RSID: <<2026-08-06T23:31Z MFSK-32 @ 9265000+1500>>
 

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Welcome to program 461 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:

  1:44 MFSK32: Program preview (now)
  2:55 MFSK32: Airbus A350 completes record 24-hour flight
  6:28 MFSK64: What's to blame for Canada's wildfires?
12:37 MFSK64: This week's images
27:55 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 AFP voa TechXplore:

Airbus completes record 24-hour flight with plane to be used by
Qantas

July 29, 2026

A specially modified Airbus A350 plane touched down in France on
Tuesday after a record 24-hour test flight from Australia, ahead
of joining Qantas' fleet next year.

Its 23,076-kilometer (14,339-mile) journey—across three
continents and two oceans, and through two sunsets and two
dawns—was among the most-watched flights on the Flightradar24
tracking site.

It was also a crucial step before Australian airline Qantas
receives its first A350-1000ULR in April next year, to be
followed by 11 others for services able to link Australia nonstop
to destinations in the United States and Europe.

ULR stands for "ultra-long-range," a feat made possible by
fitting an additional 20,000-liter rear center fuel tank to
Airbus' A350-1000 model.

The flight from Australia to France took precisely 24 hours and
24 minutes.

On its outbound flight last week from Toulouse to Melbourne, the
test aircraft flew 17,000 kilometers (10,600 miles) in 19 hours
and 12 minutes.

The return trip simulated a trajectory the plane would take once
put into commercial service. Qantas plans to start offering
nonstop flights between London and Sydney from October 2027.
Later, it intends to also start flying between Sydney and New
York.

On board the plane was a cockpit crew of eight people from
Airbus' testing division, accompanied by two Qantas pilots. Two
Airbus engineers were also on board.

Some of the aspects studied on the flight were the modified
architecture around the extra fuel tank, changes to make the
cabin quieter and the plane's air circulation system.

Qantas' "Project Sunrise," using ultra-long-haul planes, has been
planned for the past nine years but has been repeatedly delayed.

Currently, the world's longest commercial flight is Singapore
Airlines' route between Singapore and New York, which covers
15,350 kilometers (9,540 miles) and lasts more than 18 hours
using another variant of the A350.

https://techxplore.com/news/2026-07-airbus-hour-flight-plane-qantas.html

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Shortwave Radiogram now changes to MFSK64 ...


 

RSID: <<2026-08-06T23:36Z MFSK-64 @ 9265000+1500>>
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This is Shortwave Radiogram in MFSK64

Please send your reception report to radiogram@verizon.net

From Science News:

What's to blame for Canada's wildfires?

By Carolyn Gramling
July 24, 2026

Canada is on fire. Over 190 wildfires raging in Ontario in July
have so far burned more than 735,000 hectares of boreal, or
subarctic, forest. And the thick smoke from those blazes
smothered the U.S. Midwest and East Coast for days with thick
plumes of hazardous haze.

A similar scenario happened in 2023, when smoke from a
devastating, record-breaking fire year in Canada also turned some
U.S. city skylines orange. Projections of future climate change
suggest there will probably be many more such events.

What's behind the rise in extreme fires in North America? Here
are three sometimes counterintuitive facts about boreal fires
that might help pierce through the haze.

Lightning sparks the biggest fires

The recipe for an extreme wildfire consists of three ingredients:
an ignition source; dry vegetation that's primed to burn; and
hot, windy weather.

Fires in Canada's boreal forests are primarily ignited by
lightning or by human activities: the careless toss of a
cigarette butt, a stray ember from a bonfire or a spark from a
railway. In terms of the simple number of fires they start each
year, lightning and humans are roughly on a par.

But when it comes to total area burned, it's not even close.
Lightning is by far the primary ignition source, responsible for
an estimated 92 percent of area burned — often in Canada's
remotest regions, where fires tend to be monitored rather than
fought.

"The boreal forest is evolved to burn; that's how it replaces
itself," says Chelene Hanes, a wildland fire scientist with the
Canadian Forest Service who is based in Sault Ste. Marie in
Ontario. "It's ecologically responsible to let fires do what they
do," as long as they're not threatening to impact communities,
she says.

Canada is so vast and sparsely inhabited that fighting fires in
its uninhabited wilderness is also not a good use of resources.
Effective fire suppression typically requires quick response for
maximum effectiveness, perhaps within the first 30 minutes after
ignition. That's far less possible for remote fires than for
those in populated areas.

Public messaging about fire management probably contributed to a
decline in human-caused fires by 2018. But recent data suggest
that human-caused fires are again on the rise. That may not be
because people have become more careless, Hanes says. Instead, as
global climate change increasingly makes the landscape drier and
hotter, even smaller sparks could lead to massive blazes.

The worst fires add fuel to the fire

Extreme wildfires — those that burn more than 200,000 hectares of
land — now dominate Canada's annual fire statistics. These
behemoths are relatively few in number, comprising just 3 percent
of the annual fires. But they are responsible for 97 percent of
the land burned.

"Extreme fire weather really drives the fire world in Canada.
And, I would argue, the [United] States as well," says Mike
Flannigan, a wildland fire scientist at Thompson Rivers
University in Kamloops, British Columbia.

"Extreme" in fire lingo refers specifically to huge burn areas —
but such huge fires can also be extremely intense, burning so hot
that they generate their own weather. The heat rising from these
fires high into the atmosphere is increasingly likely to form
pyrocumulus clouds, fire thunderstorms that in turn can spawn
more lightning and spark new fires.

"We're seeing more and more of these suckers," Flannigan says.
"They have always been around, but the sheer numbers of them are
increasing." The 2023 Canadian wildfire season, for example, had
the most fire-generated thunderstorms on record, at over 140; the
previous record was set in 2021, with 100.

Fire suppression is also dramatically more challenging with these
intense fires. Generally, fire containment strategies include
direct aerial attacks, such as dropping water, fire retardant
chemicals or foams from airplanes. Indirect attacks are next in
line: burnout operations that burn land in front of where the
fire is spreading with the wind, trying to rob it of fuel.

But "when you get a really intense fire, the tools in the fire
manager's toolbox start to decline quickly," Hanes says. "At a
certain point, fire becomes a flood or a hurricane — when it's
generating its own weather, that is no longer something we can
fight."

Aerial attacks may buy a bit of time by slowing the blazes, but
the soil may still smolder for weeks. "If you don't get the hot
spots, a week later you get a big wind event, and it's off to the
races we go," Flannigan says. Ground crews armed with infrared
cameras are needed to find those hot spots and put them out.

Canada's fire managers are also battling another kind of
wildfire: misinformation on social media suggesting the country's
out-of-control fires are the result of poor management practices.
Some claims suggest reining the fires in should be a relatively
simple matter of removing older, fuel-rich trees or forest floor
debris.

But that kind of routine management would not be possible or
desirable across Canada's vast hinterlands, which span some 300
million hectares. Moreover, the logic is flawed, researchers say:
Those regions have never been managed, so it doesn't make sense
that a lack of management there would be responsible for the
recent uptick in extreme fires.

The real underlying problem, scientists say, is that the boreal
forests are increasingly conducive to severe fires, thanks to
climate change.

Yes, climate change is making it worse

Forecasts suggest that 2026, while still projected to be a big
fire year, won't dethrone 2023 as the record-holder.

"2023 was bonkers; it was off the charts," says Flannigan. That
year, a record 15 million hectares — an area roughly the size of
the state of Illinois — of land was on fire in Canada, beginning
in early May. That dwarfed the previous record, a mere 6.9
million hectares.

As shocking as 2023 was, it's part of a longer-term worrisome
trend. A climate attribution study that analyzed the unusually
severe fire season in eastern Canada determined that climate
change more than doubled the likelihood of extreme fire
conditions existing in the region.

Canada is warming at roughly twice the global rate, with longer,
hotter summers and earlier snowmelt. A warmer atmosphere much
more quickly sucks moisture out of dead fuel in the forest floor
or from soils. Shifts in the Northern Hemisphere jet stream are
reducing precipitation as well. And warmer winters are expanding
the ranges of pine bark beetles that kill trees. All of this
means more fuel available to burn.

"Big fires are getting bigger, covering a larger area and burning
for longer," Hanes says. Drier landscapes also mean fewer wetland
areas that once served as fire breaks, and bigger fires can pass
over Canada's many lakes without being extinguished
significantly.

In a 2025 analysis, Hanes, Flannigan and others examined trends
in the country's fires since detailed recordkeeping began in the
1950s. From 1959 to 2024, the study found, very large fires —
those that burn more than 20,000 hectares — are getting larger
and are accounting for a greater proportion of the area burned.

The six most active fire years in Canada on record all occurred
in the last decade, and more land area burned from 2017 to 2025
than in the entire rest of the record.

And 2023, 2024 and 2025 were all big fire years, the first time
on record that there were three in a row, Flannigan says. So
"2026 was a litmus test: Will we see another active fire season
in Canada? Then we can probably expect one every year, because of
our changing climate."

"The future," he adds, "is hot and smoky."

https://www.sciencenews.org/article/what-blame-canada-wildfires-toxic-smoke

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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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On Shortwave Radiogram 459, Jeff WB8REI in Ohio read about the
impending SpaceX rocket crash onto the moon. He trained his
Zhumell 8 telescope on the calculated point of impact, but like
everyone else, did not see the impact. But he did share this
great photo of the moon, August 5 ...

Sending Pic:265x313;
 

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The July 29 Buck Moon rising behing the Royal Liver Building in
Liverpool. tinyurl.com/26zxflgv ...

Sending Pic:153x185C;
 

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The waning gibbous moon sets at dawn in Dunsden, Oxfordshire,
England. tinyurl.com/27jbglmb ...

Sending Pic:196x129C;




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A firefighter works to contain part of the Gann Fire in Calaveras
County, California. tinyurl.com/27jbglmb ...

Sending Pic:200x141C;


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A Columbian black-tailed deer forages through a roadside pasture
in south-western Oregon. tinyurl.com/25rra4ek ...

Sending Pic:197x139C;


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A duckling at Monklands Canal, Coatbridge, Scotland.
tinyurl.com/27hm5ofh ...

Sending Pic:196x150C;


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A tractor on Mellon Udrigle beach, Scotland. tinyurl.com/27hm5ofh
...
Sending Pic:203x131C;
 

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Plates by the Michigan artist Michael Kifer, painted using a
skunk tail (from roadkill), 1990s. tinyurl.com/27b8h74l ...

Sending Pic:216x106C;
 

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Our painting of the week is "I'm Just A Tangle In These Trampled
Weeds" by Michigan artist Zech Ray. tinyurl.com/2bbfuma8 ...

Sending Pic:207x158C;


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Shortwave Radiogram returns to MFSK32 ...



 

RSID: <<2026-08-06T23:57Z MFSK-32 @ 9265000+1500>>

This is Shortwave Radiogram in MFSK32 ...


Transmission of Shortwave Radiogram is provided by:

WRMI, Radio Miami International, http://wrmi.net

and

WINB Shortwave, http://winb.com


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: <<2026-08-06T23:59Z THOR 25 x4 @ 9265000+1500>>

Thank you for decoding the modes on Shortwave Radiogram.



 

RSID: <<2026-08-07T11:31Z MFSK-64 @ 15770000+1500>>

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Jacquie O'Sullivan of Bananarama was born on August 7, 1960. 🇬🇧

Sending Pic:188x240;

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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacquie_O%27Sullivan

Please report your decode to themightykbc@gmail.com and
tune in this week’s Shortwave Radiogram.

".....the {WRMI} Optimod phase rotator and filters   shift the timing of the some {AF} frequencies more than others."

Yes, that is technically possible—but the statement needs some context. It likely refers to the group delay caused by the Optimod processor in WRMI.
A phase rotator and the subsequent audio filters can indeed shift the timing of different audio frequencies by varying amounts.
 

Why?
An ideal delay element would delay all frequencies by the same amount:

 1 kHz ---> +10 ms
 5 kHz ---> +10 ms
10 kHz ---> +10 ms

The waveform remains identical in terms of timing.
However, a real audio processor does not do this.

It contains:
- High-pass filters
- Low-pass filters
- Equalizers
- Phase rotators
- Multiband compressors
- Clippers/limiters
- Stereo enhancers (if active)

These have a frequency-dependent group delay:
 

Frequency Delay
 50 Hz 20 ms
200 Hz 12 ms
  1 kHz 5 ms
  5 kHz 2 ms
 10 kHz 8 ms

The individual frequency components of a signal therefore emerge at different times.

What does a phase rotator do?
A phase rotator (frequently used in Optimod) alters the phase of low frequencies without significantly changing the frequency response.
Goal:
- more balanced audio peaks
- improved limiter performance
- higher modulation density
- less distortion

It is particularly common in AM/SW broadcasting.

However, it can alter the temporal relationship between bass, midrange, and treble.

Audible effect?

For speech:
- usually barely perceptible
- no “echoes”
- no audible delay

For certain signals:
- music with transients
- drums
- digital test signals
- MFSK/RTTY/DRM-type signals
it can be measured.


Typical order of magnitude:
- a few milliseconds
- with an unfavorable filter combination, even >10 ms

Reference to WRMI
WRMI uses or used Optimod processors (e.g., Orban Optimod-FM/AM-like processing) upstream of its shortwave transmitters.
In shortwave, the following factors also come into play:
- Receiver AGC
- Selective filter
- SSB/AM demodulator
- Audio post-filter in the SDR

As a result, a listener may sometimes get the impression:
“The high frequencies arrive later than the bass”
or
“The audio sounds like a short reverberation”

This can indeed result from a combination of Optimod group delay and receiver filtering.
But: “Optimod shifts some AF frequencies more than others”
The more precise technical formulation would be:
Yes. The Optimod phase rotator and its audio filters introduce frequency-dependent group delay, so different AF components may experience different amounts of phase shift and timing displacement.
So: Yes, the effect exists—but it’s usually small and more measurable than clearly audible.