Shortwave Radio

I’m going to tell you about a hobby I had back when I was in high school in the late 70”s, it was just listening to shortwave radio, or DXing as it is called.I first heard of this when I went to a friends house and they had a cool poster of the Dutch national football team and I asked them where they got it, and the answer was Radio Nederland sent it to me. So I asked for the address and wrote them and asked asked for mine. 

But I was intrigued about this, so I had a shortwave Toshiba analog 4 band receiver and I tried my luck, and then a whole world opened up for me, I heard radios like HCJB a Chritian station transmitting from Ecuador, BBC, Deutsche Welle, Radio Moscow, Voice of America, all kinds of commercial radio stations from South and Central America.

I started writing to them and eventually collected QSL’s from about 60 countries, QSL is like a postcard that verified you really had heard the station, you had to send a reception report were you told them on what frequency you heard them, time, date and details of the program you heard. The cool part was that sometimes they sent other stuff with the QSL, like pennants, books, t-shirts, towels, walkman, leather wallet,etc.. I even won a shortwave radio of which I am including a picture. The radio stations that answered me and took the longest were Radio Pyongyang, North Korea, and Radio Damascus Syria this one took two years, of course a few didn’t answer at all.

I ended up listening to about 115 countries, I also was left with two Grundig portable digital SW radios, including the one I got from the Deutsche Welle both of which are not functioning.It really was a great hobby, you got to listen to the news or other interesting programs, and since this was during the cold war you got to hear from two different points of view.

Source

Unfortunately the internet killed this hobby, it’s just easier to listen to these stations via internet and also you get no interference or other noises which happened when you used the radio.