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Why no shortwave band on radios?

Arran Cameron
I have lost count of the number of transistor (and IC) radios and Hi-Fis that have passed through my hands over the years. Some were high build quality but others were complete junk. What is common between them are that relatively few models have the facility to receive shortwave broadcasts. They only have LW, MW, and VHF bands.


Notable examples from the heyday of the transistor radio with a shortwave band include the Hacker Super Sovereign RP75, GEC G820, and Grundig Yacht Boy, but these were all top of the range models. Commercially available models of radios with a shortwave band at an affordable price to the average person were limited although there was the option of constructing one yourself or modifying an existing LW / MW radio.


What is the reason why so few transistor radios and Hi-Fi tuners had a shortwave band?
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    1950. My family had a mains radio. It had long, medium and short wavebands, with lots of lovely interesting names on the dial - Hilversum, Kalundbourg, Luxembourg, Lahti, Munich, Oslo - that sort of thing. Most of the listening was done on the long and medium wave. Most of the short waveband gave just weird hissing, whistling, chirruping noises, etc. There were just a few tight spaces where actual broadcast programmes could be received, crammed so  close together that tuning needed to be to a hairsbreadth. Reception was faint on most of them, and the odd one or two that did come in loud and clear were inevitably in a foreign language. (Probably BBC Overseas broadcasts from Britain) Most of the time spent on this waveband was myself messing about and finding out what was there. There was one service worth mention - Radio Luxembourg also broadcasted on the 49 metre band, a practical alternative to 208 metres, before that medium wave signal was boosted.

    1970. I bought  myself a portable transistor, a hefty Ferguson for the serious listener, LW, MW, SW, VHF with sockets for car radio aerial, aux-out, headphones. All these facilities were put to good use during the time I had it. That year, whilst touring, I visited the Daventry area and had a look at the short wave station, a huge forest of wires running at every angle imaginable. The mast radiator for the medium wave Radio 3 broadcasts was on the other side of the hill. That radio came with me to other parts of the world, to Saudi Arabia, to Sweden, to the USA, and its short wave facility was put to good use to tune into the BBC World Service to keep up with the news. It served this purpose well, though took up quite a bit of room in my suitcase.

    1990 or thereabouts. I bought an Aiwa radio with digital tuner (not a digital radio). It could select individual short-wave broadcasting bands and had number buttons to key in a short wave frequency if known and save many favourites in a memory. Much more compact than the previous radio so more suitable for travelling. It did not travel however as much as its predecessor. The last occasion when it was used abroad was a memorable night in the USA on December 31, 2003 at 7:00 pm when we listened to Big Ben striking midnight as it happened. It is little used nowadays - just for the occasional piece of casual listening on VHF. In 2004 I revisited Daventry. Practically nothing left now of what was once the short-wave capital of Britain.


    The reality is that short wave has always been a more-specialist service and nowadays its use is in continual decline. The World Service is now available crystal clear on digital channels, though I understand it is still receivable in short wave in some places. Radio manufacturers see no point in complicating designs and upping the price by providing a facility that is unlikely to be used by the regular listener. We now live in the age where information is only too available world-wide on TV in hotels, cruise ships, etc., via satellite communications. There is also of course the Internet; anyone with a mobile smart-phone can check up on world events pretty quickly. There is no longer the need to use radio for the purposes for which I used to; new methods are quicker and more convenient.
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    I have a similar experience to Denis. Following on from the family mains radio dating from the 1950s I bought my first 'transistor radio' in about 1972/3 which had LW/MW/VHS and about six shortwave bands. I still remember the joy of searching the SW bands and coming across Radio Trrane, then searching my Atlas to find out where the broadcast was from. Later, about 1980, in the Merchant Navy I bought a Sony digitally tuned radio (PLL) which had only FM and AM, with the AM ranging continuously from 150kHz to (I think) 29999 kHz, which came with a book of all the SW frequencies used worldwide. That travelled with me on all my ships and enabled me to listen to radio transmissions from all corners of the globe. After I left the sea went with me to South Korea before it gave up the ghost in the late 1990s, at which point I bought a much smaller Sony AM/FM radio with similar capabilities that I still have. However I do not listen to the radio so much now - perhaps when I retire in a few years I will have the opportunity to start investigating the Short Wave bands again, by which time the may all be shut down.....
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    My father chose a Grundig Yacht Boy (gorgeous radio) as his 40 year long service award in 1969. He really enjoyed the fact that it had a short wave band - but in actual practice only fiddled with it occasionally, mainly I think to encourage my interest. The only bands he actually listed to properly were FM and occasionally LW (being the days when a fair few Radio 4 programmes were only on LW).


    For many years I had a wonderful R1155 which would pick up just about anything AM, but I gave it away years ago. These days it's FM (mostly on a mixture of old and new Roberts sets + the hifi), digital over the TVs' Freeview, and BBC Sounds. Oh, and one DAB radio permanently tuned to Radio 4 because we can't be bothered to work out how on earth to make it pick up anything else! But for world connections absolutely agree t'internet is much easier to use than SW.


    What I - and particularly my wife - get more worked up about is: why no decent speakers in radios? Hence the collection of old Roberts'...


    Cheers,


    Andy


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    Andy Millar:

    What I - and particularly my wife - get more worked up about is: why no decent speakers in radios? 




    Which is one thing that has been a feature of my radios - not necessarily a good speaker but a sound output that can be wired to an external amp/speakers/headphones

    Alasdair

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    Alasdair Anderson:

    I have a similar experience to Denis. Following on from the family mains radio dating from the 1950s I bought my first 'transistor radio' in about 1972/3 which had LW/MW/VHS and about six shortwave bands. I still remember the joy of searching the SW bands and coming across Radio Trrane, then searching my Atlas to find out where the broadcast was from. . .




     

    Yes I remember Radio Tirane. It had a distinctive call sign, and shared a wavelength with BBC Overseas- 232 m. Approaching the hour on BBC Overseas the Tirane call sign could often be heard repeating faintly in the background. In 1972, BBC Overseas changed to 276 m and there was no longer interference from Radio Tirane. However I remember once I stumbled across Radio Tirane on the short wave - an English broadcast which came in loud and clear.


    Fun days!
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    Alasdair Anderson:




    Andy Millar:

    What I - and particularly my wife - get more worked up about is: why no decent speakers in radios? 




    Which is one thing that has been a feature of my radios - not necessarily a good speaker but a sound output that can be wired to an external amp/speakers/headphones

    Alasdair


     




     

    Yes, a decent pair of headphones, though constraining, is a better listening experience than a tiny speaker. Headphones worked well on my 1970s Ferguson, and its aux-out socket output was useful for tape recording, leading to playback to a big speaker with satisfying results.  The 1990s Aiwa sends stereo sound to the headphone socket when it is tuned to VHF.
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    There is an unfortunate problem, that means that AM radio generally, not just shortwave, is in decline, namely it is not a protected service (unlike VHF/FM broadcast), so the levels of incidental interference/ man made noise  from switching supplies and radiation from ADSL/VDSL are very high in all but the most rural areas.

    So the listener experience is not that good, so the broadcasters do not invest, so there are no killer programs, and little demand for radios to receive them. The digital mode for HF, DRM has not really taken off for the same reason.


    In this internet era the big selling point of shortwave, which used to be that you could receive stuff from abroad, be that expats listening to their services from home in the mother tongue, or locals in less permissive states getting a second opinion of international news from somewhere out of state boundaries, has been largely lost. Although of course an internet connection relies on many things in a long chain of equipment all working, and all of them can be monitored /traced. Radio just needs a power source at each end.


    And good quality SW reception requires more careful receiver design, both as tuning needs to be multi-octave, an a choice of IF frequency that is OK at MW may lead to spurious responses and lack of selectivity at the 20-30MHz end, and as the dynamic range of adjacent signals can be very high. It is not uncommon to want to extract a signal of a few hundred nanovolts RMS from under the skirts of an adjacent unwanted one at tens of millivolts RMS that may be 10-20kHz offset. For these reasons the common (=cheap) solution on a MW/LW set of  single tuned circuit prior to an unbalanced 1 transistor self oscillating mixer is not likely to be adequate, so attempts to extend an existing LW/MW design cheaply are usually a disaster.




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    It's debatable whether SW is in terminal decline due to satellite and internet methods of delivery or whether there is still life left in it.


    My mother has a GEC G820 with a SW band complete with a bandspread fine tuning facility. It requires a long external antenna to receive anything other than the strongest stations. She told me that during the Cold War years (which also coincided with the heyday of the transistor radio) every communist in Britain had a shortwave radio to receive propaganda stations from the Soviet Union, and they were seen as objects of suspicion by the police and even some employers. The prevailing view was that 'normal' folk didn't have shortwave radios at home, and my mother claims that the Metropolitan Police trained their officers to check the tuning dials of shortwave radios when seaching houses that contained them in order to determine whether the owner is listening to propaganda radio stations. Smart communists retuned them to an innocuous station when not in use.


    It may sound like verging on a conspiracy theory but could it be possible that there was a gentlemen's agreement between governments and consumer electronics manufacturers to restrict the number of models of radios with a SW band as part of a mechanism to hinder communism in Britain and other western nations?
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    mapj1:

    There is an unfortunate problem, that means that AM radio generally, not just shortwave, is in decline, namely it is not a protected service (unlike VHF/FM broadcast), so the levels of incidental interference/ man made noise  from switching supplies and radiation from ADSL/VDSL are very high in all but the most rural areas.

    So the listener experience is not that good, so the broadcasters do not invest, so there are no killer programs, and little demand for radios to receive them. The digital mode for HF, DRM has not really taken off for the same reason. . .


     




     

    Thanks Mike. Not long ago I attended a Group Meeting and the speaker was reviewing the development of radio broadcasting. I spoke to him and suggested that Digital Radio Mondiale might be a logical way to re-engineer the AM radio bands, now falling behind and dwindling with this dated technology. This would combine the advantages of LW/MW/SW i.e. good propagation over distance and uneven terrain with the advantage of digital broadcasting, i.e. good immunity to interference.


    His reply that there was at present little commercial interest in investing in those bands; most of the interest was in UHF. This is very much in line with your thoughts.

    . . .And good quality SW reception requires more careful receiver design, both as tuning needs to be multi-octave, an a choice of IF frequency that is OK at MW may lead to spurious responses and lack of selectivity at the 20-30MHz end, and as the dynamic range of adjacent signals can be very high. It is not uncommon to want to extract a signal of a few hundred nanovolts RMS from under the skirts of an adjacent unwanted one at tens of millivolts RMS that may be 10-20kHz offset. For these reasons the common (=cheap) solution on a MW/LW set of  single tuned circuit prior to an unbalanced 1 transistor self oscillating mixer is not likely to be adequate, so attempts to extend an existing LW/MW design cheaply are usually a disaster.

     



    Yes an interesting point. Briefly, few manufacturers see any commercial advantage in developing extra-sophisticated designs for a system for which there seems to be little demand.
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    It may sound like verging on a conspiracy theory but could it be possible that there was a gentlemen's agreement between governments and consumer electronics manufacturers to restrict the number of models of radios with a SW band as part of a mechanism to hinder communism in Britain and other western nations?




    And it may be that there is a lack of action from OFCOM to take up their powers under s54 of the wireless telegraphy act to prosecute interference from VDSL and poor enforcement of EMC standards by trading standards, is a deliberate conspiracy to discourage potential terrorists, spies and other radical elements from using short wave radio, and to force them onto the internet where they can be far more easily monitored and controlled.


    Or more likely it could just be apathy from an establishment that sees no profit in paying out to police AM reception.


    Certainly, and I am old enough to recall the end of the cold war era, interference from faulty equipment and unlicenced radio broadcasts generally were much more strongly pursued at the time when HMG and every other country ran numbers stations ( the UK 'probably' transmitted The Lincolnshire Poacher from near Akrotiri ) out of military bases to (allegedly) provide a one way encrypted link to their field agents in other countries,  and one side effect of that attitude was that SW (HF) and MW/LW were far more useable than they are today.


     


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