Monday, February 2, 2009

Shortwave Listening as a Hobby

Twenty to twentyfive years ago shortwave listening was probably the geekiest hobby one could imagine. As teenagers we used to hack some BASIC code with our Commodor 64 home computers and play endless hours of computer games with the underpowered computer.

But at that time there was no Internet. Or at least there was no Internet for ordinary home users, no email, no world wide web and no internet streaming radios. But we had our shortwave receivers.

Shortwave radios were the passport to world, its languages, music, cultures and up-to-date news from all over the world. Nowadays in the era of Google, shortwave listening might seem an anachronistic hobby - how cares about noisy reception of radio transmissions from neighboring countries when the Internet is full of streaming radios?

We did. And I still care about shortwave receivers and international broadcasting on the radio frequencies. It is somehow just more human, the fading audio and athmospher noises make the listening something special - even if the transmission can be heard every day.

I'm coming back to shortwave listening after more than a decade of inactivity. The world has changed a lot, and not all of the changes are welcome for a traditionalist like me.

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