Shortwave Radio
Connected to the World
Nerdy hobby or global cultural dialogue? Shortwave radio and the amateur radio scene are very active, not least as a result of the Ukraine war.
By Jürgen Moises
A few clicks, a couple of keyboard strokes or a finger on the touchscreen – it’s that easy to access the world via the internet. These days it can be done almost anywhere using a mobile phone: you can research things, listen to music, communicate. But what did people do before the internet? Even then it was already possible to listen to music and spoken content from all over the world, from America, South Africa, India and the Soviet Union. You could learn about the political situation in the countries and even speak to people there. That happened with the help of shortwave: to listen and receive information a simple radio or world receiver was sufficient, to communicate you needed a transceiver, an aerial and a piece of wire. And if you wanted it to be legal, then you also had to have an official radio licence.
Before the Internet There Was Radio
Shortwave radio transmission and reception have been around for over 100 years. There’s a long and exciting history behind these technologies, which still exist today – albeit on a smaller scale. The main reason for this is indeed the internet, as Rainer Englert explains: at the age of 60 he is on the committee of the German Amateur Radio Club (Deutscher Amateur-Radio-Club; DARC) and has been a radio amateur for more than 40 years. “In pre-internet times,” says Englert – who lives just outside Ebersberg near Munich – in a telephone interview, “which would have been the early nineties, shortwave radio was really the only source of information from abroad that you had. There were stations like Radio Moscow, Radio Afghanistan and Radio Bucharest. I think there were more than 100 broadcasters. And of course with the emergence of the internet they more or less all disappeared.”
This trend can also be seen from the number of radio licences and DARC members. In 1995 around 80,000 people in Germany had a licence, according to Englert. In the history of amateur radio that was also the maximum, he says – since then the number has been dropping, admittedly not dramatically, but steadily. At the moment the total is around 65,000 radio amateurs with a licence, of whom around 35,000 are members of DARC, Germany’s largest amateur radio club. And his prognosis is that “in 20 years it might only be half as many”.
DARC was founded back in 1950, when the number of radio amateurs stood at around 6,000. “There was a predecessor institution, the DASD – the Deutscher Amateur-Sende-Dienst (German Amateur Transmission Service) – which was founded in 1926. And the first radio club in our sense was Radioverein Coburg.” The Coburg Radio Club was formed in 1920, even earlier than the state-owned radio broadcaster, whose first show hit the ether on 29th October 1923 from the Vox-Haus in Berlin.
For the radio amateurs that wasn’t such a great day. The trouble was that the arrival of government stakeholders resulted in the monopolisation of radio. The frequencies for amateur radio were cut back, licence obligations were introduced and “amateur radio was downgraded to a role where the priorities were science, technology and education,” relates Englert. Since 1949, the German Amateur Radio Act has quite officially stated that amateur radio may not pursue any political, religious or financial goals. During the Second World War, amateur radio was banned by the National Socialists. But interestingly before that, the DASD was “the only club that wasn’t banned by the Nazis,” said Englert. Because they realised “that radio hams had expertise that could be crucial in a war.”
Marconi, the Zuckerberg of His Time
That was also the reason why there were radio amateurs in the GDR – because they were considered “important to the armed forces” there as well. Nevertheless they were subject to strict regulations, similar to those in place under the National Socialists and even before that, in the early days of state radio. Yet the state radio would never have existed without the amateurs, without the hobbyists and experimenters. The pivotal role was played by the Italian pioneer of radio broadcasting and amateur radio, entrepreneur Guglielmo Marconi, who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1909 jointly with Ferdinand Braun for his practical work in the field of wireless telegraphy. In contrast to Braun, Marconi – who was born in 1874 and died in 1937 – is largely forgotten outside the radio scene. Yet according to Englert he was also a “very clever businessman” and in those days “one of the richest people in the world. You might say he was the Elon Musk or Mark Zuckerberg of his time”.
What was Marconi’s main discovery? The fact that radio waves can be used to transmit messages wirelessly. “In 1900, Marconi successfully sent the first signal across the Atlantic from England, using shortwave. That was the birth of wireless telegraphy.” Around the same time, the Italian inventor had radios made, “which became popular on a wide scale. He made a lot of money out of his invention. And that really was like the internet of its time. A hype. A completely new technology. And it only took a few years until people were communicating by telegraphy everywhere.” Marconi’s ideas were then first used for a specific purpose in the armed forces. “By 1910, most ships had Marconi wireless stations,” says Englert. You could book a radio operator as a service to go with it. “The radio operator on the Titanic was an employee of Marconi as well.”
Shortwave Always Works
In the navy, in the army and during wartime, shortwave continues to play a crucial role. “Because it doesn’t require an infrastructure. It always works. Without internet. Without a converter. Without electricity. I just need to put a few batteries in a receiver and off I go.” Unlike the internet, shortwave can’t be censored, switched off or traced either. Which is why it’s also very important alongside espionage in disaster response and crisis communication. And in light of the Ukraine war, shortwave is currently experiencing a bit of a revival too. For instance, explains Englert, the Austrian Broadcasting Corporation (Österreichischer Rundfunk; ORF) has “reactivated its shortwave service. Shortwave has been restarted in Ukraine as well. Quite simply because many broadcasters had been destroyed. And shortwave has the really huge advantage: it’s worldwide, it has a range of a few thousand kilometres.” In contrast, the very high frequency (VHF) technology introduced in the 1950s, with its superior sound quality, only manages around 100 kilometres.
Rainer Englert transmits on both frequencies these days, depending on the distance he hopes to achieve. And since 2015 he has been running a technology magazine with Radio DARC, which airs once a week on shortwave. For this project the club built their own radio transmitter. To “counteract the disappearance” of shortwave to some extent. Otherwise he doesn’t have tubes or transistors in his radio shack like they used to, instead he has “several computers that control everything: aerials, rotors, digital signal processing. That’s all computerised nowadays.” As a result, the “people interested in this hobby are different now. They are more tech freaks. That’s a feature of the maker scene.” In the past though, he used to be more focused on contacting distant worlds. The “invention of wireless technology”, Englert is certain, “won’t be disappearing from our lives. It’s here to stay.”