![]() ![]() By 1992 a few of these broadcasters figured out they could make money by selling airtime to assorted kooks and freaks, and the shortwave bands became cluttered with the likes of "God's end-times prophet" "Brother" R.G. religious broadcasters, starting sometime in the middle 1980s. Federal Communications Commission in their infinite wisdom decided to open the floodgates to privately owned U.S. On 1 April 2014, it left shortwave altogether, a victim of government budget cuts. Instead of extolling the glories of Communism, it reported on news, sports, and cultural affairs in the Russian Republic. One notable example is Radio Moscow, which began in 1929 as the shortwave propaganda powerhouse of the USSR, and became Voice of Russia in 1993. After the rise of streaming audio over the Internet, broadcasters like the BBC World Service, Radio Canada International, Voice of America, Deutsche Welle, and many other respected international broadcasters severely curtailed their shortwave broadcasts and all but eliminated their broadcasts directed at Europe and North America. Satellites and later the Internet replaced most of the maritime and utility transmissions. What happened after the Berlin Wall fell? It went something like this: Cold War competition in propaganda nearly ceased, as did most of the spy transmissions although a few can still be heard. Kooks like William Luther Pierce found a home on shortwave. Sadly, since the fall of the Berlin Wall and the rise of streaming audio on the Internet, these aspects of shortwave have fallen into disuse and much of the shortwave bands have become a quaint bore.īesides commercial and nonprofit radion stations, shortwave radio is still used by amateur radio operators to talk and send Morse code messages globally. ![]() During the Cold War, shortwave became a hotbed of international intrigue, with broadcasts from Warsaw Pact countries (USSR's Radio Moscow, East Germany's Radio Berlin International) competing with the likes of Voice of America and Radio Free Europe for international audiences, ideological rants from countries with radical governments not aligned with either side in the cold war like Libya and Albania, rebel governments like the breakaway Republic of Biafra, and spy transmissions and maritime activity taking up some of the shortwave spectrum as well, which always made for interesting listening. Axis countries responded by jamming shortwave radio broadcasts from Allied countries. For example, international shortwave broadcasting really took off during World War II, when people living in Axis countries who wanted news not censored by their governments tuned in to shortwave broadcasts from neutral or Allied countries, in some cases risking criminal prosecution for doing so (but the shortwave broadcasts from Allied countries also smacked of propaganda). In some times and places, shortwave was the only place you could get unbiased news from across the border. Many countries' governments ran their own shortwave stations and some, like the BBC World Service, Radio Canada International (aka CBC International Service or "Voice of Canada"), and Radio Netherlands were highly respected. ![]() Shortwave radio was traditionally the best means by which you could hear the news and interesting radio programming from around the world because these frequencies bounce off the ionosphere quite handily. ![]()
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