1971 in USSR. I made my first crystal radio on plywood board. At day time it was only Radio Myak from Moscow and at night it was only VoA. Coil was winded on 3D battery paper casing and capacitor was from old transistor radio. Antenna long wire hide in walnut tree.
@@fretlessfenderRisk? Listening anti soviet western radio could give you a free ticket to see Siberia or accommodation in special medical facility with mental orientation.
I miss listening to shortwave during the Cold War years. I live in the middle of North America. I could listen in to the USSR, Cuba, Mainland China, Voice of America, HCJB out of Ecuador, the BBC, Deutchewelle, Austria, Australia, the Canadian Provincial stations, and more. Nowadays, the only international broadcast I can pick up in English is Spain. The airwaves feel so empty compared to those days.
When I use my supermarket brand short wave radio, the only broadcast I pick up in English is Radio Romania. I think everyone's switched over to the internet. I know there's a digital broadcast mode called DRM (Digital Radio Mondiale) which is kind of like DAB for AM (in that it's not backwards compatible with analogue radio) but I've never seen actual radios capable of receiving DRM the way DAB radios are ubiquitous here in the UK. Also, the UK were very early adopters of DAB meaning that most of our stations still broadcast in MP2 and not AAC because so many old radios are still out there that can't decode AAC! Other countries that use DAB have switched completely over to DAB+ with AAC, but the UK won't do that. Only a small handful of stations use DAB+/AAC and they broadcast at very low bitrates, 24kbps last time I checked!
@@GeoNeilUK DAB, whether plus or not, has been a solution without a problem from the beginning, and has been a real damp squib in Germany in spite of repeated marketing campaigns to get everyone to buy a new receiver. The early adopters here bought staggeringly expensive DAB receivers to be able to decode only a handful of channels, then the decision was made to switch to DAB+, which created a pile of high-value electronic junk. Although advertised to reach 90% of the population, reception is still very hit-and-miss today, and certainly doesn't have the continuous coverage that good old FM VHF does, particularly in the many hilly areas. Besides that, there are just far too many 'old' and perfectly good receivers in use here to warrant switching off the FM VHF services. Doing so would create a veritable mountain of electronic junk and annoy many poeple!
Those jammers made shortwave listening almost impossible at the end. And added to those the Russian Woodpecker oth radar destroyed the hobby. The when these pests were switched off one had largely moved on and soon international radio stations started closing. But I would say jamming largely killed off the great DX-ing hobby. So sad, bloody communists trying to keep their populations in the dark.🤮
I live near Kaunas station. Disconnected speakers with longer wires were humming and sometimes speaking. The greenhouse in the yard had strange phenomena- plants died reaching horizontal wire. There was several hundreds volts potential between ground and wire. HF, so not dangerous for humans. But neon lamps worked for free. There was nice fireshow when some wires were broken on transmitter. Still one tower here.
I was a teenager in the late 1970's, and built a shortwave radio. I picked up a bunch of these jammers, and had no idea what all that noise was. I had no idea it was censorship. Some of what's in this video are very similar to what I heard.
Same here, when I was very young, when we visited my grandparents, they had a portable short wave radio, I'd disappear into a quiet corner for a listen. I'd hear these jammers and thought they were some form of super secret stations as I could not figure them out.
The Brit TV programs " Connections " ( 1 and 2 ) and " The Day the World Changed " by James Burke . One line in an episode goes something like this " It isn't about who has the biggest army or the most bullets, it is about who controls the information "
@@John-mf6ky I used to have a neighbour like that where I previously lived. Standout incidents included the night her stoner boyfriend came home from working late one Christmas Eve and turned his music on full blast at 3am, because he wanted his mood to be "festive"... Thank God I don't live there any more.
Interestingly the domestic soviet shortwave radios didn't have anything above the 25m band, but the export radios had 19m, 16m ,13m bands wich weren't jammed. When my grandfather got a VEF-12 for his wedding, he had his friend, who worked at the VEF factory, put in the 19m, 16m, 13m bands, so he could listen to VoA and BBC without the jamming.
The higher bands were jammed, but the jamming was less effective at these frequencies because of the greater skip distance, i.e. the jamming could go over the heads of the intended listeners. During the sunspot maximum, Voice of Israel used even higher frequencies - among the 27MHz CB channels and just above the 28MHz amateur band - for its Russian language broadcasts as the Soviet jammers couldn't go that high.
I understand from other sources that Radio Free America was very effective from a cost benefit perspective. For every $1 spent broadcasting; the Russians ended up spending like $100 dollars jamming it. When you are in a strategic race with a rival, both USA and Russians were launching submarines, tanks, aircraft carriers, and more; having a rival waste more resources that you use is important. It would appear that the broadcasters, only needed one station to broadcast, yet in order to jam the enemy needed to use hundreds of jammers, generally in large cities. A cost/benefit analysis such as this could easily be calculated on killowatts of broadcasting power, number of hours of manpower and number of towers constructed.
This sounds like an aspect of the efforts to broadcast 'propoganda' (as it were) into the Soviet Bloc that isn't generally appreciated. One has to wonder if it was, in fact, the primary purpose of these broadcasts(?!) Even if not, certainly a nice ancillary benefit.
@@richiehoyt8487 Getting truth to people in Russia was probably the main thing. People knew their government "might sometimes lie," but without having a way to hear the other side, people did not have a way to make up their own mind. A little truth goes a long way in counteracting lies.
In lithuania we've recantly had a TV programme about amateur radio operators in soviet times. This is an awesome supplement, even if unintended by you :)
Great video. I remember listening to short wave in the UK in the 1980s and hearing the jamming. I now live in Warsaw, Poland, and my parents-in-law still have the VEF 206 radio they used to listen to Radio Free Europe and the BBC. Just outside the city, in a placed appropriately called Radiówek, was the local jamming transmitter. Apparently the remains of the bunkers used are stlll there, though I haven't had chance to go and look for them.
I remember getting into radio seriously in early 1981 when the CB craze was in full swing, and my interest quickly turned to shortwave radio in general. The assorted pulses, wobbles and mechanized voices fascinated me. But still, the biggest bugbear for me once I got my amateur licence in 1984 was the infamous Russian Woodpecker (although it was over-the-horizon-radar, it still did a fantastic jamming job!)
Wasn't that used for Jammer control? I remember one well, just outside the 49 metre broadcast band. It was supposedly well up in the north as it propagated for longer periods than would be expected.
Being a shortwave listener and amateur radio operator back to 1960, I remember that jamming on the airwaves especially back in the heyday of shortwave broadcasting. Today with less on Shortwave to listen to, it's less common. Years ago on a Caribbean cruise back to Florida, passing Havana Cuba, I could hear the jamming on Radio Marti from Florida to Cuba, I think on 1180 KHz. 😊
@viarnay Thanks 😊 Canary Islands are a very nice place. 20 years ago when I operated as V25CH, in Antigua, I was called by a Canary Islands amateur Operator. I have done shortwave and Amateur Radio for over 60 years, now being 80. I miss the old days of short wave reception, that we had before the internet. 73 de Ray W2CH, NH.
Yet more accurate research Lewis! Some of the BBC's HF feeders (different language streams on each sideband and were never jammed) to relay sites occasionally also carried RTTY data for those relay sites. This was frequency changes, array changes, general schedule changes, etc. and it was suspected these were being read by the USSR jamming centres. A test was set up using a frequency and relay site never before used for BBC Russian. If it took the jammers a few minutes to find the new transmission (they were very efficient!) it was suspected they found it just by band-scanning. However, the test BBC Russian-language transmission was found instantly, confirming the RTTY telexes were being read...
Thanks for the interesting video and thanks for paying tribute to Rimantas Pleikys, one of the best experts in broadcast radio and jamming issues. I remener the jamming era very well from my childhood and young adult years. What is interesting, the radio receivers produced in and made for the soviet market were only having 75, 49, 41, 31 and 25m Short Wave bands. And these bands were jammed heavily. At the same time, the other SW bands, like 22, 19, 16, 13m were, actually, free of jamming (as the soviet radios were not having them!) ,and one could listen to the VOA, RFE/RL, BBC etc , if only had the right receiver. To have this, many radio amateurs, like myself, or just electronics enthusiasts were upgrading the soviet-made transistor radios by rewinding the coils and replacing some capacitors in order to shift the receiving frequencies up to the right frequency range. One brand of radios, the VEF -202 designed and made in occupied Riga, Latvia, has become a legendary radio, as it was very easy to upgrade due to its very smart rotating cylinder with band-coils easily accessible and swapable with rewound ones. I had one I modified for myself, another for my parents, also for some friends. Greetings to all Short Wave listeners! @Linas_LY2H
The irony is that the VEF radios were quite a successful Soviet export to the west being sold under the names Vega and Selena. The adverts actually highlighted the Soviet expertise in shortwave snooping using "trawlers" with an unusual number of antennas.
What interesting is jamming has the opposite effect many times because people wonder what is the state is so afraid of and jaming strarts to creating more questions needing to be answered then if they left obvious western propaganda broadcasts alone
Exactly, a perfect example was in the GDR / East Germany, where there was a culture of discouraging people from watching west german tv through a variety of methods (as west germany strategically placed some of its tv transmitters for maximum coverage over east germany), but it couldn't be blocked without blocking tv in parts of west germany and causing diplomatic problems, so those people had access to those western broadcasts. However, in the "Valley of the clueless" (Tal der Ahnungslosen) in areas like Dresden where they couldn't get the western TV signal to reach easily and those people had reduced information / freedom to get that information, there was actually more anti-government sentiment and more demands for freedom, to the point there are stories of the east german authorities supposedly building in downrange antennas so that those areas could still get west german tv in an effort to try and placate them and stop them being so disruptive (the idea being that there isn't one area that will then start protests elsewhere due to being so annoyed)
Your comment made me think how Romania broadcast the American series Dallas thinking it would show their citizens how unscrupulous American businessmen were, putting profit before even family. Of course the main thing Romanians actually noticed were the beautiful houses, cars, and clothes.
Thanks for a very well researched video. Amazing the amount of effort and money that was put into the jamming process. The Russian government must have been very frightened by the free access to information. Very frightened!
The problem is that it was (and is) not information but rather material designed to "promote the interests of the United States of America". That is from their own website. IE propaganda radio.
A friend of my dad said, back when he lived in GDR, he and some friends built an antenna in the attic that they got tuned so it would receive the western signals but block out the jamming signal. That was the first time I heard that there was radio jamming going on in the eastern bloc.
Hell, the power adapter that came with the original HD Radio I had caused enough Interference, it blocked out the digital sidebands on an FM station and messed with stereo reception on weaker stations, where other, older AM-FM Radios worked fine. I got a better quality adapter and got better FM and FM-HD reception. We don't have any HD stations I can get on AM.
Very cool. I had a crystal radio in the early 1960's and a SW Radio also. Short wave was great back then. Today, much SW is just religious Nutters. There is fortunately, some real intelligent & rational content out there. I'm using a 100 foot outdoor wire antenna. Thank You & Best Regards.
I remember hearing really annoying jamming of broadcasts in Belgium in the early 1980s. The jamming signals were very annoying. I believe they were warbler type jammers.
I remember the wobble jammers that were used during the Gulf war, a rapid siren like noise. Not heard it since, and not sure if it was used prior to that. I don’t have any recordings of the wobble jammers (or even the woodpecker) but we did certainly hear that down under.
@@wrongsideof40 that’s a very similar sound, but if anything the Hawkwind sound is a slightly sped up sound compared to what I remember the wobble jammer being.
@@timmoore60 Yeah, just an approximation. But if anyone down the pub asks you about wobble jammers(!) you could probably point them to this, with a clear conscience!
Lewis, on Easter Day the ham bands were jammed off and on with a massive carrier signal that was 5 to 8 times the size of an AM carrier. It was a buzz or a clock tone. It was so large the splatter would cover 1/2 of the small bands like 12 and 17 meters. The signal would cover 1/4 of a large band. People in western and northern US did not hear it. The southeast was affected. Have you heard of this?
Started my interest in radio back in the early 60's, my uncle was a radio operator in the RAF. He showed me some of the SW Broadcast stations around the world and started SWLing. Radio Moscow, VoA, Radio Tirana, Radio Beijing, Radio Hanoi, Radio Havana, BBC World Service to name but a few. So many were jammed but still possible to resolve a lot of content despite the jamming. Eventually moved on to the Ham Bands, got licenced in 1979. 73 de GW8TVX.
I started in the 60s when father gave me an old Murphy radio that his father bought after their house was bombed in 1944.I trailed a wire down the catslide roof at home and spend hours listening to stuff from many countries .Still have the radio ,which is waiting to be restored.
Thank you for sharing. When I was in my teens, I would accidentally pick up Radio Moscow and other gurgling/high-pitched Morse code on my electric guitar amp. It was the most surprising sound to hear from an amp. At the time, I couldn't understand how or why this happened.
I've been rebuilding and listening to shortwave for over 40 years now. Sometimes I hear the most fascinating conversations, some tend to be very suspicious. I find older tube shortwave receivers to be more sensitive than my transistor receivers. My favorite radios tend to be from early 40's.
Yeah, 1988! The years of Gorbachev's "glasnost" - or, in other words, an ushering in of a new era of openness and transparency in the Soviet Union... Nice to the man followed through - unblocking Western broadcasters across the Eastern Bloc!
Here on the other side of the pond, I always considered US Aviation Weather stations and beacons our version of information blocking, preventing us from receiving European longwave broadcasts meant for local consumption. Admittedly very difficult here in Texas even without the AvWeather jamming, I did manage to catch a few at EU dawn.
I remember that back in the day. I also remember that moment when all of a sudden the radio jamming got switched off. The jamming tower was situated just 5km away from where I lived. It didn't cause much problem with the reception though so I could easily listen to what I want to on SW when the sun is set. I was a school kid at the time but was addicted to all the Voices of the West very much especially thanks to my mom who didn't let me watch the Soviet TV. But my favorite program was the daily Billboard Magazine Top 10 with Ray McDonald on VOA broadcasted not on SW but MV from Thessaloniki, Greece. It was all in English so there was no jamming there at all and sound quality was just a huge step up from what was on SW. I liked to bring my portable radio in my classroom and play Yankee Doodle - a VOA's signature tune at 8AM to the teachers. The dumb Soviet teachers knew fuck all about what I made them to listen to so I felt very proud of me doing that. Great thanks to my parents that I was born and grew up in the non-Soviet family despite living in the SU.
Cuba is not a slouch when it comes to jamming. For a long time, they jammed 1140 kHz to hit WQBA in Miami. (WQBA also lost a News Director to a car bomb assassination in the 1970's.) The jamming was so intense that co-channel WRVA in Richmond, VA was often unlistenable in the city at night. There was also Cuban jamming of U.S. AM stations in summer 1982. My employer at the time was a victim. Although few listened to our simulcast AM outside of drive, I did check on it occasionally by checking the AM mod monitor. One night, I noticed the meter wasn't in sync with the FM. I punched-up the audio and I heard Radio Rebelde! A little bit of excitement on what would've otherwise been a boring evening. I called our CE. He called our VP/GM. He called me and wanted a report on his desk before I left the studio. Needless to say, the Government Relations people of a lot of broadcasters were at the State Department the next day! IIRC, this was a response to the start of Radio Marti. Also, in the spring of 1980, Radio Moscow had a short-lived "North American Relay Station" in Cuba, broadcasting to at least the U.S. east coast on 600kHz.
That may explain why I had such a hard time hearing WRVA at night as a kid, despite living about 25 miles from their transmitter site. Even when we could pick it up, there was always what sounded like electrical noise in the background (sounds that were reminiscent of what Lewis presented in this video). My parents said it was because they had to reduce power at night, but everything I read said WRVA was full-power 50,000 watts 24/7.
I was a disc jockey in commercial radio from late 70s through 80. In 1980 I was doing morning drive on an AM 600 station in North Florida. We were having our antenna system being worked on. As was typical for AM we had an omni direction antenna during the day and directional at night (straight West to protect Mexico clear channel). We were off the air at night for a couple of weeks and I brought the station up in the morning. I brought the station up, and immediatly got calls asking what the heck was that commie BS we were broadcasting last night (when we were off). Come to find out it was radio free Moscow comming out of Cuba directed straight up Florida. I assured the callers it wasn't us. So, the US sure didn't seem to do any jamming of Soviet propaganda.😂
@@tvdan1043 Even 50 kW stations often had to reduce power and go directional. Only a couple of blowtorchs (as we called clear channel stations). I doubt if they went directional they stayed 50 kW
I love these historical subject videos, Lewis. You do a great job digging up all this historical information, the kind of Cold War history most people forget about. And the photos of vintage 1970s East Block radio equipment are wonderful. Would love to get our hands on some of that gear today!
@@michaelmiller641Her name was / is June Taylor, and she's a New Zealander of Maori heritage. Worth a Google - an interesting story about how a New Zealand dentist's daughter ended up reading boring propaganda in a tinpot dictatorship on the far side of the earth.
Very thankful you covered this topic. I was a little child when I and my Grandfather listened to the Voice of America. I remember the jamming well. Sometimes the people responsible for jamming did not know the language of the broadcast so they would randomly jam here and there. But the message was hear still even if it was fragmented. People would use different methods to enhance the tuning devices on the radio to be able to get a better signal if one of the short waves was disrupted. Older radios made before WW 2 where in much demand at some point cause they could be used to listen to wave bands that where missing from the standard Soviet Radios.
My mum and dad went on a cruise around Sweden & Finland ending in a trip to Russia in st Petersburg a few years before to Ukraine war ... On the Swedish ship they were traveling on all the TVs and radios just received 'static' interference even they're mobile phones stopped working when they approached Russia and they were over flown many many times by fighter jets very low .. I remember my mum saying the captain kept reassuring them telling them it's ok it happens every time they enter russian waters .... Sounds to me like the jamming is very much still a thing.
Cool never imagend my country of lithuania will ever make in one of your videos.😊 Edit#1: 10:36. My dad sayd that was a radio station. He knows that since he worked a short time as an army radio coms oficer for the army. Edit#2 10:50 the now closed old kaunas post office.
@@rockymountainbiking4030 Not just Lithuania, the other Baltic States are mentioned more than they used to be in lots of media. Estonia is becoming the model Democracy in the World.
Thanks for reminding me of the bad old days especially when I was out to sea trying to listen to the BBC, Well at least China hasn’t started ramping up their transmitters and sometimes their “Firedrake” signal is okay to listen to. Fortunately, Cuba’s money problems have slowed their jamming somewhat. 73! Have a great day!
Another really well thought out and researched video. Thank you Lewis. I shudder to think how much time and effort you out into producing these. I learn something new with every one. Thank you.
This is utterly fascinating stuff to listen to - imagine the resources that the cash-strapped Eastern Bloc economies threw at attempting to jam Western broadcasts into their territory. And all for nothing, in the end. I have worked with a few older Poles who can remember their parents listening to the Polish Service of the BBC during the period of martial law in the '80s, and they told me it was an absolute lifeline because it showed them that they were not alone.
Hey thanks bud. Another great video . I remember hearing weird sounds as we had a cb antenna on the roof . But , I'd get weird interference now and then and I remember hearing the old channel markers. Wished I could ask my dad. About it but he has passed 3 years ago
This video was extremely well produced and has great information in it. Lewis, you continue to do a fantastic job on this channel. Keep up the good work!
I read that during the Berlin blockade RIAS was some times so powerful people could hear it in the fillings of their teeth ! True or not I do not know. . I am about to string all the wire of my directional wire antenna out in the back field will have 415 feet of wire plus the grounding radials under it in the earth will make it receive northeast towards your side of the pond hope to hear the cool stuff you do .
Although there has never been a confirmed case of dental fillings picking up radio signals, it has probably happened. During the 20th century, fillings were made up of an amalgamation of different metals. Some combinations of these metals have been used in similar per portions to early fillings by soldiers in the field during WW2 to make crude radios. The earliest consecutive reports of fillings picking up radio signals occurred across Europe during WW2 on a night when the Northern Lights were exceptionally vivid. For me, that’s enough proof.
I remember as a kid hearing all these and many more. Some of the were extremely loud and nasty sounding. Being in the US, many times you could distinguish both the station and jammer; and even augment one or the by antenna orientation. I sure miss the SW stations, you could get different versions of news; so you could pick your propaganda. Some of the propaganda was so outrageous that it was a hoot to listen to. Thanks for the video and 73… 😊
Got a surprise when making up an amplifier kit back in the 1980s and found the short unshielded cable to the volume control caused it to pick up a Russian shortwave broadcast clearly.
My cousin had a bass guitar amplifier that when he put his tongue to the cord it would pick up a local aussie radio station… still have never learned exactly why
Makes me wonder if RTE had an international service if that would have been jammed. There was briefly an Irish Overseas Radio service that I think had nothing to do with RTE that broadcast on short wave in the 1990s I believe but the closest RTE got to an international radio service was 252 on long wave and that jammed Algeria until it was switched off.
Atlantic 252 ? I recall getting good reception of that driving all the way from Bristol to Blackpool. A few years later a pilot told me they listened to it in the cockpit as the NBD receiver could be tuned to it.
There are far more ways for people to receive data from other parts of the world for it to work now. Instead they seem to rely on being able to brainwash or frighten a large proportion of the population to believe that NOT listening to anything foreign is not only your patriotic duty, but that only the state services from VGTRK tell the truth.
@@thomashenden71 people should worry about their brains being massively, all them media cannons, jammed. Some positioning sys gotta be the least of their worries.
When Chernobyl exploded, Soviet authorities did not alert the population during the first most dangrous weeks when the air was full of radioactive iodine, moreover people were forced to attend the1st May demonstrations in nearby cities like Kyiv or Homiel as if nothing happened. I was lucky that my father used to listen to the "enemies' voices" on shortwave, and got aware of the accident a few days after it happened, much earlier than everyone else, and made me stay at home even though there was great weather outside, probably saving my health or even life -- quite a lot of my childhood mates suffered from thyroid-related problems and even cancers, i didn't. Also, as far as he remembers, back in 70s-80s RFE/RL has always been heavily jammed, VoA was jammed not so thoroughly and could be heard, while BBC and DW were not jammed at all most of the time. Additionally there was barely no jamming on the shorter bands 19m and 16m not used in the USSR, so a skilled person could retune an existing receiver to them for better listening. Also it was hard and expensive, but quite possible to get an export version of a soviet or a foreign radio supporting these bands. And thank you for dedicating the video to Rimantas Pleikys: apart from his great work on radio jamming history, he stood behind Radio Baltic Waves that relayed Belarusian RFE/RL service on MW from Vilnius and even had own programming towards Belarus in early 2000s: listening to these 612KHz transmissions in my Walkman impacted me a lot back then. 15 years later i payed a visit to the transmitter site before it got demolished.
Oh wow, I remember as a kid picking up Russian stations with multiple people speaking at the same time and thought it was a few stations overlapping! now I know what it was!. Thanks for this great video.
It is little known that the Eurovission Song Contest was pushed by the Western Powers as a means of overcoming Soviet jamming of Western television. Basic principle was that all of Europes television station transmitters would pushing out the same program. It is the reason why the program had such a lavish presentation.
Nope, that’s a myth. You can’t overcome jamming like that. Also jamming wasn’t that constant and complete - you could and did get broadcasts. RF propagation caused more issues.
@@gustavevilleneuvedehoff-un5459 Surely you have answered your own point which is probably correct, if jamming g was complete. However it was evidently not as you indicate allowing some western TV tx's to be recieved. They were all carrying the same program.
@@longsighted oh, where do I begin. First, simultaneous transmission wouldn’t have improved on power output, as it couldn’t have technically been simultaneous. Second, the frequencies and often signal standards were different - no multiplier again. And, finally, they didn’t jam tv signal as the frequency it operates on doesn’t really travel far.
@@gustavevilleneuvedehoff-un5459 I concuur with your technical observations. However the song contest was pushed by the western powers in a way to illustrate western vibrant living standards. How effective it was for the money invested (in scheme of things small) is only known and possibly summized by those who promoted the plan. However the song contest still survives today in much the extravagant and some times bazaar presentation it pioneered in those very early days of television. I suppose they thought it was another headache for the Soviet Union to contend with.
@@MrDuncl Radio Tirana used to talk a lot about tractor production, the UK didn't need to jam it, it was not a station to listen to for long although it was a very strong signal in London.
In the late 60s and early 70s I had a large cabinet type tube radio that would tune some of the shortwave bands. There were religious broadcasters, VOA, Radio Australia, RSA; rarely would I get USSR. I knew nothing about propagation. Eventually I learned that low frequencies do better in darkness and high frequencies do better in daylight. Heard a few jammers in the background. I had a longwire antenna. Oklahoma
i managed to get a hold of some LP records which were used by Radio Free Europe. Crazy to hear the music from the same discs that perhaps millions have heard over shortwave.
Regarding the jammer callsigns - the two letter ones were within the USSR, the alpha-numeric ones were located in satellite states such as Bulgaria. How do we know this? In the mid-80s, the BBC Receiving Station at Crowsley Park was involved in an international exercise to identify the source of this "harmful interference" (a euphemism for "deliberate jamming"). In conjunction with Radcontrol Baldock (that had DFing facilities) and monitoring stations overseas, a mass of information was collated, identifying the offending sites and formally complaining the the governments concerned. Checking jamming of BBC broadcasts was a daily task at BBC Monitoring, and functioned as something of a beacon of East-West relationships; for instance, BBC Polish had been clear until martial law was declared in Poland, when it started again. RFE and Radio Liberty were the main targets, and were still jammed for a time after jamming of the BBC, VoA and DW had stopped. The very last services to be jammed were actually Bulgarian - jamming of RFE Bulgarian continued for a few weeks after all the other jamming had ceased, presumably at the request of the Bulgarian government.
The iron curtain was real.thing Although most people never understood the great lengths people would go to to get information from both sides..today the same thing happens using cyber communications..different times same.story
Seems to me that with how many different ways we have to communicate now, they can't just jam a signal anymore. Every major nation has its own army of misinfo agents. Just a symphony of garbage fed to us now to obfuscate the truth instead of jamming.. Our poor brains! lol
Interesting to look at jamming history in the UK. As far as I can tell the UK government, even during the wars, never jammed overseas transmissions - even Lord Haw -Haw. The only use of jamming, that I can find , was back in 1970 when Harold Wilson authorised jamming of RNI / Radio Caroline who had started an active campaign against the Labour Party, and Wilson, before the General Election. It was said he authorised the use of a massive 1 megawatt transmitter reserved for National Emergency use. Wilson lost the election. I guess that was an early for of Election Rigging by Social Media!
@@belstar1128 It is probably done differently - they can (and probably do) block internet sites. The Radio Caroline / RNI jamming was on the medium MW AM band - apart from the fact that Wilson was scared the pirates would expand on his alleged infidelity with his secretary the Record Companies lobbied the government because they saw a loss of revenue.
I believe there was a SMALL amount of jamming carried out by Britain in WW2, but for military reasons - German broadcasts carrying information for bomber missions etc - rather than to stop the public listening to enemy broadcasts.
It’s wild that governments go to such lengths to keep their people from hearing others people’s truths and opinions. Imagine what our government is doing to us now.
@@cryptickcryptick2241oh, governments of the majority of White countries block so much. Try to question anything about WW2 and not only do your social media posts get wiped almost instantly but you could go to prison
I have the book your video is based on i remember hearing those jumnled up vouce jammers once as i tuned across a jammer the nouse stopped and radio moscow appeared in its place it wasobviousley an error but proof jamming was made in USSR. The Kaunas radio station today transmitson 1386 khz programs in Ukranian and polish power is only 75Kw
I own many SW receivers, over 50 Halicrafters, many more japanese ones. SW amd LW are topics of my interest and on net i have found declassified reports from CIA listening post in Belgrade from 50s/60s. Many, many pages of interesting stuff. Yugoslavia did not jam western stations so it was ideal for installing listening and measuring station in US embassy.
China also jammed broadcast signals on HF and MF. But LF seemed to be relatively free of jamming, except for the use of identical frequencies by very high power Soviet bloc domestic broadcast transmitters. (Up to 2 Megawatts for a while.) Curiously, the BBC's 200kHz Long Wave broadcasts were often clearly audible in New South Wales, Australia when I was there around 1970, with no obvious attempts at continuous jamming, except for the big Radio Moscow broadcasts on the same frequency. But the BBC and Moscow broadcasts were not always simultaneous. For instance, after midnight, UTC, until 06:00, the BBC World Service used to take over from domestic Light Programme (then Radio 2 but now Radio 4) daytime broadcasts on 200kHz. So at certain times of day or night, anyone in Southeast and Eastern Asia with a Long Wave receiver could listen to BBC News and other transmissions. Of course, the 200kHz frequency (which was also a frequency standard signal with low bit rate clock synchronisation data on the carrier, was changed later to the present 198kHz. The BBC 198 kHz transmissions will discontinue when the very few remaining high power transmitting valves can no longer be rebuilt. They have been run at reduced power for several years already, in an attempt to prolong their useable life. Will Moscow continue to use the frequency when that happens? Time will tell.
I remember listening to the Voice of Russia way back when I started listening to shortwave in earnest. My biggest problem was that I was too close to our local AM station and there were so many heterodynes it acted as a jammer.:(
As a schoolboy in the early 60s, I would listen to the Soviet stations after the BBC had closed down for the night. They were propaganda alright but nothing that affected my politics, more about grain and steel production and other national statistics. Of course there was VOI but the others were more exotic. I often arrived at school tired.
I read about these systems in the Metro series of Books by Dimitri Glukovski. such an insane idea to build a jamming wall that massive to keep forign music and information out
1 MW, not environment friendly, even with 380VAC here I couldn't pull off that one. max 5Kw, but my antennas wouldn't survive. Although I worked with such power transmitters when I was part of Broadcast Partners in the Netherlands, doing work in Belgium. For both national and local FM radiostations, and later DAB+ crap. I remember in the 70 that we jammed the woodpecker in a international effort. Great times. Btw, I bought you a coffee, a very strong one 😅
