Last Christmas Pam got me something I’d wanted for a long time: a shortwave receiver.

Growing up in rural Indiana did not afford me with a lot to do at night, and one of my joys was a shortwave receiver. I used to listen to TASS, the official Soviet News Agency. It was interesting; the news they reported (propagandized?) was so very different from what I heard here in the states.

I should have kept that radio, but I needed money and I sold it to my dad who left it on the garage bench to get dusty, rained upon, etc.

Back to the new radio: It is a Grundig FR-200 “Emergency radio”. It has AM/FM, as well as two shortwave bands (~3.2 to ~7.6 Mhz and ~9.2 to ~22.0 Mhz).

It wasn’t terribly useful in Illinois. For some reason there was a lot of electronic noise and I never could get more than a couple of stations which faded in and out terribly.

Not so here in CA; I found a plethora of stations. One of them was a broadcast from the Netherlands in English at about 6.4 Mhz, and the other was an atomic clock “time station” at about 5.2 Mhz.

I have fond memories of the time stations, and how they allowed me to set my Casio calculator watch (yes, I am a dyed-in-the-wool digital geek) so I knew – KNEW – that my watch was accurate to within a second. I was oh-so-smug about my time accuracy, oh yes.

And, Wil Wheaton contributes (via BoingBoing):

Luckily, there is another fantastic source for DPK propaganda: shortwave radio. The DPK sends out an English-language broadcast via shortwave that will blow your mind. A typical broadcast is filled with Personality Cult ramblings about how great Kim Jung Il is, bookended by some music that’s actually pretty cool. Anyone who misses the cold war propaganda of Radio Moscow will not be disappointed. Listeners in North America can tune in daily at 1500 UTC on 9335 or 11710 kHz, while Europeans can listen on 11335 or 15245 kHz. The European broadcast repeats at 1900 and 2100 UTC on the same frequencies.

I just need to set an alarm so I know when these are on. I wonder if someone makes a RadioShark for shortwave? If not then I guess it’s time to dig out the mixer…