Shortwave Radio: A changed hobby, and American influence

August 11 got me reminiscing: 52 years ago, on August 11, 1971, I got my first QSL card.

What’s a QSL card?  It’s basically a picture postcard that radio stations send to listeners as verification they actually had listened to that station.  You’d mail in a “reception report” with details about what you heard and how well the signal was received and a QSL card came in the post.  It was/is a big thing in shortwave radio, that part of the spectrum just above the AM band where stations broadcast internationally.  My first QSL was from Radio Prague.

A 12-year old kid getting mail from an then-Iron Curtain country was a big thing.  Gleaning cards from around the world was exciting!

My aunt gave me an old shortwave radio she had and, from that began a hobby that coincided with the golden age of shortwave radio: the 1960s-1980s.  I probably gathered about 40 or so QSL cards.  My most exotic catch?  The Sierra Leone Broadcasting Station, Freetown, West Africa.  Not bad for a kid in Perth Amboy, New Jersey!

Shortwave radio was ascendant in those days for two reasons: without the internet, there was no other rapid communications network and, in the middle of the Cold War, both sides were out to make friends and influence people.  The East was especially active: who would have thought that one of the most powerful English broadcasters was Radio Tirana, Albania?

Shortwave’s changed a lot since then.  For one, it’s a shadow of its heyday.  Because of its Cold War connections, the fall of the Soviet Union led to a lot of stations going off the air, mostly because they couldn’t afford and/or didn’t see the need to stay on it.  The “peace dividend” was also taken out of the hide of shortwave radio, and some of the most popular stations, like Radio Australia, are gone.

The rise of the internet also altered the information landscape.  Why listen to a station with a lot of crackly static whose reception depended on solar conditions when you could have crystal clear audio on demand over the net at a fraction of the cost?  Other popular stations (also driven by information diplomacy on the cheap) also went that route and became shadows of their former selves: think Radio Canada or Swiss Radio International.

This isn’t just memory lane.  I want to raise the question: how are we winning friends and influencing people (especially in their own languages) today?

The biggest international broadcasters—Voice of America, Voice of Russia (old Radio Moscow), China Radio International (old Radio Peking)—are alive and kicking.  And, reverting to pre-Cold War history, private broadcasters (especially religious ones) have taken to the airwaves.

My experience showed that medium’s effectiveness.  I learned a great deal about geography and politics through that radio.  It was also my first exposure to disinformation, nor was my instinctual reaction one of cancellation: my certificate as an “Honorary Listener of Radio Sofia, Bulgaria” attests to that.  In the early 1970s, not many of my peers knew about the “Sino-Soviet rift,” much less could hear its practical expression when switching between Radio Tirana, Radio Sofia, and Radio Belgrade.  My expertise in Central European affairs probably began with that radio.  Shortwave may not have made me a friend of our opponents, but it enabled me to understand where they were coming from, both literally and sub-text.

That’s not to say that all change is bad, much less that it can be stopped.  The Internet puts lots of choices at people’s fingertips, and the chances of learning about other countries and cultures are there, albeit differently.  Whether those differences are as stark as they were 52 years ago perhaps says something about the West, too: have we given up propagating what’s uniquely ours in the name of values relativism?

That said, there’s still something different and exciting about a scratchy announcement, “This is Radio Tashkent, the voice of the Uzbek Soviet Socialist Republic,” that FM-quality internet just doesn’t provide.

John M. Grondelski is an independent scholar writing from Falls Church, Virginia. All views expressed are his own.

Image: Mark Pitcher, via Flickr // CC BY 2.0