What Happened to Shortwave? Nobody Could Count the Listeners

Shortwave brought the world to American kitchen tables from the night the BBC Empire Service went on the air from Daventry in 1932 to the peak in 1989. Radio Shack put the Realistic DX-160 in its 1975 catalog at $159.95. You ran a wire out the window, crept along the bandspread through the whistles, and waited for dark. Radio Netherlands aimed two 300,000-watt Philips transmitters on Bonaire at the Americas. The interval signal told you where you were: a folk song on the celesta from Holland, Waltzing Matilda from Australia. You mailed a reception report, and weeks later a verification card came back with a foreign stamp. Governments paid for every one of those signals, and when the Soviet Union dissolved in 1991 the reason to pay went with it, years before the internet mattered. Nobody could count the listeners, so nobody could defend them. The BBC switched off shortwave to North America on July 1, 2001. By 2024, one European country was left. 73. #hamradio #shortwave #swl #vintageradio #electronicshistory #coldwar