Wednesday, October 19, 2011

Radio Tirana

Propagation on 10m today is as good as I can remember. I made a few nice contacts using SSB including Japan, India and Bahrain. I heard several Chinese stations as well but have yet to work one.

Not really DX but a new country for me was Albania, in the shape of Dik, ZA1E. Decades ago as a teenaged short wave listener I remember hearing Radio Tirana, a huge signal on 7.065MHz, smack in the middle of the 40m phone band. I wonder whether anyone ever listened to its broadcasts? They were pure anti-capitalist tirades read by a woman announcer who sounded like she had a beard and no sense of humour. They actually used phrases like "capitalist running dogs" if I remember correctly. At least Radio Moscow tried to make life on the other side of the iron curtain sound attractive.

I don't think there was any ham radio activity in communist Albania and there still aren't all that many hams there now so I was pleased to work Dik for a new one.

4 comments:

Richard G3CWI said...

http://www.swldxer.co.uk/tirana3.wma

Happy memories.

73

Richard
G3CWI

ab2tc said...

I remember when I was a teenager our local radio club was often listening to an RTTY feed from Radio Peking. The Maoist propaganda was so ludicrous that we just fell over with laughter. The machine we used produced text on a paper strip and was very smelly (all that lubricant).

AB2TC - Knut

henry said...

I loved listening to all those stations ...

plus, if you were a woman with a beard you'd have no sense of humor either :)

Steve GW7AAV said...

I used to listen to the news from all those SW stations and the Americans and compare it to the BBC.

Someone was lying and it wasn't always the propaganda stations.