of ways to the average person there on how to get around those players is huge.

Shortwave does still serve a purpose.  I just hope the western governments take this into account:  Since their current method is air superiority early then throwing a media capable airplane into foreign airspace until ground troops have taken over or installed ground based xmitter.

--Shane
WP2ASS / ex KD6VXI