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This new site it taking off on the interwebs:
check it out, pretty interesting for those lamenting the loss of the DX era
There is also Global Tuners, which is made up of user-owned receivers. Most of these receivers can be controlled via the website, thus allowing site visitors to sample the radio dial in a given location. I recall trying out a tuner in eastern Canada and hearing no local AM stations there, just some skywave signals (such as WCBS 880 from New York) struggling to be heard above the interference.
Recently, I backpack around Scandinavia countries. The AM stations are completely useless I tried to DX AM stations at night around Oslo and I get nothing out of it. I received some AM stations at night in Copenhagen, but it sounded like Polish or some sort of Slavic language. As for FM stations in the Scandinavia, majority of them (outside of major cities) are run by public broadcasting. NRK for Norway, Sveirge Radio (SR) in Sweden, and Denmaske Radio (DR) in Denmark. Also, I brought a portable DAB radio from the UK for only £49 ($60 USD) It work great, but I have to hear a screeching noise when I lose the DAB signal.
Anybody else finding http://radio.garden/live/ somewhat buggy, crash prone?
Yesterday, I was up a bit too late listening to the Rovigo, Italy receiver. Local time in Rovigo was about 10 AM, so I was hearing groundwave signals. The Rovigo receiver seems to have a fairly effective antenna system for longwave and mediumwave.
On LW, I heard 252 kHz from Algeria with a program in French. Reception of this station was pretty good, but it was the only station that was intelligible. There was a weak station at 183 kHz from Germany, but it was barely above the noise floor. On the lower LW frequencies, I heard “carriers” that were more likely harmonics of switching power supplies.
On MW, I heard many more stations than I expected. Perhaps, this is due to Rovigo being near an international border; I heard some Italian stations and some foreign stations. There was a lot of activity at the lower end of the band, as well as at the middle of the band. There was a strong local station at 1368 kHz. However, save for the local station, the upper end of the band was dead.
I found that an even better receiver on Global Tuners for MW/LW is the Grenoble receiver. On this one, I can hear longwave stations on most dial positions. What is amazing is that some of the longwave stations that sound like locals are about 100 miles from this location. Some of the other groundwave signals are up to 600 miles distant!
We can start a new thread if anyone feels it is needed. I’ll put this article here for now.
“Norway is killing FM radio and folks aren’t happy”
I tried out DAB radio, and I hated it. When I move inside the building the signal immediately gets cut off and it’s like DTV, either you get it or you don’t. When you loose the signal, you’ll hear a high pitch squeaking noise. I wish Europe would use IBOC instead of DAB.
As for AM radio, it’s almost non existent in Central and Northern Europe except for the UK, Spain, and Italy.
When I searched around the mediumwave band on the Grenoble receiver, I heard Spanish, Catalan, Portuguese, and a few other languages. Several of the Spanish stations sounded as if they were single-frequency networks (multiple transmitters with very accurately synchronized carriers). The audio had an “echo-ey” quality, likely created by the different STL delays to the different transmitter sites.
Unofficially (via comments on YouTube videos about old radios), I have read that AM broadcasting has disappeared in Portugal and Estonia. A recent bandscan video that I watched, shot in Portugal, revealed many stations broadcasting in Spanish, but none in Portuguese. This somewhat contradicts my experience on Global Tuners (see above).
I found a used backup wifi radio the other day at Goodwill for $15. It is an older Sangean but works well. More FM stations are on the radios than AM, especially in overseas areas like Japan or Korea. But streaming is the future. So many online radio stations are operating Worldwide now. No licensing to worry about with the FCC. It is a new World. Putting on a new AM or FM station is expensive and so many are barely operating with little revenue.
I would imagine that in a number of the countries where AM has gone away altogether, selling the land on which the transmitter sites formerly sat to developers brought in fairly non-trivial amounts of money. European public broadcasters are not exempt from budget cuts, which mean having to shut down transmitter sites (sadly), cancel programs, and lay off staff.
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