We just lost the most powerful longwave transmitter in Europe, and why that's kind of a big deal 

Perhaps ,soon you might be constructing a small radio to hear some freedom from the East. Just a thought.

@@michaelmullins3396 Haha , how times change . Yeah it's so true

@@michaelmullins3396 freedom like if you're calling a war a war, you go to jail? 🤡

"Freedom in the west" Those were the days

@@michaelmullins3396 I hope not. My country was a battlefield for Sweden,Germany, Austria and… Russia for ages. Whatever was build here was burned or stolen. For us the “east” is a symbol of pain and loss. As we can see some things aren’t changing from 1000 years. If nuclear weapon will be used who knows maybe long wave radio will be back….just because nothing else will not work

[in a tone of marvel wonderment] Say! I just wrote a comment referencing what you just wrote. But, yours is better detailed than my written note, as I just generalized what I read about The Beatles and Radio Luxembourg.

they could have continued with the program. it consumes a lot of power, these are just excuses. it must be heard all over the world lw, mw and kw. it always works on every receiver.

That was around that time, the first Motown songs were played on Radio Luxembourg during the 1960’s when the Motown superstars conquered the UK with such big names like Smokey Robinson & The Miracles, Diana Ross & The Supremes, The Four Tops, The Temptations, Stevie Wonder, Marvin Gaye and dozens more when it comes to Motown. Radio Luxembourg played a lot of Motown during the time when it’s called Northern Soul.

@@Musicradio77Network [in a tone of wonderment] 'Ah! I always wondered about how the Motown acts became popular in the UK.' The accounts I've heard about BBC Radio in the 1960s having selective playlists, I assumed the pirate stations off-shore from England were the contributors of Motown popularity among the 'subjects of the Crown.'

Indeed. Thanks!

So true

@@retro_tech Ill bet you can receive WABC 770 late at night.

She spoke French ?

now she can listen to it via internet at full CD quality without any interference

@@1sonyzz Internet? You do understand that analogue radio is light years simpler than any PC. And lamps can survive EMP blast as well. You never know what can happen tomorrow. Not mentioning all that "filtering" and "tracking" stuff that happens in the Internet of today in some countries.

​@@IDGinUkraine So get an Internet radio.

@@IDGinUkraine i am invulnerable to EMP

Thanks for sharing. I guess that was on 208 meters on the medium wave band? A station which already stopped a long time ago, I think...

Yes ,you are right, all the advertising and jingles are coming back to me, my favorite was 'radio lucky Luxombourg' sang of course! Thanks for the great memories, good times!

@@keithglaysher9201 You might enjoy this website then: 208.studio/

I sometimes listen to Radio Caroline on m.w. It fades in and out like Luxembourg did but can be good at times for 20 minutes or so. It's not intended for the Manchester area though.

@@bill-2018 Some of my earliest musical memories of radio are from Radio Luxemburg which my dad always had on in the car when we were driving back from my grandfather's. As such, Led Zeppelin's Kashmir always has the fading included in the song in my head!

If you listen to the Chinese propaganda stations on shortwave currently, you'll notice that not much has changed.

150 km range for a megawatt of transmission power is not that great.

@david line true!!!

@@pizzablender re: "150 km range for a megawatt " Hmmm ... something is not right. KLBJ (590 kHz) in Austin Tx at only 5,000 Watts (5 kW) during the day can easily do a 337 km path to where I am located w/reception on a battery portable ... just sayin.

I was sad to see the CBC station on the Tantramar marsh closed. It had been transmitting long wave since the 1930's and short wave since WW2. Most of CBC radio isn't worth listening to anymore, but if you can get the French Moncton CBC station ('Ici Musique') it is decent.

Not just the broadcasting world.

​@@drmoss_ca I had no idea that Canada had Long Wave broadcasting. Like everything, you only ever find out about these things after the fact! I had been under the impression that LW had never caught in in the Americas _at all,_ except for aircraft beacons and things of that nature... And maybe, just _maybe,_ communicating with submarines..?

Not to forget that mysterious, all powerful entity, "The Markets"...

re: "Yet the idiotic CBC wants to put all of its radio and tv on the internet," Those who work in "IT" today have no concept of radio, radio propagation, nor the scale of how fragile their technology is when storms hit or perhaps if an EMP occurs.

RTE, the Irish state broadcaster who had a majority share in Atlantic 252 kept the channel going for some years after Atlantic shut down, carrying their main programme, mostly for the benefit of Irish emigrants in the UK, as well as as a place to put Gaelic Football and Hurling matches, religious services for the housebound, etc, leaving their main FM frequencies free for their regular programming. They had been running it on very reduced power for quite some time though - as little as 50kW at nights, reportedly - on cost grounds, before finally pulling the plug on it 2 or 3 months back. Hardly some big surprise, of course, but the fact of them using the price of the juice as an excuse kind of leaves a bad taste, considering that the electricity bills were a drop in the ocean given the amount of money simply wasted, or spent on backhanders, in the organisation, according to the financial scandals that have hit the network since the LW closedown. They would have still been on the air at the time of this video, and we might have heard them given the pull of these old valve radios, but for the fact that they're being obliterated by Algeria, with whom Ireland share(d) the wavelength...

@MrPete81 that's what I liked about such LW stations. Shortly after passing my driving test in late 1991, I drove down from my hometown of Middlesbrough to York to do some Christmas shopping. All the way there, I was able to listen to Atlantic 252 without having to mess on retuning the car radio to another frequency as was the case with Radio 1 from 1053 to 1089 on AM

I haven't been able to pick up RTE1 yet. Happy New Year to you too!

@@retro_tech They've been thinking of shutting RTE1 on 252 down. According to wikipedia It's been saved by Irish people in England complaining... but I expect that's mostly a dwindling population of old people. I was listening to it just today - The Irish adverts for Hyundai cars are still pronouncing the name the way the adverts in the UK used to. Now the UK adverts have started telling us that the way the older adverts taught us all to say Hyundai is wrong. I guess you might get it with an external loop.

rte is due to close its long wave service ive heard not sure when sad times closing down LW/MW stations. Loads of MW local stations have shut their transmitters down offering FM and DAB and the god awful internet...

All the tech aside, picking the signal out of a real natural and physical medium cannot be beaten 👍🏻

In theory the saltwater will apply a path to ground. Reducing the signal

Thanks for sharing! The beeping is actually morse code for the callsign of the beacon. So you can deduce which one you're receiving by looking up the the call in a table like this: cisquet.home.xs4all.nl/NDB.htm

I lived in Morocco in the winter months, and I could then listen to BBC Radio 4 LW on my car radio afternoon and evening from Casablance to Agadir.

Can hear Droitwich here in Northern Finland.

200KHz is an harmonic of the 100KHz distress signal.

I think it was the ITU (International Telecommunications Union) who made the agreement to make more frequencies available for broadcasting, by changing from ten's of degrees (ie 200, 210, 220, 570 580, 1500, 1510) the number of the frequencies to nine, (ie 207. 216, 225, 576, 585, 1503, 1512, 1521etc) on the Medium and Long Wave frequencies . If you look at the Long Wave and Medium Wave frequencies you'll notice that the addition of the numbers of the frequencies will always add up to either 9 or a multiple of nine. So BBC on 198 when you add the numbers together gives you 18 which is 2x9! RTE on 252 gives you a total of 9 and so on! I believe that this was made for Europe, Parts of Asia and Northern Africa, though I am willing to be corrected on the geographical matter.

@@peterblake4837 re: "200KHz is an harmonic of the 100KHz distress signal." Huh. Used to be used for LORAN-C ... 90 to 110 kHz including the pulse sidebands that is.

Some claim that it was the Talk Radio Show of the late, great Rush Limbaugh show that helps sustain and even bring back AM in the US. Rush got his start with AM radio and as his "network" expanded he gave preference to AM over FM outlets. But in the fullness of time, talk radio also became just as if not more "popular" on FM.

LW-AM has always been much more popular than MW-AM in continental Europe and AM stereo was never an option in Europe anyway. Rightly so I think, FM is so much better and today the choice is huge on the internet. DAB gains very very slowly momentum (compared to FM the advantages are not that obvious).

Not only that, I spend a lot of time in forests and guess what, no cell signal but the radio is always available no matter where I am.

as regards DAB: it really does not deliver. It is digital and therefore you lose the sound completely & frequently, in the car and in rural areas. In AM especially, it was the listener who decided for the acceptable quality, not the technician who put an arbitrary mute-threshold in the electronics. Do you think noise was esthetically a problem when people on the continent listened to the BBC in 1940-45? Good luck with your non-robust digital infrastructure when the going gets tough.

@@Nettlebed7 With a digital signal the resulting data stream is either correct or it isn't, there aren't any states in between that make the comparison against the more traditional AM / FM broadcasts quite so relevant. There are thresholds, but they are not arbitrary. The modulation methods are also more complex, though they result in vastly more efficient use of power and bandwidth across the spectrum. It all starts out with an analogue signal where some combination of frequency, amplitude, or phase change represents a set of zero(s) and one(s). On the receive side assuming we have more signal than noise and a dozen other conditions are met, the resulting bit stream will be okay, but it will always contain some amount of error. Typically it will also include a forward error correction scheme. When this is applied, an error rate can be computed. If the error rate is low enough, a sync pattern of some kind will be readily identified so you can obviously go off and do something useful with the data - like extracting an audio code that contains your favorite tunes. There will always be errors, but you aren't going to hear one or two bad bits amongst many tens of thousands of good bits. If you can't see the synchronization bits, you can't do any useful work with the data other than go silent and wait until you can. This is where muting occurs. If this isn't done, all you would hear from the speakers would be loud points of sound at random frequencies. Garbage. It's not like the AM days where your music fades or you get some hiss or crackles, instead you will only hear random glitchy and very loud irritating noise, though I guess some people might like that :-)

@@nohandleleft your argument is not fully covering the issue. One can achieve graceful degradation in digital systems, as shown in best-effort rendering of Jpeg images over low bandwidth. In DAB this just isn't done. It is not robust enough outside urban areas. Don't promise digital perfection if you can't deliver.

@@Nettlebed7 I do cover the issue fully, and no, there is no graceful degradation of a digital signal. You've mixed up the transmission path with the information it conveys. Progressive JPEG requires a stable largely error free medium in exactly the same way every other digital signal does - that particular method of image encoding is also just a small part of a much bigger data compression standard. A digital broadcast signal is what it is, nothing more, nothing less, it can't magically transform itself to have a lower bandwidth with higher radiated energy the further you get from the transmitter. It stays exactly the same. Nobody promised digital perfection, what they promised was a method to shove more data across the same amount of spectrum, a way to make even more money from the same limited resource. I'm a former tactical electronic warfare drone, I now write medical imaging software. Not that this matters, but I'd like to think it gives me some knowledge on the subject.

@@nohandleleft well, with proper buffering of the low-frequency content, the effects of bit loss can be predominantly left to the higher frequencies. There is a lot that traditional engineering overlooks as regards robustness and graceful degradation. Packet loss in audio streams can be solved with deep learning, e.g. GANs for reconstruction. A lot of fresh literature. But that does not solve the original point. Are we irritated more by analog hiss than by stochastically occurring, fully silent breaks?

Once listened to RTL on the day that Radio Gaga by Queen was released. The DJ played it. enchanted, about five times over the course of the programme and said "This song is a classic, you are going to be hearing it for the rest of your lives". Yup, they got that one right!

I listened RTL everyday on 1440 kHz in the car, with one of those "copper wire inside fiberglass" antennas, right from the start of the transmission at the late afternoon.... Top music allways...

I can't receive it in Belgium. The 150kW of RTÉ is not enough to overpower Radio Algeria which is broadcasting at 1.5MW on the same frequency.

Thanks a lot for sharing! Nice to see so many people have fond memories with these radio stations.

Hams on that frequency made a transatlantic qso at those power levels.. some going!

Thanks!

Thanks. I tried to keep the explanation short and simple (because it's not a video about the Luxembourg effect) while still being factually correct.

They are still a flourishing TV empire in Hungary as one of the two remaining private-owned broadcasting companies (alongside the ATV Group) that are not spreading Orbán’s fascist agenda in their evening news broadcast (yes, the entire radio market is now controlled by Orbán’s dictatorship). They also recently switched their company design to the German look and it looks superb! Even I have recorded some parts of the switch onto my channel.

I got it out of a Master's thesis from 1969 which I found online: scholarship.rice.edu/handle/1911/90106

@andrewsim9180 I live in North-East England & often listened to Radio France on 164 (later 162) LW & even at night the signal was very good. For some reason, at 11 pm UK time, the signal would go off for about 3 seconds. I never knew why but always found it fascinating when it happened

. @@stevenoneill7166 I didn't know abut that little "interval". Actually, that 3 second pause is another example that would serve as a prompt/ reminder to appreciate the natural miracle of the aether as a conveyor of information. i.e. perhaps some exotic astronomic/atmospheric mystery was conspiring to obstruct the signal, regular as clockwork.........although, who knows, maybe it was just the broadcast engineers regulating or recalibrating something. I was always intrigued, and entertained, by the very faint Slavic-station signal (a voice) that would bleed over during very occasional long pauses on LW B.B.C. Radio 4 during hours of darkness. It usually happened at the top of the hour whilst the pause heralded the B.B.C. hourly news.

Thanks! Glad you liked the video!

Graag gedaan!

Thanks! You can see the full restoration process here: ru-vid.com/group/PL_om3vbdc5Y9Jk1WYUoORefe4iUHgZ1Ah

Zenith was the Rolls Royce of radio receivers. I have the 1958 Trans Oceanic .

Too bad the Hungarian government uses all the national media (and more) including that radio to broadcast Russian propaganda now. They also cancelled the digital radio broadcasting just to make even harder for non-government-ally radio stations to get a frequency for broadcasting.

Thanks! I restored it myself and documented the entire process on my channel. You can see it in this playlist: ru-vid.com/group/PL_om3vbdc5Y9Jk1WYUoORefe4iUHgZ1Ah

@@retro_tech yeah I've seen that, great job especially on the wood! a Friend of mine and me will soon have to do the cabinet of a Telefunken gavotte witch someone painted green with house paint. It will be our first cabinet restoration as we only had to do capacitors up to this point so we will take your video as a guide.

@@bennetenglisch1467 Thanks! I also suggest you have a look at David Tipton his RU-vid channel if you want to learn more about cabinet restorations.

@@retro_tech thanks for the tip I'll definitely look into it!

I'm pretty sure this isn't true, the first time the Beatles was heard on the radio was in Hamburg, then multiple pirate stations.

@@dennis8196 What you wrote has merit. Since I don't possess irrefutable facts about the first airing of a Beatles song on radio is the reason why I framed my comment attributed to wording of 'historical accounts' and 'may have,' and avoided using phrasing in absolutes.

@@bloqk16 I worded my response poorly too. Too late to change it without managing the context of the whole thread.

My electronics engineer father worked for CAA in NZ. He was responsible for installing valve (tube) NDB transmitters on Pacific islands in the early 1950's. These were "tropicalised" meaning all the internal big components were sealed into metal boxes. Despite this they corroded and overheated and failed often. He also flew very slowly in a specially modified DC3 called the "Cal Flight" to check operation, later including VOR. CAA developed the first transistor NDB receiver for the long Pacific flights using Philips OC72 germanium transistors.

@@howardsimpson489 thanks for sharing your dad's work. Would have loved to fly a dc3. Only a few left here in NZ.

I fully agree with your comment about the spectrum

There are already LF and MF bands which radio amateurs can use. Not many do though due to the equipment involved.

@@paulsengupta971 Correct, though people who do use it, are often invisible because they use sub-noise floor digital modes. So even if you don't hear anything, it could still be there! The LF allocation is extremely narrow though (2kHz) , and sandwiched between the very strong Teleswitch signals. The Teleswitch is tens or hundreds of kW, and amateur signals barely 1w ERP, so you need a VERY good receiver to be able to do anything.

The main reason for the end of all AM broadcasting is that the number of listeners cannot justify the high running costs. LW transmitters need a huge antenna, which has ongoing maintenance costs and ties up a lot of potentially valuable land. The biggest cost, however, is the electricity to run the transmitter; AM is not a power-efficient mode. The UK seems likely to have very little AM left by the end of this decade. Radio 4 LW is on notice of closure - the only LW station in the UK. One of the two national commercial MW stations, Absolute Radio, closed all its remaining transmitters last month - it continues to broadcast on DAB). That leaves one national commercial MW station, some local commercial MW stations and some BBC national, regional and local MW stations. Most of that will close in the next few years and continue broadcasting only on DAB. A small amount of MW may remain in areas that are difficult to cover with higher frequencies (VHF FM and Band III DAB). Technology and our radio spectrum use have evolved over time. Most people have limited interest in a signal that is of limited audio bandwidth and is subject to all sorts of interference. Increasingly services will be carried over the Internet; the UK is due to close its landline telephone networks in the next few years, replacing them with VoIP.

That may explain if true Explain why I’m finding the signal for RTE shocking compared to what it was in the midlands UK