In case anyone has missed these couple of bits, here’s two upcoming dates for your radio diaries.
Over in Sweden, SAQ will mark the 100th anniversary by firing up their whopper gear and sending out CW with about 874 quasars worth of power. This will be on July 2nd and will comprise not one but two CW sessions.
Hardcore CW fanatics can book tickets to attend in person if you fancy a trip to Sweden.
On the SWL side of the house, two bits. Apparently the BBC are finally taking Longwave out to the glue factory to give 198 the bullet. Reportedly at the end of June. Keep a listen out for its final moments if it really is going to be put out to pasture - a very sad day if so.
Which is bizarre because another date for your diary, June 21st, will mark the annual BBC Midwinter broadcast on LW. I think its set for 19:32 BST but double check the final time confirmation this week.
Anyone listening to SW over the weekend will have caught the test transmissions by the BBC to determine which transmitter they will use this weekend. Last year I caught it from Wooferton and Ascention Island. This weekend gone I caught it from Wooferton only.
Given the BBC hates LW so much, this could be the last time you hear it. Let’s hope not eh…
I just had a look on the Curry’s website for radios - there was the “antique” Roberts DAB radio, but on a quick scan through there wasn’t that many that had AM, and without getting into “specialist” products there was nothing I could see that included LW. So not only are there very few listeners but there isn’t that much a new listeners could use to hear it? I wonder how many watts per listener there is on 198 KHz?
Finally this is an interesting read (Or I thought it was!). Droitwich
LW transmitters are not entirely funded by the license payer. It’s not just for domestic broadcast but the wider picture for citizens of repressed nations to get access to (we’d like to think) reliable news, education etc.
Then there’s the whole resilience piece. Look what happened in Spain and Portugal. First thing people did when comms were totally gone was go to a shop and buy a portable radio. Stocks are still low across Iberia even today due to demand.
Happened in Malawi and Namibia recently too when telcos got taken down due to ransomware. What happened? Everyone went and got analogue radios to stay informed.
Resilience in the form of power and heat too. Bye bye Economy 7 (probably antiquated, im just giving an example), and I’d wager many more will be effected by the shut down too in remote areas or areas reliant on the transmitters for heat and power.
The running cost angle for LW pales in comparison to the upkeep of FM too.
LW is a lot more than just the World Service. A sad day when it goes. Don’t follow RTE’s example in Ireland and demolish your transmitter(s).
That’s transmitted on SW, not LW. And the World Service is funded by the licence payers. Funding from the Foreign and Commonwealth Office stopped several years ago.
Now switched by other means.
But people listen to FM.
It isn’t the World Service, it’s Radio 4.
I don’t disagree with the idea that we are losing a lot of resilience in our systems. But to say that the BBC hates LW is just stupid.
For two more weeks. I doubt it covers much of the cost of running a LW transmitter.
The fundamental problem is that the LW transmitters are probably old and need replacing. It will cost many millions for a service that very few people use. The teleswitch service is also obsolete because it is being replaced by smart meters.
Could be a case for modernisation and/or repurposing? You’d have thought as well with recent events that the resillience factor might’ve found a home a bit further up the priority list?
The advantage of LW is you can cover most of the British Isles with one transmitter which you could keep going in an emergency. To use VHF requires hundreds of transmitters, each of which needs to be kept powered. Plus you need to maintain the feed to each of those locations.
Our infrastructure relies on mains power working. We’re told that it doesn’t matter that the new VoIP phones stop working in a power cut because we can use our mobiles. But they seem to forget that most base stations do not have generators - the batteries only last a couple of hours.
The main power system seems to be vulnerable too as was shown in Spain recently. Because all generation needs to be synchronised a failure tends to bring down the whole system as voltage or frequency sags. Then it takes a long time to bring back up. Although fossil fuelled generators are very bad environmentally they do at least have a lot of inertia to keep the frequency stable.
Unfortunately I don’t think those in power understand any of this.
I broadly agree, but there isn’t as much point in having a LW transmitter if we don’t have any stocks of LW recievers! If the main FM transmitters were powered (I think there is 40 - not 3 as for LW) that should give reasonable coverage and most radios seem to include FM.
We suffered badly in Storm Arwen, the village had no power for 5 days, and it took 8 to get the power back at home, the 11kV overhead poles blew over like matchsticks. The mobile network lasted about 12 hours as the generators failed from lack of fuel and because of the snow on the roads there was no access to the sites. Mobile coverage reappeared after about a week. At home we had a generator and the fibre broadband still worked so we were quite comfortable but a lot of our neighbours were in very cold, dark houses with no working communication systems. After several days of complaints the solution was to send in burger vans to give out free hot food in the villages.
This was a localish outage (well a strip down the country but not the major centres of population). It is quite sobering to think what would happen if the grid fell over as a black start is quite difficult and slow.
I ought to say what have we learned from this - as far as I can tell very little, the copper phone lines are no longer connected, the 11kV network is probably stronger as they had to rebuild most of it and no obvious changes to the resilience of the mobile masts.
Final thought - would the Today programme on BBC Radio 4 LW cheer me up if I’m sitting in the semi dark trying to warm up some tea over a candle wearing all my winter gear - possibly not! Paul
On my commute to work I tend to listen to radio 4 via Long wave purely because it reach’s parts other radio signals don’t ( just like Heineken Beer used to !) as my area is all up hill and down Dale and FM is a pain in the bottom with it chopping in and out. That said I think broadcast radio is mostly an outdated thing as rather than listen to you local station talking absolute rubbish and broadcasting 99% music you don’t like you can easily stream ( that doesn’t work for me either !) or as I normally do listen to a downloaded Podcast on a subject I am interested in !
It would be interesting to know just how much power this adds up too and also how much the costs of renting or owning that many buildings /sites costs !