RSID: <<2026-05-21T23:31Z MFSK-32 @ 9265000+1500>>
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Welcome to program 450 of Shortwave Radiogram.

I'm Kim Andrew Elliott in Arlington, Virginia USA.

Here is the lineup for today's program, in MFSK modes as noted:

  1:43 MFSK32: Program preview (now)
  2:54 MFSK32: Radio Taiwan International visits Ukraine
  7:47 MFSK64: Navy satellite launched in 1964 still transmitting
14:10 MFSK64: This week's images
27:40 MFSK32: Closing announcements

 

Please send reception reports to radiogram@verizon.net

And visit http://swradiogram.net

We're on Bluesky now: SWRadiogram.bsky.social

And X/Twitter: @SWRadiogram
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From Radio Taiwan International:


Rti delegation visits Ukrainian national public broadcaster

18/05/2026

After the conclusion of the Lviv Media Forum, a delegation from
Radio Taiwan International (Rti) toured Ukraine's national public
broadcaster Suspilne alongside other media officials in Lviv,
Ukraine. The visit provided firsthand insights into how Ukraine
maintains nationwide news broadcasting and public information
services amid missile threats and information warfare.

Suspilne was established in 2017 as the country's first
integrated TV, radio, and local media public broadcaster. After
Russia's invasion in 2022, Suspilne became a key media hub for
the public, combating disinformation and connecting with the
international community.

Suspilne Senior Executive Mariya Frey showed the delegation
around the station. She said that, as the country fell deeper
into a state of war, many media workers from other outlets, which
were rendered inoperable, volunteered to join Suspilne to
continue their duties. This has resulted in a station packed with
workers from around the country.

To deal with the changing pace of information, the broadcasting
center was rapidly upgraded to ensure uninterrupted information
flow, such as in the case of television interference.

The heart of this broadcasting system is Suspilne's wartime
broadcast control/dispatch center. Engineering teams monitor
national signals and broadcast statuses 24/7 with the singular
goal of maintaining uninterrupted broadcasting during the war.
The biggest challenge, staff noted, is the need to instantly
grasp emergency details – such as missile strike locations,
signal interruptions, or frontline changes. Engineering teams
often need to complete and reorganize signal switching and live
broadcast scheduling in a very short period of time.

The Rti delegation noted the way in which, even in the ancient
city of Lviv, public media remains a necessary piece of Ukraine's
past and present. With the revelation that Rti currently offers
Ukrainian-language broadcasting, both sides exchanged ideas on
future cooperation, program exchanges, and experience sharing as
vital organs of a country's public infrastructure.

https://www.rti.org.tw/en/news?uid=3&pid=209203

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Shortwave Radiogram now changes to MFSK64 ...




RSID: <<2026-05-21T23:37Z MFSK-64 @ 9265000+1500>>
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This is Shortwave Radiogram in MFSK64

Please send your reception report to radiogram@verizon.net
 

From Space Daily:

There is a single satellite launched by the US Navy in 1964 that
is still in orbit, still transmitting, and still being used by
amateur radio operators around the world — and nobody at the Navy
has been in charge of it for decades

May 20, 2026

On December 28, 1964, a Thor-Able-Star rocket lifted off from
Vandenberg Air Force Base in California and put a small US Navy
satellite into a low polar orbit.

The satellite was called Transit 5B-5. It weighed about 70
kilograms. It was part of the first satellite-based navigation
system in human history — the predecessor to GPS, designed to
help American submarines fix their position anywhere in the
world. It was given a working lifetime of a few years. Maybe
five, if everything went well.

That was sixty-one years ago.

Transit 5B-5 is still up there. It's still in orbit. It's still
transmitting. And somewhere right now, an amateur radio operator
with a backyard antenna is listening to a signal that was first
beamed down from space when Lyndon B. Johnson was president.

Nobody at the US Navy has been in charge of this satellite for
nearly thirty years. The program that launched it was officially
retired in 1996, when GPS took over the job. The Navy walked
away. The satellite did not stop working.

How it's still alive

The reason Transit 5B-5 has lasted this long is genuinely
remarkable.

Most early satellites ran on chemical batteries or basic solar
panels that degraded quickly. Transit 5B-5 carried something
different: a SNAP-3 radioisotope thermoelectric generator — a
small nuclear power source that converts the heat from decaying
plutonium-238 into electricity.

Plutonium-238 has a half-life of about 88 years. That means a
SNAP-3 RTG launched in 1964 should still be producing somewhere
around 65% of its original power output today. The satellite
isn't using sunlight. It isn't using a battery. It's using a
small lump of slowly decaying radioactive material that simply
continues to give off heat, year after year.

The radio transmitter on board doesn't need much power. Just
enough to keep broadcasting a signal at around 136.65 MHz — a
low-frequency telemetry beacon that, against all reasonable
expectation, has never stopped.

There are no moving parts left to wear out. No fuel to run dry.
No on-board computer to crash. The whole satellite is essentially
a power source connected to a transmitter, drifting along in an
orbit that itself doesn't require maintenance. It just works. It
has worked for sixty-one years.

What it actually sounds like

If you tune the right radio receiver to the right frequency at
the right time, you can hear it pass overhead.

Amateur radio operators describe the signal as a faint, rhythmic
warble — telemetry data encoded as audio tones. With the right
software, those tones can be decoded into actual numbers:
information about the satellite's onboard systems, its
temperature, the state of its hardware. Sixty-year-old
engineering, still phoning home.

The amateur SDR (software-defined radio) community treats these
old satellites as a kind of living museum. Receiving Transit
5B-5's signal requires no special permission, no military access,
no expensive equipment — just a basic SDR dongle costing about
thirty dollars, an antenna, and patience.

The Navy is no longer involved in any of this. The institutional
memory of how Transit worked has been preserved largely by
hobbyists.

The man who tracks the zombie satellites

A Canadian amateur radio operator named Scott Tilley has become
something of a folk legend in this niche.

In 2018, he discovered IMAGE, a NASA satellite that had been
declared lost in 2005 — picking up its signal from his backyard
in British Columbia. In 2020, during pandemic lockdown, he
tracked down LES-5, a US military satellite launched in 1967 that
everyone had assumed was dead.

Tilley calls these "zombie satellites" — spacecraft that were
supposed to be silent decades ago but are still, somehow,
broadcasting. When NPR asked him in 2020 which was the oldest
he'd ever heard, he didn't hesitate. "The oldest one I've seen is
Transit 5B-5," he said. "A nuclear-powered U.S. Navy navigation
satellite that still circles the Earth in a polar orbit, long
forgotten by all but a few amateurs interested in hearing it sing
as it passes overhead."

He said sing, not broadcast. The satellite produces a specific
pulsing tone that, to those who know how to listen for it, is
unmistakable.

What this story is actually about

There's something quietly beautiful about a piece of Cold War
hardware that's outlived its mission, its program, and its
handlers — and continues to do exactly what it was built to do,
with no one giving it instructions, for sixty-one years.

The engineers who designed Transit 5B-5 in the early 1960s could
not possibly have imagined that ordinary people would, in 2026,
be listening to it from their backyards with a thirty-dollar
device. They couldn't have imagined the device. They couldn't
have imagined the people.

This is, in a way, the opposite of how we usually think about
technology. We expect our devices to fail before they're
obsolete. We replace phones every two years. The cycle of planned
obsolescence has trained us to think of hardware as something
that wears out predictably.

Transit 5B-5 was built by people who were not thinking that way.
They were thinking: the cost of putting this thing in space is
enormous; build it to last. They overengineered it. They gave it
a power source that would outlive its operators. They built it
for ten years and got sixty.

Somewhere overhead, right now, a small metal object the size of a
microwave oven is moving at 17,500 miles per hour, listening to a
heater fed by slowly decaying plutonium, and broadcasting a
signal that nobody officially needs but that several people, in
several countries, are still patiently catching.

The Navy walked away from it nearly thirty years ago.

It hasn't noticed.

https://tinyurl.com/2ap4hu2r

Is it actually 5E-5? See ...
https://tinyurl.com/2cvvsrg2
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Image: Illustration of the Transit 5B-5 satellite ...

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This is Shortwave Radiogram in MFSK64

Please send your reception report to radiogram@verizon.net
 

This week's images ...
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A flower arrangement recently exhibited by the Asheville, North
Carolina, chapter of Ikebana International. tinyurl.com/ysg33hzv
...
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Visitors at Dante’s Inferno Immersive Experience, at the
Cattedrale dell’Immagine, in Florence, the former home town of
the medieval poet Dante Alighieri. tinyurl.com/26n2gsjl ...

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Jinling's photo of Jenny Lake, with mountain background, in Grand
Teton National Park, Wyoming ...

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A cayote in Yellowstone National Park, photo by our guide Kevin.
...
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Refreshments at the Taste & Toast fundraiser at the University of
Minnesota Landscape Arboretum. tinyurl.com/26358ewf ...

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A Fiesta Hibiscus at Washington Oaks Gardens State Park, Florida.
tinyurl.com/ympoymh5 ...

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A red campion (Silene dioica) at the Belmonte Arboretum in
Wageningen, the Netherlands. tinyurl.com/ywo4w4h3 ...

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Our painting of the week is "Delicately Balanced" by Daryl
Gortner (American, b.1986). tinyurl.com/ylk8e3g2 ...

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Shortwave Radiogram returns to MFSK32 ...


 

RSID: <<2026-05-21T23:57Z MFSK-32 @ 9265000+1500>>

This is Shortwave Radiogram in MFSK32 ...


Transmission of Shortwave Radiogram is provided by:

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and

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    Please send reception reports to radiogram@verizon.net

And visit http://swradiogram.net

http://swradiogram.bsky.social

X/Twitter (for now): @SWRadiogram

I'm Kim Elliott. Please join us for the next Shortwave
Radiogram.


 

RSID: <<2026-05-22T11:30Z MFSK-64 @ 15770000+1500>>

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Rick Fenn of 10cc was born on May 23, 1953.
🇬🇧
 

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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rick_Fenn

Please report your decode to themightykbc@gmail.com and
tune in Shortwave Radiogram.


RSID: <<2026-05-22T11:48Z OL 64-2K @ 15770000+1500>>
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