Why no shortwave band on radios?

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.

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.