Why no shortwave band on radios?

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?

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?