5045khz Bay Island radio half decent signal into Toowoomba tonight.
According to their facebook page they are using 120w and a wire antenna of some sort
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Obviously easy to get in Brisbane but still not very strong. Wonder why they have an out of band frequency.
This is the station - also on 88 FM
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5045kHz received with just the telescopic antenna. Not strong, but itās there. 1400km.
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Nice. Outside the signal was peaking at around S7 with my TEF with 1.4m telescopic whip. Signal down to about an S4 with antenna retracted down to standard height of 75cm.
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I notice a few international shortwave broadcasters are using DRM. Do you think its worth it for the broadcasters? And have SW DRM receivers available in the market yet?
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Is 4KZ still broadcasting on 5055 KHz? I havenāt heard it on a few east coast SDRs lately.
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@ron12 sadly not. Understand it ended when Al Kirton retired from the GM role of Coastal Broadcasters.
Happy to be corrected to clarify the timeline.
That was my understanding too.
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1674 Radio Haanji Sydney is back on air after a few hiccups of late and dead air. The signal seems to be a lot stronger as well.
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Apologies for the bump but I didnāt want to sidetrack the Radio History thread with this relatively obscure topic.
Iāve been indulging in a bit of Internet archaeology lately. On the rec.sport.cricket group there are a few posts from the early 90s that tell of attempts to listen to international cricket on shortwave, mainly from the US which had no cricket coverage at that time.
Were cricket/AFL/league broadcasts available regularly via Radio Australia in the 90s and earlier? I do remember tuning into live cricket via RNZI in the very late 90s, and I also remember some commentary from the 1999 cricket World Cup on BBCWS. By the time I dabbled in shortwave listening though, the glory days were very much over.
We take blanket sports coverage very much for granted these days, but back in the pre Internet era the only way to follow Australian sport from overseas was via shortwave.
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radio australia definitely broadcast AFL in the mid to late 90ās. i was a pretty frequent listener back and recall hearing AFl. I canāt recall NRL or Cricket (but back than i wasnāt a big NRL fan, and a big cricket fan so it was on the tellie, so i wasnāt trying to get it via SW)
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The ABC used to have shortwave stations and they covered the same sports as AM&FM stations. I remember picking up the AFL from one such Western Australian station from here in Melbourne in 1983.
I donāt know if they could be heard in the US, but I heard some of the remaining ABC shortwave stations around 2015 on various SDRs located in Europe, so it might have been possible to pick them up from the US if someone had a good antenna and receiver, especially from the west coast.
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The ABC Qld shortwave stations(VLQ and VLM from Bald Hills) did carry sport back in the day - the curtain array antennas next to the highway actually looked like a big set of AFL goalposts.
I also listened to a VFL Grand Final on Radio Australia on a seismic boat I was working on in the early 90ās off Burma. Satellite was never an option on a boat without a tracking antenna back then and without shortwave, radio was impossible in locations like the Andaman Sea.
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About as far away from MediaSpy as you can get! Please regale us with moreā¦
Iām aware that domestic SW was significant in the early 90s and earlier. However the Usenet poster was going for the Radio Australia (external) and BBC broadcasts and listening from the central US. From what I gather there wasnāt any media coverage of cricket at all in the States back then. Intriguingly though, some enterprising expats at Stanford appeared to have commandeered a lecture theatre or two and screened some matches of the 1992 World Cup, charging a small fee for the privilege. Iām guessing this must have been via satellite, possibly from Asia.
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