http://www.rhci-online.net/radiogram/radiogram.htm

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                            http://www.digidx.uk

RSID: <<2017-01-01T20:30Z MFSK-32 @ WEBSTREAM WRMI [SYSTEM D]-11580000+1500>>
 

Hello and welcome to a special episode of DigiDX were we review of some of the more interesting shortwave news stories throughout the year.

DigiDX weekly schedule:

Sunday    2030 - 11580kHz via WRMI (Okeechobee, FL, USA)
Sunday    2330 - 11580kHz via WRMI (Okeechobee, FL, USA)
Monday    2000 -  3975kHz via IBC (Europe)
Wednesday 2100 -  3975kHz via IBC (Europe)

To buy shortwave time at very reasonable rates from WRMI visit http://www.wrmi.net/
Any other extra broadcasts will be listed on http://www.digidx.uk
If you enjoy DigiDX and find the service useful please consider donating via Paypal to reports@digidx.uk. Any money donated will go towards paying for airtime

to keep DigiDX on the air to Europe and North America.
 

Selection of Shortwave news stories from 2016

We start with a story from DigiDX 2 in February -

BBC to Launch Korean News Service to N. Korea Q3 2016 - Report from KBS World (South Korea)

The British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) will launch a shortwave radio service to North Korea this fall.
A BBC insider said the British government has given final approval to the public broadcaster's plan to broadcast news to North Korea and has even earmarked a budget.
The 30-minute daily broadcast in the Korean language will include news from the two Koreas, China and Japan. BBC will also run a website with a listen again section.
The source said that a team of ten has already begun preparing for the launch of the service and that BBC will hire a radio anchor and reporter proficient in Korean.
The news program will be produced at the BBC headquarters in London and transmitted via shortwave from locations including Singapore.

Many North Korean residents are known to own a shortwave receiver. BBC is also considering broadcasting its Korean news service in South Korea as well.
Report from http://world.kbs.co.kr/english/news/news_In_detail.htm?No=116870
 

From DiigDX 4 in March we had the sad news that Mighty KBC were ending their weekly broadcasts to Europe on 6095kHz.

Luckily however the broadcasts to North America have are still on air even though this story expressed doubt:


Mighty KBC have annouched on their Facebook page (https://www.facebook.com/TheMightyKbc/) that the broadcasts on Sunday to Europe on 6095kHz from the

Nauen transmitter will end on the 27th March. Weekday transmissions on this frequency from KBC ended on 27th November.
KBC have recently appealed for new sponsors or donations to keep going and it appears that these appeals have not brought enough money in to continue on 6095,

The broadcast from 2300 - 0200 UTC Saturdays to North America is also under threat with the Mighty KBC
Facebook status promising an update on the 6040kHz broadcasts soon.
The last broadcast on 6095 will be on Sunday 27th March between 0900-1600UTC, broadcasts in the Netherlands on 1602Khz and DAB+ will continue.
 

More sad news came in DigiDX 7 when we heard that Radio Belarus were stopping their shortwave broadcasts:

Radio Belarus to end shortwave transmissions
All shortwave, medium wave and longwave broadcasts from Radio Belarus and the First National Channel of the Belarusian Radio will end as of the 1st of April.

Belarus television and radio terminated their contract with the transmissions authority in Belarus and have
appeared to replace these broadcasts with satellite transmissions on the same shared transponders as the Belarus 24 TV channel with more details on

http://www.tvr.by/company/novosti-kompanii/radio-belarus-rasshiryaet-auditoriyu-slushateley/
Radio Belarus on shortwave broadcast in English, German, French, Spanish, Polish and Russian as well as Belarusian. First National Channel of the Belarusian Radio

used the frequency 7255kHz while Radio Belarus used 11730 and 11930kHz.
 

Some good news however on DigiDX 10 in April:

Radio Guinea reactivates shortwave transmissions
After several years off the air, Radio Guinea from Guinea (Conakry) in West Africa has reactivated its shortwave broadcasts since the 16th April.
The broadcast is in French on 9650kHz and is believed to come from the Sonfonia site located in the capital Conakry. The signal has been observed in Europe

and North America between 2200 and 0800 however over the last few days before this broadcast it appears to have been off the air once again.


At the start of May in Episode 12, DigiDX brought news of a return of shortwave broadcasting from Russia - if only in regional form:

According to NVK Sakha which is the National Broadcasting Company of the Sakha/Yakutia region in Eastern Russia, shortwave broadcasting in the region has been reactivated as of 6th May.
DigiDX previously reporting that licenses had been given by the Russian communications regulator to the Sakha National Broadcasting Company for broadcasting on shortwave on 7295kHz and 7345kHz.
To see read the news story (in Russian) and to view news story video on the reactivation go to http://nvk-online.ru/news/6819.
 

Later in May we had news of the launch of a new shortwave station from Zambia, Voice of Hope:

Voice of Hope Launches

The religious station Voice of Hope has started transmissions from its new Zambian transmitter station. Los Angeles based KVOH acquired the Lusaka site in 2014

from Christian Vision to expand its service beyond the current California transmission site and test transmissions took place in March of this year on 6065kHz.
The Southern African site has 12 buildings on 150 acres of land housing two 100 kW Continental shortwave transmitters and two high-gain TCI long range antennas

to beam signals over all of west, central, and southern Africa.
The initial schedule of Voice of Hope via Zambia will be on 9680kHz between 0500 and 0800 UTC Monday-Friday and at weekends between 1200-1700UTC.

Voice of Hope intent to add additional times are frequencies in the coming months.
 

DigiDX 18 in June brought news on the yearly BBC Mid-Winter broadcast to Antarctica:

BBC World Service Mid-Winter broadcast to Antarctica

The BBC World Service’s yearly broadcast to Antarctica will take place on the 21st of June from 2130-2200UTC. The broadcast is aimed at the members of staff

working at the four British bases on Antarctica with an intended audience of just 44 people. The BBC explains how theses are split across the bases:
“There are just eight among the seals and penguins of King Edward Point on South Georgia and only four at nearby Bird Island. The biggest base, Rothera, on the Antarctic Peninsula

houses 19 winterers – the population can reach 100 in the Summer. Furthest south still is Halley VI on the Brant ice shelf where the Sun does not rise for many weeks and temperatures

of -30° C are made worse by bitter winds. But life is more comfortable for the 13 lucky residents because they are in the futuristic new modules of Halley VI – the
previous five bases have either been dismantled or even lost beneath the ice.”
 

At the end of July, DigiDX brought news from the world of espionage on Shortwave in DigiDX 22:

North Korea resumes coded broadcasts after 16 years

North Korea’s state radio has recently broadcast strings of indecipherable numbers, according to officials in Seoul, in a possible resumption of a cold war-era method

of sending coded messages to spies operating in South Korea.
A female announcer at the radio station read numbers for two minutes on 24 June and 14 minutes on Friday, according to Seoul’s unification ministry and national

intelligence service (NIS). A copy of those comments provided by the ministry included phrases such as “No35 on Page 459” and “No 55 on Page 913”.
During the cold war, Pyongyang sent such numbers via shortwave radio to give missions to agents dispatched to South Korea, according to captured North Korean spies.

It later reportedly stopped such broadcasts once it could communicate with its spies overseas via the
internet, and as animosities with South Korea eased following a historic inter-Korean summit meeting in 2000. Relations have deteriorated greatly since then as North Korea

has pursued the development of nuclear weapons despite international sanctions.
Read the full story via the Guardian here - https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/jul/19/north-korea-radio-broadcast-numbers-code-spies
 

In a sign on things to come, DigiDX 25 in August reported on Radio Australia going off the air for around two weeks -

Radio Australia off the air and expected return

Many shortwave listeners across the world have noticed that Radio Free Australia has not been on any of its shortwave frequencies since around the 4th of August.
Although scheduled maintenance sometimes is carried out at Shepperton which is Radio Australia’s only remaining transmissions site, rumours of technical problems and contractual

disputes were also mentioned as possible reasons for this time off the air.
On the 10th of August, some listeners who had contacted ABC were sent an email stating that “We are currently working with our transmission provider on a number of shut downs

over the past week and again over the next week to investigate a range of technical and
commercial issues for the service“ and also advising listeners of the availability of Radio Australia on satellites Intelsat IS18 and IS22 targetting the South Pacitfic area.
On the 16th of August, Radio Australia started replying to queries about their SW service on their Facebook page with the following response “"Hi there, the ABC is running a technical

outage of the Radio Australia service until Friday the 19th of August to test
reception in the region. Sorry for any inconvenience caused."
Next week's DigiDX will include news on the return of Radio Australia and if it does come back on shortwave on the 19th of August. However the strange wording of the reply on Facebook

has led some shortwave listeners to ask if “running a technical outage” and “testin
g reception in the region” is actually a way of testing how many listeners are actually tuning into Radio Australia in the target area rather an actual technical problems.
 

ABC’s Northern Territory stations also went off air in September and this was reported in DigiDX 29:

ABC Australia Northern Territory returns
Last week on DigiDX we reported on ABC’s Northern Territory shortwave stations being off the air and rumours that they were to close down.
Thankfully as mentioned to some listeners in an email from ABC, all three stations came back on air on Tuesday 13th September and were heard as early as 0400 UTC instead of the suggested 2100UTC return time.
The following frequencies are used for the 3 stations broadcast on shortwave and aimed at the Australian Northern Territory.
Alice Springs - 0000-2359 on 4835khz                           [VL8A]
Tennant Creek - 0830-2130 on 2325kHz / 2130-0830 on 4910kHz    [VL8T]
Katherine     - 0830-2130 on 2485kHz / 2130-0830 on 5025kHz    [VL8K]
 

October brought Hurricane Matthew and devastation to Haiti, this brought special broadcasts to the country from VOA mentioned in DigiDX 31.

The broadcasts in Creole are still on the air at the time of creating DigiDX 43.

Special VOA broadcasts to Haiti

Due to the ongoing devastation in Haiti caused by Hurricane Matthew, VOA have added special broadcasts in Creole and English. The transmissions are all from Greenville, North Carolina and are scheduled as follows:
 

2200-0200 7305 kHz
0200-1200 7405 kHz
1200-1630 9565 kHz
 

Including in the programming is news and announcements Creole and VOA 1 music shows in English.
With the hurricane also expected to hit the East Coast of the USA, some broadcasts from WRMI are also expected to be affected.

Below is a picture of the boarded up windows on the WRMI transmitter building as they prepare for the storm in Okeechobee, FL.
 

DW was another station cutting their shortwave broadcasts in 2016 as reported in October in DigiDX 34 -

DW English cuts

From the new season schedules it appears that Deutsche Welle have made a change to their remaining English language broadcasts targeted at Africa.
Instead of 4 hours of English transmissions each morning, according to the B16 schedules there will just be one hour in English each day at 1600UTC on the following frequencies:

 9820 via Meyerton
15290, 15315, 17690 via Issoudun
17710 via Dhabayya

 

Some good news from the BBC came in Episode 37 in mid-November:

BBC WORLD SERVICE ANNOUNCES BIGGEST EXPANSION 'SINCE THE 1940s'

The BBC World Service will launch 11 new language services as part of its biggest expansion "since the 1940s", the corporation has announced.

The expansion is a result of the funding boost announced by the UK government last year.
The new languages will be Afaan Oromo, Amharic, Gujarati, Igbo, Korean, Marathi, Pidgin, Punjabi, Telugu, Tigrinya, and Yoruba.
The first new services are expected to launch in 2017.
"This is a historic day for the BBC, as we announce the biggest expansion of the World Service since the 1940s," said BBC director general Tony Hall.
"The BBC World Service is a jewel in the crown - for the BBC and for Britain.
"As we move towards our centenary, my vision is of a confident, outward-looking BBC which brings the best of our independent, impartial journalism and

world-class entertainment to half a billion people around the world. "Today is a key step towards that aim."

Relevant as ever
The plans include the expansion of digital services to offer more mobile and video content and a greater social media presence.

BBC World Service expansion
 •  £289m investment
 •  11 new languages
 •  12 new or expanded daily TV and digital bulletins
 •  40 languages covered after expansion
 •  500m people reached by 2022 - double the current number
 •  1,300 new jobs, mostly non-UK

On Wednesday the BBC launches a full digital service in Thai, following the success of a Facebook-only "pop-up" service launched in 2014.

Other expansion plans include:
 •  extended news bulletins in Russian, with regionalised versions for surrounding countries
 •  enhanced television services across Africa, including more then 30 new TV programmes for partner broadcasters across sub-Saharan Africa
 •  new regional programming from BBC Arabic
 •  short-wave and medium-wave radio programmes aimed at audiences in the Korean peninsula, plus online and social media content
 •  investment in World Service English, with new programmes, more original journalism, and a broader agenda

Fran Unsworth, the BBC's World Service director, said: "Through war, revolution and global change, people around the world have relied on the World Service for independent, trusted, impartial news.
"As an independent broadcaster, we remain as relevant as ever in the 21st Century, when in many places there is not more free expression, but less.
"Today's announcement is about transforming the World Service by investing for the future.
"We must follow our audience, who consume the news in changing ways; an increasing number of people are watching the World Service on TV, and many services are now digital-only.
"We will be able to speed up our digital transformation, especially for younger audiences, and we will continue to invest in video news bulletins.
"What will not change is our commitment to independent, impartial journalism."
The new language services mean the BBC World Service will be available in 40 languages, including English.
Lord Hall has set a target for the BBC to reach 500 million people worldwide by its centenary in 2022.
(source: www.bbc.com/news)
 

But unfortunately we ended the year with some bad news from ABC Australia repoted in DigiDX 40:

ABC Australia to end shortwave broadcasts

06 December 2016
The ABC will end its shortwave transmission service in the Northern Territory and to international audiences from 31 January 2017.
The move is in line with the national broadcaster’s commitment to dispense with outdated technology and to expand its digital content offerings including DAB+ digital radio,

online and mobile services, together with FM services for international audiences. The majority of ABC audiences in the Northern Territory currently access ABC services

via AM and FM and all ABC radio and digital radio services are available on the VAST satellite service.
ABC International’s shortwave services currently broadcast to PNG and the Pacific. Savings realised through decommissioning this service will be reinvested in a more robust

FM transmitter network and an expanded content offering for the region that will include
English and in-language audio content.
Michael Mason, ABC’s Director of Radio said, “While shortwave technology has served audiences well for many decades, it is now nearly a century old and serves a very

limited audience. The ABC is seeking efficiencies and will instead service this audience through
modern technology”.
The ABC, working alongside SBS, is planning to extend its digital radio services in Darwin and Hobart, and to make permanent its current digital radio trial in Canberra.

Extending DAB+ into the nation’s eight capital cities will ensure ABC digital radio services can
reach an additional 700,000 people, increasing the overall reach of ABC digital radio to 60% of the Australian population.
ABC Radio is also investigating transmission improvements to address reception gaps in the existing five DAB+ markets. It aims to ensure a resilient DAB+ service in every

capital city, with enhanced bitrates and infill where necessary.

“Extending our DAB+ offer will allow audiences in every capital city in Australia equal access to our digital radio offering, as well as representing an ongoing broadcast cost

saving owing to lower transmission costs,” added Michael Mason.

ABC International’s Chief Executive Officer Lynley Marshall said the reinvestment from closing international shortwave services would maximise the ABC’s broadcast capabilities in the region.

“In considering how best to serve our Pacific regional audiences into the future we will move away from the legacy of shortwave radio distribution,” Ms Marshall said.

“An ever-growing number of people in the region now have access to mobile phones with FM receivers
and the ABC will redirect funds towards an extended content offering and a robust FM distribution network to better serve audiences into the future.”

Once international shortwave ceases transmission, international listeners can continue to access ABC International services via:
• the web stream at: http://www.radioaustralia.net.au/international/listen
• in-country FM transmitters: see Radio Australia’s ‘Ways to Listen’ at: http://www.radioaustralia.net.au/international/radio/waystolisten/fiji
• the Australia Plus expats app (available in both iOS and Android)
• partner websites and apps such as www.tunein.com and www.vtuner.com.

Audiences can access further information via the reception advice line 1300 139 994, online at abc.net.au/shortwave, or via ABC Local Radio (Darwin and Alice Springs).
 

That brings this review episode to an end, we hope you have enjoyed DigiDX’s first 43 episodes and continue to listen in 2017. Happy New Year!

As always please send reports, comments and shortwave related news or articles to reports@digidx.uk.

This is DigiDX Signing off.....


Sending Pic:258x128;
 

RSID: <<2017-01-01T01:30Z MFSK-32 @ 6145000+1500>>
 

Happy New Year! ...

Sending Pic:202x90C;

 

Thanks to The Mighty KBC

and to KBC listeners

for Keeping Shortwave Alive!

Please report decode to themightykbc@gmail.com


 

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                                                              http://voaradiogram.net/

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