Following on from the
day time scan of the Medium Wave band that I did back in March 2018, I have spent the last four weeks listening to the band at night. As before, I was using basic domestic radios at my house near Cork City on the south coast of Ireland.
I used the Silvercrest above which is a very basic and not so sensitive receiver to find a signal using the digital frequency readout. I would then use the more sensitive analogue Sony radio below to listen to the signal properly so I could identify it.
All of the signals were heard roughly 2-4 hours after sunset... approx 9pm to 1am local time. As you might expect, a lot more signals were heard during the hours of darkness and the full list is shown at the bottom of the page.
Some stats and figures....
a) Spain...A total of 109 different signals were heard and roughly 50% of those were from Spain. With the sea path to the south from Ireland, it was probably no suprise that the Spanish signals were so strong and numerous on the band.
b) Gaps....Tuning from 531 kHz to 1602 kHz, there were 35 channels where no signal was heard. It's not that there was no signal there, it's just that I couldn't hear one. In some cases, very strong signals tended to block out the adjacent channels.
c) Countries......The countries with the highest number of stations heard were Spain and the UK. The only signal heard from Eastern Europe was Radio Free Europe in Lithuania.
Italy...Some stations in the north-west of the country were heard at about 1400kms.
Algeria & Tunisia....Some high power stations were heard here along the north African coast at roughly 2000kms.
Portugal...Not too many from there.
France....Two signals....a monster 1 megawatt transmitter in the south east (~1500kms) and a digital DRM (
Digital Radio Mondiale) transmitter from a site near Brest in Brittany (~500kms). The DRM signal could be heard as a hissing signal with no obvious pattern.
Belgium and the Netherlands...Not too many from there.
UK...The UK signals were by far the most interesting ones to hear. Many were buried in the noise and were only identified by listening to a particular song and then checking online to see what they were playing. I found that the online feeds were often 20-30 seconds behind the live radio signal.
Strong English Stations.....In terms of strong signals that could be listened to at night, these were the strong ones....
810 BBC Radio Scotland
Westerglen??
882 BBC Radio Wales
100
Washford, Somerset, England
909 BBC Radio 5 Live
50
Clevedon, Somerset
1053 TalkSport
500
Droitwich, SW of Birmingham
1089 Talk Sport
2
Washford
1215 Absolute Radio
100
Washford, Somerset, England
1341 BBC Radio Ulster
100
Lisnagarvey, Belfast
1368 Manx Radio
20
Isle of Man
These were what I would call acceptable quality. Most of the others had too much interference with them to really listen to. I found it interesting in how on a band full of signals, I could only find seven English speaking stations that were worth listening to at night.
Interference...This biggest issue when trying to listen to some of the UK stations was the level of noise and interference. In many cases, there was a strong Spanish station on the same frequency and it was a case of rotating the radio and nulling out the Spanish station using the directional properties of the internal ferrite rod aerial. On one occasion, I could hear a Spanish station perfectly clear, I'd rotate the radio by 90 degrees and there was a perfectly clear English station on the same frequency.
Echo......Some of the UK and Spanish stations are using the same frequency multiple times in their respective countries. It probably sounds fine in the targeted service area but outside the service area, it results in a loud echo which makes it difficult to listen to.
2 second echo......This was an interesting one. There are two Smooth Radio transmitters listed on 1557 kHz.
1557
Smooth Radio
0.76
Northampton
1557
Smooth Radio
0.5
Southampton
It was impossible to identify which one I was hearing until I realised that I was actually hearing both of them with a two second delay between them! I'm not sure which one was first but I was certainly hearing both of them.
In conclusion...... It was interesting to do a detailed scan of the medium wave band to get a feel for what it is like currently. It is something I would have done many many years ago when I first started listening on radio.
What's pretty obvious is that a lot of stations in Central and Eastern Europe have now closed down their medium wave transmitters and have moved to VHF and digital. Looking at the various frequency listings and from my own observations, Spain and the UK are the two main countries in Europe that still use the medium wave band in a big way.
In the past, I would have listened to the band using a long wire aerial... great for bringing in the weak signals but it can't discriminate between stations. With so many Spanish stations on the band, it is really important to have a directional aerial so that some stations can be nulled out.
I was also suprised as to just how well the internal ferrite rod aerial in the Sony radio performed as it pulled in some of the lower power stations in the UK, especially the ones under 1kw. Prior to this, I would have assumed that I would need a long wire to pull in the low power ones but that doesn't seem to be the case.
The full list of station heard is below...
