One wonder how many SW hams were active in the Caribbean. Most hams today seem to be into 2 meter and not so much long range SW.
I would suspect it was still quite important. As a fun project, a number of years ago, I used a modem card with a DSP chip to decode radio weather fax. I used to DSP to be a narrow band filter and to digitize the signal, when connected to a receiver. As far as I know, they still transmit weather fax on SW. Dwight ________________________________ From: cctalk <cctalk-boun...@classiccmp.org> on behalf of Jon Elson via cctalk <cctalk@classiccmp.org> Sent: Saturday, October 7, 2017 7:51:14 PM To: Brent Hilpert; gene...@ezwind.net; Discussion@ Subject: Re: OT: the death of shortwave / Re: Hallicrafters S-85 On 10/07/2017 06:46 PM, Brent Hilpert via cctalk wrote: > SW is dead. The internet killed it. You can fix your S-40B > but there won't be much to make it fly with. There are a > couple international broadcasters left, but nothing like > it used to be. I was an SWL'er as a kid in the 70s, > learned a lot about the world. Voice of America, Armed > Forces Network, Radio Japan, Radio Hilversum Holland, > Deutsche Welle, HCJB Voice of the Andes, Radio Prague, > Radio Moscow, Radio Peking, BBC, etc., etc., etc. > Listening to the Cold War play out on the international > airwaves. Pretty much all gone. Left between the static > are a few religious broadcasters. I used to do a lot of RTTY receiving. I copied RCC in Washington DC. That was the Soviet embassy! They'd send some clear test stuff for a while, then go off the air for 5 minutes and start sending 5 digit code groups. I also figured out how to decode a binary synchronous transmission that turned out to be a police net among the French-speaking Caribbean islands. It was standard ITA2 (5-level teletype code, often called Baudot) with the start and stop bits removed, and blocked into groups. Only hams seem to use RTTY any more. There are a plethora of digital modes used by hams, though. Jon
