Short Wave Magazine - Do Try To Be A Bit More Modern

Why oh why do you insist on running features about boat anchors and the sad folk who insist on keeping them.

Surely our hobby should be about ad opting the latest technology. Perhaps it should. And don't call me Shirley.

Those of you who have followed these nostalgia pieces will be happy to read that once you have run out of memories, all you are left with is the here and now. In the heap I call home, our hobby is finally under control. It has taken just forty years to achieve this. From radio rooms full of classic AR88's, HRO's and the groundbreaking backbreaking RA17 to just the AR7030 on the top of the bookcase.

I have even lost the aerial wire. Loops, Zepps and Inverted L's have gone. As have the days when I could stand a draughty shack, happy to wait for the Racal, a pre-synthesised AGA, to warm up to blood heat eventually doing the same for me. Creature comfort is the name of the game now. I can take my place in the snug of The Phase and Jitter and bore for Britain about double-glazing. Having had it done, there is no easy way to get the downlead in without voiding the guarantee. All my precisely engineered copper wire has given over to nothing more than the whip on the back of the AR7030. In fact, there is little around the place to suggest how the hobby once took over my life. It still does sometimes but listen, Doctor, I can handle it. OK?

Yes, I know. The whip is a compromise. Yes, I did work alongside JT and JW up at Matlock as an ARSE (amateur radio service engineer) in the quondam days of the HF 225 development. Yes they did ask me - little me! - to take the prototypes home to get the opinion of someone who had SWL diagnosed as a terminal illness. Yes, they did pack my Listener's Guide in the same box as their highly developed receivers without thinking it devalued the radio in any way. And yes, I'm using the whip when I'm supposed to steeped in antenna folklore.

It can't be all bad. When GBR celebrated 75 years on 16kHz with a Morse message, I did just hear it on my whip all of 0.00005333 of a wavelength long. Only trouble is I can't read Morse. And my maths is rather questionable, so I can save you a stamp if the decimal point is a few places out.

I'll tell everyone that I really don't get the time to listen around but habit forces the hour before The Archers on a Sunday to be lost dithering up and down 80m. I need my fix of G2CVV reading an ever-expanding GB2RS news bulletin in a time slot that has always remained the same. He must have done about 1700 of these since I first heard him as The Thinking Ham's Trevor MacDonald on AM via a John's Radio 19 Set.

Then there's the chap who has just bought the latest top-of-the-line all-bander who feels all that DSP technology will be vastly improved if he uses his Shure Triple Four, pronounced as one word. He thinks this as all the lads (lads?) on the net agree with him. Those flimsy mikes you get with a 3000 quid rig these days are not up to the job.

As I write this, I hear another chap who has only just got around to clearing away the dogs bowl, basket and lead after the poor beast went silent key last year. I really identified with this as so many people experience genuine grief over the loss of a pet. My heart went out to him until he said he kept the dog's clippers to do his own hair with. You can't write stuff like this. You can lock Galton and Simpson, Muir and Norden, Smith and Jones with Ben Elton as Team Leader in a darkened room and tell them to write a sketch like this and they couldn't. Nothing prepares you for life as it is lived. And there is nothing like life on Eighty.

The chap who proudly proclaims all his kit is home-brew, that is, he made it all himself, talking to the guy who only buys black boxes, that is, branded kit from a shop. Silence. Shop Bought Ham has nothing to say to Homebrew Man. Without brand loyalty, a dealer to have a go at or a range of Fascinating Mods to try over the bank holiday, there is no conversation. Shop Bought Stan will say, "Well er, good effort there, sounds really nice. Anyway, must sign this end. Phones ringing." I never heard it. Perhaps the TX gain has been knocked back by the end-stopping ALC produced by the phenomenal output of a shuretriplefour.

I have flirted with digital. I heard the recent DRM tests that gave short-wave mono FM quality. Hang on a bit. At the peak of the last sunspot cycle, VOA used 26.040MHz for a while. Sprain your wrist switching over to 13kHz bandwidth on the Racal or click WIDE on the R1000 of blessed memory and you got er, mono FM quality. I have been firmly corrected that the digital signal has similar bandwidth to current AM senders, but even if it has an ordinary wireless sees DRM as hideously over-modulated AM that upsets the AGC system causing it to appear over-loud and spread compared to the AM'er on the next channel, leaking nicely into the skirts of the AM filter, no matter how good it is.

More spectrum space for broadcasters - less of an issue as so much Utility is up on satellite now - and phase-locked detection provides all the quality you need for the next generation of listeners brought up on MP3 audio via computer speakers.

I thought short-wave wireless was meant to be cost-effective for the listener. That is, man in under-developed country listening on a Grundig Yacht Boy which has already cost him an unreal proportion of his monthly income. If he has a local ISP, will he really sign up for Internet Radio for the cost of an AR7030 based on UK prices? Will he be ready for the when it's good, it's very good - when it's average, it's pretty grim quality of downloaded audio? Will economies of scale kick in enough to put Digital in the Grundig price range? Is it true Grundig was going to introduce a lease-only receiver and call it the Rent Boy? It's radio, Jim, but not as I know it.

As the BBC pulls out of America and SRI trumpets its killing of short-wave as a real development, I wonder who its all for now.

It does leave a few clear channels, though. Channels that can fill with US Evangelists. No matter how bad a day I have had at work, Brother Stair has had a worse one. And it's all my fault. When the day comes and the faithful are taken up in the final rapture, I won't be among them. Unless I send my donation.

According to the good Brother, the computer Year 2000 issue was an Act Of God to get us all thinking. And all my fault. You can't beat this stuff. An hour of this puts a whole new slant on the news when you go back to Radio Four. And short-wave must be doing something right. I haven't bought a newspaper in ten years.