Is there anyone else who likes to listen to shortwave radio? Either listening to regular old shortwave programs or listening to oddities like beacons, weather & time signals, over the horizon radars, data transmissions, of course the famous number stations and so on?I've loved this hobby for many years and have owned a lot of radios, but just casual interest which meant I would usually sell the radios eventually.
I recently bought a little handheld (Tecsun PL-680) and plan to build a good longwire antenna outside, buy a few more little portables (like pocket sized) and buy a SDR at some point since having access to waveforms and waterfalls on the software would be nice, though I still prefer actual radios. Unfortunately I live in a city with millions of people and have some high voltage powerlines right outside my flat so that fucks reception, but I still plan to build a new antenna.
This week I was not listening much, but I did manage to pull in a Korean radio station (which is impressive, since there is a lot of jamming there), something from India and a Chinese station, but I don't know which one. Of course there is always Brother Stair and other batshit insane religious folks and a lot of right-wing preppers/MAGA/retards that pollute the radiowaves. The other night I listened to some woman who sounded like she had been smoking since she was 10 years old, talking about how Joe Biden was a pedophile and the usual crazy nonsense that crowed of people is obsessed with. That stuff is not interesting at all but unfortunately the signals for that are strongest in North America. Ever since stations like Voice of America and Radio Canada International stopped broadcasting on shortwave...most of what you hear is that sort of garbage.
I've been listening a lot lately since I have a flu or something, so I've heard a lot of fun stuff. I had some morse code station one night. I didn't bother to translate it, but I'm sure it would just be gibberish to me anyway. I also heard HM01, the number station run by G2, better known as Dirección de Inteligencia which is Cuba's foreign intelligence agency. Tonight I've had WRMI on in the background while I play an MMO. They had some music at times, then some weird pro-vegan sermon from this well known Vietnamese cult leader Ching Hai. After a new program came on which was just some retard paranoid right wing prepper American guy who started rambling on about World War 3 and shit hitting the fan soon so I turned it off. Tuned into 9330 and I think it's some Portuguese show. I can't understand it.
Also I've listened to Radio Nikkei a lot. This is actually a great way to practice Japanese if you have been trying to learn it. They have a lot of talk radio programs so it's nice to listen in if you can manage to tune in such a distant station. The talk radio is good for vocabulary practice and shit. I think they also have a program for Japanese people to learn English. I've never caught that one but it's probably entertaining to listen to if you do.
This sounds like a fun hobby I might try it. I haven't used radio in nearly a decade.
You could get a nice introduction buying a cheap handheld receiver for very little money and scan the shortwave bands that way. Reception depends on your antenna, but the built in one is sufficient to get started. There are other ones you can build for cheap, such as what we call a longwire antenna. It is as the name implies: a real long wire you connect to it. Well, there's more to it but you can really just attach a bit of speaker wire to one and you'll hear a lot more.
Or what a lot of people do now is just use WebSDR aka Software Defined Radio. This works using a little digital receiver that basically has its "ears" open to a shit ton of frequencies, from a few MHz to GHz. A device like this can be bought for as little as 30-40 USD and is super cool, but requires its own antenna. However there are a lot of WebSDR websites available. Here's one located in Georgia, USA which is I guess run by a high school radio club. Try it out, click around and see what you can tune in. It will let you hear everything from FM radio, shortwave, amateur/ham radio to I think even things like satellites.