Ham Radio Forum

hamradio · Site Admin Joined: 03 May 2005 Posts: 46

Shortwave listening (abbreviated SWLing) is tuning for stations located on short-wave frequencies, usually thought of as those from 1700 kHz (the upper limit of the AM broadcasting band) to 30 MHz (the lower limit of the tuning range of most scanner radio). In between those two frequencies, a simple, low cost shortwave radio is capable of letting you hear news, music, commentaries, and other feature programs in English from stations located round the world.

Most of the larger nations of the world broadcast programs in English especially for North American audiences, and transmit them on times and frequencies for best reception in North America.

But why bother listening to short-wave in this era of communications satellites and cable television news channels? Perhaps the biggest reason why is that SWLing can give you a unique perspective on events that you simply cannot get from American media. If you watch coverage of an event in Moscow from CCN or CBS News, you get the American perspective on what is happening from an American journalist. If you listen to the Voice of Russia, you get the Russian perspective from a Russian journalist. As you might expect, the two interpretations of the same news event can be quite different.

radiowave · Joined: 22 Sep 2007 Posts: 23 Location: East Coast USA

Is the information we receive controlled? Shortwave can certainly realign ones perception of world events by the simple fact that so much of the information you will hear has so few “gate keeper” or “spin doctors”.
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