So, I’m listening to shortwave radio again. One of the things that really fascinates me about it is that, when I was a kid, we had a Ford Pinto in the early ’70s. It had an AM radio—no air conditioning—and it was about as close to not being a car as you could get without actually not being a car. Sorry, anyway…
Every once in a while at night, I would fiddle with the radio and catch these Spanish-speaking stations here and there, with a lot of static and all kinds of crazy, spooky things. I really loved that. The way I fill that void today is by listening to these distant, far-off, crazy broadcasts—number stations and all of that. I’m back into it again.
I got my dipole antenna first, which is like the rabbit ears that used to be on TVs way back in the day. Next, I’m going to incorporate my AM antenna so I can explore even more. I also like taking these “artifacts,” as they call them, and putting them into my music. Sometimes in the background you’ll hear a preacher saying, “Praise the Lord!” off in the distance, very hard to hear. I love that.
Speaking of which, I guess it’s my antenna right now, but as I go down through the bands where the shortwave folks hang out—like the 10 kilohertz area, just before the middle band and so on (all semantics, really)—one thing I’ve noticed is that I’m only picking up Evangelical shortwave stations transmitting. There’s one out of Nashville, Tennessee, another from South Carolina, and maybe one or two in the UK. Some of it is a trip! I’ll try to post a sound bite of one that really doesn’t match my view of Christian Evangelical stuff—it’s just weird, almost like a chant repeating over and over, and I don’t really understand what it is.
I do understand evangelicalism, and I’m not putting that down. Everyone has their own religion and faith, and we all try to do our best to be good people.
Anyway, it’s just fun to cruise through and listen to all the different sounds, the static, things repeating over and over, and stumbling across ham radio broadcasts and satellite weird stuff—even Morse code. It’s just fascinating and I love it. I’m going to keep a log here of things I find. Let’s see if I can post that sound bite here as well.
Thanks for reading—have a good one!