Surviving World War Three...
V1.16
The grumbling broke last November and is picking up momentum.
We have cleverly left Russia with very little to lose if they do take a pop, as Ukraine is proving the truth of the old maxim that a good biggun will always beat a good littleun in the long run. At the start of the Ukrainian adventure, Russia was exposed as seriously inept - but we have now graciously given it enough time to get its act together with the money from the sale of oil and gas and Ukraine is in deep trouble... while ignoring the Yuri Bezmenov warnings for 40 years of becoming immersed in the distraction nonsense of gender and pronouns for our armed forces (farces?)...Maybe Russia's greatest triumph has been to reduce UK national moral to the point that there is no evidence of any appetite to fight for King and Country. Never mind our woefully discredited politicians. Patriotism is "so yesterday" as a result of the unprededented public and media cynicsm - traceable to the rot that was initiated by Tony Blair's 1997 regime. Coincidentally, Sunak is now punting the idea of national service for 18 year olds. Presuambly some members of the Sunak Youth will serve in squads of smoking ban enforcers?
Various observers believe that World War 3 has already kicked off involving the West versus Russia/Iran/Palestine axis with ambivalence from China and India.
Many missiles and drones have been launched; helicopters carrying presidents have come down in mountains, and undersea communication cables and pipelines have been "failing". This is actually getting serious if you can drag yourself away from the Euros and pantomime politics.All of which means the strategic case for scheduled short wave (SW) broadcast radio is as strong now as it's ever been since WW2 : especially in the online age where the path from source to listener is complex, convoluted with many vulnerable points for interception and failure.
Shortwave can reach over 4 billion listeners behind tyrant internet firewalls for a transmission cost of around £500 per hour. A £5k "field" transmitter and antenna can be set up and made operational in an hour by a trained crew. Compare that to 20 years and ~£100bn to install and commission internet/cellphone digital broadcast infrastructure that could reach 4 billion. Assuming everything was working in chains of hundreds of connected interdependent services.
WW2 had made “the Wireless” the go-to national information medium for the whole world – and those sets used thermionic valves tied to mains power. The much more convenient battery powered portable transistor radio appeared in the 50s, and by the 60s every home (and teenager) had at least one.
The swinging sixties was the seminal period for British Pop – and Radio Luxembourg (founded in 30s) was already available across the UK and Europe - despite the UK’s government’s autocratic control of the airwaves that prevented commercial broadcasting, 208 Radio Luxembourg was “adopted British media”, much to the chagrin of the BBC and UK regulatory authorities. As the name suggests it was broadcast (legally) from tiny Luxembourg using the world’s most powerful medium wave transmitter on 208m - in the medium wave, easily heard across Europe after dark. It cornered the teenage and youth market and so the advertisers lined up, it was clearly hugely popular.
Then came the offshore pirates operating in international waters off the UK’s east coast, and Radio Caroline 208, Radio North Sea International (and others) were launched from 1965 and quickly became an entertainment sensation in the medium wave. The UK response was typically anodyne with the 1967 introduction of the heavily regulated BBC Radio One to sit alongside the Light Programme which became Radio two – and the Home Service became Radio 4. Various other services have come and gone over the years, and now all these and more exist in a variety of online incarnations. And then there was the podcast.
BBC Radio has been rebranded as BBC Sounds. However, the audience has been divided rather than grown – the ability of the Home Service and light programme to reach just about everyone in the UK each week Is something a modern media mogul would die for.
Meanwhile, Television showed up!
TV had progressed to 5 terrestrial channels and the start of the idea of digital terrestrial TV – with another muddle of regulation, incompatible non-standard technology and an obsession with encryption. Predictable commercial folly ensued. The public was more confused than ever, and the same audience with a “legacy” UHF band4 TV antenna that once had the choices of BBC1/2 and ITV, could now spread itself thinly over about 50 digital channels.
Digital terrestrial television launched as ONdigital in the UK on 15 November 1998. However, ONdigital had problems from the start, and renaming the service ITV Digital on 11 July 2001 failed to help the matter. And Freeview still does not work reliably across much of the UK.
All subscription services except E4 and FilmFour went off-air on 1 May 2002 after the consortium collapsed, explained as being due to paying too much for the television rights for The Football League. However, the choice of 64QAM broadcast mode, the fact that at least 40% of homes would need new aerials to receive it, a high churn rate, an insecure hackable encryption system, the cost of having to provide free set-top boxes, and aggressive competition from BSkyB all contributed to ITV Digital's spiralling costs, before shareholders Granada and Carlton called a halt to the venture.
All this sets a scene that suggests the UK broadcast industry in the 90s might have been better managed if operated by a troupe of chimpanzees.
VAST amounts of money had been wasted on new technology follies - and for some reason the BBC and UK government decided to cut the relatively minor cost of one broadcast service that had been quietly and effectively going about its job of delivering authoritative news, “soft diplomacy” and British culture to the world: the BBC World Service on radio - since December 1932!
And then in the midst of this confusion, the number of digital TV and radio channels proliferated, and spread the same audience ever more thinly across all these new channels. In the golden age of 5 channel TV, ITV and BBC still commanded 20m audiences for prime time. And then the 500 channel digital diaspora was further confused by TIVO/personal video recorder devices - and now ultimately 5 million channels of internet and streaming.
I don’t think it can get any worse! Sooner or later, new formats of advanced programme guides will come along to help round up and redirect dispersed audiences to available services. Smart EPGs are a very big subject for another blog post. They can even be operated if the internet is taken down by WW3.
Back to the future
It is strategically necessary to rethink and relaunch the one broadcasting format that allows the truth to reach everybody on the planet in the most direct fashion, simultaneously: short wave radio! Remember that any smartphone is going to betray the user's identity and location - even to the extent of providing targeting information... 💥
The really fascinating allure of SW was and remains that broadcasts from the right type of antenna installations (at the right time of day) at just 1 to 5 locations around the planet can reach battery portable receivers in the hands of all 8 billion inhabitants of that planet. The ultimate mass medium. And it's "off grid".
There is no need for a subscription. A SW radio receiver is a one time purchase. Emergency and temporary transmitters can be put up in a day by squads of 4 people with a week's training. Internet infrastructure has taken 25 years to evolve to the current level, and it most certainly cannot be replaced in the day following a major natural or unnatural catastrophe.
~£25 could provide off-grid information from around the world directly from transmitter to this multiband DRM receiver, without needing to pass along sabotaged undersea cables or through a chain of smouldering data centres ..?
An Achilles heel of short wave broadcasting is that it may be jammed by those who would prefer the information did not reach the audience. This is, however, an imprecise process, and new and sophisticated ways to dodge jamming are possible. However, the very presence of a jamming signal will indicate to the audience that there is information that somebody wants to conceal from them... and it is human nature to be curious...
However, it is in the fascinating nature of short wave that the signals are bounced off the Ionosphere - which varies in height and density according to time of day and location. It is possible that a transmitter 10 miles away will be inaudible - but is perfectly audible 1000 miles away. The "skywave" signal sails over the local receiver on its way up to be reflected from the ionosphere. Back in the day, the transmitter engineers and frequency planners of the World Service could aim to "drop a signal" into a specific location. This can make jamming short wave broadcasts into an impossibly complex process.
Continued at https://poelposition.blogspot.com/2022/03/shortwave-radio-in-ukraine-why.html
The challenge is to make sure the audience has the means to receive the short wave transmissions. Some snazzy tech coupled to compelling content is a place to start thinking. Media operators ashould go weak at the knees at the prospect getting their content on a network where it costs ~£500 per hour to "pass" an audience of 4 billion.
Once upon a time, almost everyone had access to a "regular" radio with coverage of the short wave bands. Listening to the radio services from around the globe was a big part of my youth in the 60s/70s – I used to listen to the English language services of the Voice of America, Radio Canada International, Radio Netherlands – plus Radio Moscow and Radio Peking and many others. Almost all countries at that time invested an hour a day to broadcast their “state news” in English. Every house had at least one “AM” radio somewhere that was capable of receiving these programmes with a modest antenna.
The vulnerability of undersea cables carrying internet data is quite terrifying.
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