Mount Evelyn DX Report

  VTVN QSL FROM 1973 The Fall of Saigon occurred on April 30, 1975. Today marks the 50th anniversary of that day.  I remember it well. It was another example of remembering where you were when you heard a critical news report.  I was in my third year at university. Driving to the campus that morning, I listened intently, captivated by live news reports on the car radio. People frantically scrambling. Helicopters hovering. Gunshots ringing out. I shall never forget it. On that day, North Vietnamese forces captured Saigon, the capital of South Vietnam, marking the official end of the Vietnam War. The event led to the unconditional surrender of South Vietnamese President Dương Văn Minh and the dissolution of the Republic of Vietnam. Following the fall, the city was later renamed Ho Chi Minh City in honour of the North Vietnamese leader. April 30 is now commemorated in Vietnam as Reunification Day (Ngày Thống nhất), a national holiday. Conversely, many in the Vietnamese diasp...

  SILENCING OF TIBETAN VOICES The Impact of VOA and RFE Closures A few days ago, I came across an insightful article by Gyaltsen Choedrak. He is a Tibetan journalist who served as a correspondent for Voice of America’s Tibetan Service from 2018 to 2025 and previously for Voice of Tibet from 2009 to 2018. He currently lives in exile in India. Recalling his experiences of listening clandestinely to the US government-funded radio broadcast services while living in Tibet and later working for it at significant personal cost after arriving in exile, Choedrak argues that while China is spending many billions of dollars to expand its propaganda power throughout the world, the US is withdrawing from the battlefield of information and propaganda with the suspension of many of its global broadcast services, including VOA and RFA; that this is not merely a budget cut but also the abandoning of one of the most critical soft power resources that has maintained American interests and values...

  WHAT ARE ALL THOSE WEIRD NOISES? A LOOK AT OVER THE HORIZON RADAR Something a little different today, but still relating to shortwave radio reception! Over-the-horizon (OTH) radar systems represent a technological leap in long-range surveillance. They enable nations to detect and track aircraft and maritime vessels thousands of kilometres away by exploiting the reflective properties of the ionosphere. However, this capability comes at a significant cost to the global high-frequency (HF) radio community.  Shortwave listeners, amateur radio operators, and even some commercial and scientific users of the HF spectrum have increasingly found their communications disrupted by the characteristic pulsing and sweeping signals emitted by OTH radars. These systems, which transmit powerful, wideband signals across broad swaths of the 3 to 30 MHz range, are known to interfere with legitimate HF operations—often without coordination or consideration of internationally agreed-upon frequenc...

  A25 TRANSMISSION SEASON 110 NEW FREQUENCIES MONITORED The new A25 transmission season began on March 30. I have been scanning the international shortwave bands, checking out what has changed since the start of this new season. Below is a record of some observations made during the first weeks after the changeover. For each item, I have tried to identify the former frequency used in the B24 season. But this is sometimes quite hard because schedules can be complex or drastically changed by the broadcaster, making it difficult to make direct comparisons. There are   more than 110  frequency and schedule change s listed below. So if you are missing your favourite station, it could be listed here!  NOTE: It is not possible in this list to cover every frequency change in my monitoring. Sometimes, I have to sleep when my northern hemisphere friends are awake! There are many more frequencies for you to chase down, and I encourage you to do so! It's fun to play "detective"...

Images for this post were drawn from the WRTH website. WORLD RADIO TV HANDBOOK: HARD COPY VERSUS OPTIONS In the April issue of the widely distributed Asian DX Review, Sandipan Basu Mallick wrote an article titled " The Rising Cost of WRTH: A Challenge for DXers."  In it, he expresses frustration over the high cost of importing the physical copy of the handbook into India. He highlights the surge in shipping rates, Indian customs duties, the devaluation of the Indian Rupee against the Euro, and the book's price increase of 100 % over twenty years. These are legitimate concerns for WRTH users worldwide. However, let’s break down some of these issues: A 100% increase over 20 years is not uncommon for any purchase. In fact, many household goods have risen by significantly more than that over two decades. Given the rising production costs and inflation, most goods would have done well to keep their retail prices at just 100% over 20 years!

 Shipping fees have also increased s...