From “On the Media” ’s “Divided Dial”: “Fishing in the Night”
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What is shortwave radio and why is it important?
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Hi, I'm Adam Howard, a senior producer for the New Yorker Radio Hour, and we wanted to share something special with you on the podcast this week. This comes from our friends at On the Media, and it's an episode from the second season of their series, The Divided Dial. Season one was all about the rightward shift of talk radio, and it won a Peabody Award. In season two, reporter and host Katie Thornton travels to a lesser known end of the radio spectrum. Here's Katie Thornton reporting for On the Media.
Last summer, I met up with a journalist and radio fan named David Gorin. I went to his house in Brooklyn, New York, so that we could listen to the radio together. Not any old radio, not AM or FM, nothing you can pick up in your car, but shortwave radio, the little-known cousin of AM and FM, with fuzzy stations that can reach insanely far distances. David's been listening to shortwave since he was a kid in the 70s, when his uncle gave him a radio.
And I turned it on, and it's like the radio leapt out of my hand with the North American service of Radio Moscow.
Suddenly, the world was all within reach, available to him right there in this box.
In the seventh grade, I became the expert on the next five-year plan in the Soviet Union, the economic plan.
Today, he's part of the Library of Congress' Radio Preservation Task Force. And together, on a sweaty Thursday afternoon last July, we sat down to hear what we could find on the shortwave dial today. Just like when David was a kid, we heard lots of government-run stations, like Radio Marti.
The U.S. broadcasting news and information to Cuba.
Vice of Islamic Republic of Iran.
China Radio International, broadcasting in Spanish. Let's see, anything else strong?
The voice of Italy, broadcast in Italian. On other days, David has picked up English language shows from North Korea.
They have very strident, you know, military stuff.
And news from Cuba.
This is Radio Rebelde, Radio Rebel. And it goes back to the revolution.
On the short waves, the global tussle for influence plays out 24-7. But we didn't just hear news and propaganda. There were beeps and bloops. Coded messages sent between amateur radio operators or between government officials who used the short waves to send military data or secret instructions. And some of what we heard just sounded like normal radio with lots of music. And preaching.
It was hidden just to hide the meaning and the power of the divine name that is inherent in the name of Yah.
That's an end times ministry that also preaches that the earth is flat.
Which is very interesting because surely radio wouldn't propagate in a flat earth, you know. But details, details. Yeah.
In just about an hour of surfing the short waves, we heard prayer and propaganda, news and conspiracy theories, so many languages, and some really decent jams from all over the globe. I felt like I had been welcomed into a club that was somehow secret and yet right there for anyone to join. And I know it's cliche, but there was something magical about tuning into the world, training my ear to listen through the crackle, hearing the distance. As it turns out, this practice of scanning the dial, finding out what you can hear and from how far away, is a century-old art. It was popular among radio's early adopters. These early distance fiends, as they were known, uncovered something very strange about how radio waves traveled through space. And what broadcasters did with that information? Completely altered the trajectory of the 20th century. This is season two of The Divided Dial. I'm your host, Katie Thornton.
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