It’s been a couple of years since the aerial broke off this radio.
Once upon a time, I would have gone to great lengths to repair it but my geographical location and changing technology have pretty much put a permanent hold on any effort to fix this.
You see, the radio still performs just fine on AM/MW with its internal antenna; it does relatively well on FM even with no antenna.
It’s on shortwave where the missing aerial would be most noticed — and I’m saddened to report I’m normally not missing a thing.
• • •
Even when I moved to Calgary in 2005 — back when shortwave radio was still a more common means of broadcasting and my radio wasn’t impaired — trying to get a consistent signal from within an urban environment in this part of the continent was a mean feat. Putting up a decent outdoor aerial was just not a possibility. It still isn’t.
The only stations I could listen to with minimal effort and in relative comfort were Radio Australia and Radio New Zealand, usually during winter, overnight and into daylight.
Getting anything else was subject to me putting up an active antenna in just the right place. Sometimes, I’d clip random wire to the aerial and hope that whatever I’d strewn about my room would be good enough for reception.
Some days, if the conditions were right, I’d be rewarded with something I could listen to and enjoy. Other times, I could pick a barely intelligible human voice or faint music out of the static. Often, my efforts were simply fruitless.
That was then. Fast forward to the present.
Supposing the radio actually worked the way it should, there is currently a severe shortage of the kind of signal I’d actually want to listen to.
Australia and New Zealand are still there, at last check.
At one time, those two voices of the Pacific would have shared the airwaves with the likes of the BBC, the Voice of America (VOA), Radio Netherlands (RNW) and Radio-Canada International (RCI), all offering informative, interesting, entertaining international radio programming.
Now, many of those big names have retreated from the shortwave bands in the industrialized world. Some, like RNW and RCI, been totally transformed, no longer radio broadcasters as we normally conceive of them.
Thankfully BBC and VOA are still around and I can listen to them with the help of my computer or smartphone, at home or on the road, piping the audio to the speakers or my car stereo.
Modern technology has given me access to world news stations, distant domestic radio and all kinds of streaming music — more portability and more access to radio than I could have dreamed of when I first discovered shortwave radio even existed.
I even have access to streaming TV news channels on my mobile devices. (It still blows my mind this is possible.)
Clearly, it is an understatement to say digital delivery of audio and video has far outpaced simple, old, analog shortwave radio.
That said, technology has been known to fail.
I’ve experienced disconnections from Internet-based audio and video during big news events. (The last such interruption I remember was on the night U.S. President Barack Obama was re-elected to office.)
I’ve had the Internet just stop working for long periods, at home, at the office and on my mobile.
Downloading lots of data on my cellphone or tablet can lead to a bigger bill from my provider than I would normally expect.
I’ve been at public events where there were so many people trying to squeeze onto whatever mobile data bandwidth was available, I couldn’t even sent a short message out on Twitter.
And to boot, huge swaths of Canada and the U.S. don’t have reliable cellphone signals with high-speed data capabilities.
This is why despite the convenience of digital forms of communications, I long for the simplicity of plain old analog radio waves.
It has its flaws, too, but there are very few instances when analog radio can fail completely.
It’s too bad shortwave is slowly being relegated to the dustbin of history. Bit by bit, we are losing access to a simple form of international broadcasting and telecommunication. This is something we may come to regret in case of a public emergency on a massive scale.
We haven’t lost it all yet but I fear the complete demise of mainstream shortwave radio will come sooner than I would like.
I do miss the thrill of hearing something unexpected, something that got to the radio by bouncing off the ground and the ionosphere from very far away.
If, one day, I’m feeling really especially nostalgic or desperate to regain access to remaining analog shortwave radio broadcasts, I’ll put my paws on the older brother of the radio shown in the image above: There is still a functional Sony 7600-G in my old bedroom back east.
Yes, yet more inertia to keep me from repairing the broken aerial on my radio.
