RADIO NACIONAL DE EL SALVADOR
1973 Recording

Radio Nacional de El Salvador was a government-owned station that operated from the capital, San Salvador. And it was sometimes heard with a fair signal into Melbourne, Australia, during the early 1970s.

Over the decades, it had a somewhat intermittent operation on shortwave and was not always easy to verify with a QSL card. At one time, it went missing for around five years before returning to the shortwave bands! The official call sign was YSS, which later changed to YSSS.

In his book, Broadcasting on the Shortwaves - 1945 to Today, Jerome Berg recalls that during the 1960s, the station maintained a program called "Reportes del Mundo". On Tuesdays and Sundays, the station would read out and respond to letters from foreign listeners. In those days, the frequencies used were 9555 and 6010 kHz.

Later, the station changed to 5980 kHz, and it is on this frequency, the audio recording below was made on March 18, 1973, at 1233 UTC. The receiver I used at the time was the 9-valve (a.k.a tubes 😊) Lafayette HA-230, connected to dipoles about 20 m high. The video below shows the QSL card and several pennants that lucky listeners (including myself) received.