Well, I have the day off and this morning in an effort to kill a little time and amuse myself I broke out my little shortwave radio receiver.  It's a Sony ICF-SW7600G.  It seems to be quite highly regarded among those in the hobby as being good quality and quite a bargain for its features.

It's been quite awhile since I got it out and messed around with it.  Found a few programs here and there, most of which were religious rantings. Strangely enough, some Canadian station (at 13655 khz)was airing a show dedicated to Canadian hip-hop.  Who the hell listens to music on shortwave?  I also listened in on some hams yapping it up at 7290 khz....though I have noticed that the only thing hams ever seem to talk about is their equipment.  Kinda ironic, and funny.

Anyway, I remeber a few years ago listening to some station out there that seemed to rent out airtime for people to do their own shows.  There was one guy in paticular who 20% of the time would go on some hysterical tin-foil hat type paranoid rant, then spend the other 80% bitching about how people had better start spending him money, or he wont be able to continue his show to "enlighten people."  Think of him as a low rent Art Bell.  I caught his show a few times.  Total nutjob.  Funny as hell.

Throughout the course of fussing with the radio, I of course ran across several frequencies beeping out code, which I assumed to be Morse Code (are there any other somewhat popular codes used out there?) and I found after a brief search online some software packages which claim to decode it for you.  Might check that out...could be interesting.

SO! Back to my original question.  Any stations or programming out there that is interesting, amusing, etc?

I cant be the only nerd here...

Ka-bump

I don't remeber all of the skeds, but I used to listen to Radio South Africa, Radio Havana, BBC, Deutsche Welle, VOA and a host of others.

Even with modest equipment you should have no problem receiving the English services of the big guns on the shortwave bands.

Primetime Shortwave Schedules