Mount Evelyn DX Report

  ETHIOPIA ON SHORTWAVE A brief summary of recent broadcasting activities. This blog post first appeared in the April 2024 issue of The Spectrum Monitor magazine. It has been edited and updated. Further details on this excellent publication are available at www.thespectrummonitor.com With Ethiopia, all times and frequencies are subject to change without notice! Ethiopia is identified as a multi-ethnic state with over 80 different ethnic groups. It is also a country with a rich and colourful history.  For years now, the Ethiopian radio scene has been quite volatile, almost as much as the political situation in the country itself and the Horn of Africa region in general.  In recent years, a few shortwave stations have gone by the wayside, including Radio Deegaanka Soomaalida in Jijiga on 5940 kHz and Voice of the Tigray Revolution in Addis Ababa on 5950 kHz. I was disappointed to see Tigray Revolution disappear, as I always enjoyed their brand of lively African songs....

  DX QUICK TIPS June 22, 2024 Over the past week, reception conditions have been excellent across much of the shortwave spectrum. Despite times when solar activity was high, the low frequencies have proved especially resilient. And, of course, being deep into winter here in southeastern Australia - yesterday was the shortest day of the year - afternoon-long path European activity was noted on the 31 and 41-metre bands. Below are a few highlights as heard here at Mount Evelyn. RADIOS : Yaesu FTDX3000, Kenwood TS2000 and R5000. ANTENNAS : 80m long horizontal loop, 30m vertical delta loop, 20m dipole, 5/8th centre-fed vertical for 24-28 MHz. 3325   INDONESIA. VoIndonesia - Palangkaraya. 1630 Arabic with music and anncts. Weak signal and // 4755 also heard with a stronger signal, June 21. ⭐⭐ 4010.01   KYRGYZSTAN. Birinchi R. - Bishkek. 1610 Kyrgyz to CAs with an interview. Numerous mentions of Bronchi Radio at 1620, then another interview. Fair signal with barely notic...

  11935 kHz AGAIN! RADIO SANA'A FINALLY FIXES THE TRANSMITTER! Well, it had to happen. After monitoring the faulty transmitter of the Republic of Yemen - Radio Sana'a, the Saudi engineers finally got around to fixing the problem....whatever the problem was! About 24 hours after I posted my monitoring research on this blog, all of a sudden, the obnoxious, buzzing transmitted audio finally disappeared. Now we have good, clear audio and a strong signal. I first noticed this issue in August 2023, and posted this video evidence below: The buzzing appeared to be an intermittent fault. But, when it was there, it made listening impossible. Some believed that it was jamming. I was not so sure! The 120 Hz spacing of the harmonics was not something I had seen before. So, in late May and early June, I did some sustained monitoring over a week. You can read my last post 11935 kHz - Strange Goings-On!   for how I came to deduce that this was a transmitter fault and not the work of jammers...

  11935 KHz - STRANGE GOINGS-ON! Oxford Languages Definition! goings-on  /ˌɡəʊɪŋzˈɒn/. Noun events or behaviour, especially of an unusual or suspect nature. Back on August 18, 2023, I observed some strange noises emanating from 11860 kHz, the frequency then used by the Republic of Yemen Radio - Radio Sana'a. If you click back to that blog post , you will see a video of the offending sound as heard here at Mount Evelyn and on the Qatar Kiwi SDR.  Well, since then, the station has wandered around on a few other 25mb frequencies before recently settling into 11935 kHz. And, the noise has remained. But it is not there all the time. What is it? A faulty transmitter? Jamming? We still don't really know for certain! The station first appeared in November 2015. It initially claimed to operate from the port city of Aden in Yemen, on the southern part of the Arabian Peninsula. However, it is commonly believed that Saudi Arabia, sympathisers of Yemen’s pro-Hadi forces, provides the...