That's such a pity. Building a simple AM radio receiver was a simplest and coolest electronics project to do with kids.
You need two transistors, a ferrite coil and a small set of simpler elements. And it is so simple you can actually explain what every part of the circuit does.
And then the reward... Once built you could listen to BBC regardless of where you are in Europe. My kids just LOVED IT, no Netflix K-Drama replaces this experience. My daughter was listening to BBC on her radio every night going to sleep.
I was listening to DAB in the car, not so far from here last weekend, and it kept cutting out. Whereas you could get LW everywhere!
I developed a love of cricket on Test Match Special from a very young age. A tiny inexpensive radio could get it anywhere. I actually never minded the interruptions from the Shipping Forecast, the real reason they kept this service up for so long. I know there are many ways to get a forecast now, none of which is as reliable as radio 4.
Digital radio was always going to be crap, it doesn't degrade gradually as signal gets worse
They should have just put all the money into a better 4G network and ran radio through that.
Some things in life happen for the very last time and we never realize it. Where were you when Jim Maxwell interrupted the test match coverage, for the final time, to declare that “listeners on long wave will now hear the shipp-ing four-cairst”? :)
IMO, when the last LW transmitter shuts down, the whole band needs to be reallocated to hams. Realistic small-ish antennas are shockingly doable with a capacitance hat, loading coil, and counterpoise.
There’s still a lot of utility stations in the LF/longwave band. Particularly time signals (WWVB in the US, ALS162 in France, DCF77 in Germany, JJY in Japan, etc.) and NDB beacons.
At least in VK/Australia, there’s the 2200 meter band, but it’s quite limited (1W power limit, CW/digital only, 135.7–137.8 kHz).
At the same time, as much as I don’t want the AM broadcast band to die, I’d love an amateur band in the lower/middle part of MF/MW.
> There’s still a lot of utility stations in the LF/longwave band. Particularly time signals (WWVB in the US, ALS162 in France, DCF77 in Germany, JJY in Japan, etc.)
I meant just the broadcast band 148.5-283.5 kHz. (Though I'd love if 2200m and 630m were just a bit wider.)
> and NDB beacons.
Good point[1]. So 148.5-200 kHz in ITU Region 2 (and keep LowFER allowances on 160-190kHz as a consolation prize.)
In the UK we have 2200m but it's 1W *ERP*, so you're probably running a good couple of kW to get there with any practicable aerial.
We've also got a chunk just off the bottom of MW around 475kHz, which ought to be good for long-range night-time communications. It's licenced for CW, QRSS, and narrow-band digital modes.
Side Note -
VLF ( Very Low Frequency ) signals (3-30 kHz) propagate via surface wave or skywave, offering stable communication for submarines through saltwater.
These transmitters consume insane amounts of power. Per Wikipedia, that's 500 kW of rated transmission power for this one [1], so probably a solid megawatt of grid power input.
At 30 ct/kWh, that's 300€ per hour, 7200€ per day and about 2.6 million € a year - for a customer base that is only decreasing.
Also bear in mind that Droitwitch is radiating 3 different services. Talk Sport (1053 kHz), Radio 4 (198 kHz) and Radio Five Live (693 kHz).
My suspicion is that this means an exciter and a stack of amps per service, which then go through a two stage combiner and out to the antenna. There might even be a pair of exciters and amps per service depending on redundancy.
The combiners (certainly for FM/DAB/TV services) also cause cumulative attenuation as the signal gets combined each time, so even if all 3 are radiating at the same power, the first in the chain might need twice as much amplification to make up for losses.
As far as I know the medium wave services aren’t transmitted from the same antenna as Radio 4 LW, they have separate antenna, albeit with one of them (5 Live) doubling up as one of the support towers for the large long wave T antenna slung between the two large towers on site. Although I suspect the plan would be to move 5 Live to the currently unused Absolute / Virgin antenna eventually so they can demolish the long wave setup.
And by the virtue of shortwave propagation, it could be heard across the world. For the past month and a half (from when the news of its impending shutdown was revealed) I was regularly picking it up in Australia right up until the bitter end.
HF propagates through skywave (most reliably from 5-30MHz), which is where the signal bounces off the ionosphere.
In the MF (AM broadcast) band, you can observe this at night - in Australia I can pick up the 50kW Melbourne ABC station (public broadcaster) at 774kHz with a good radio, just about across the entire country.
In the LF (longwave) band, the earth’s surface and the ionosphere start to behave more like a waveguide than skywave. This is actually more reliable/consistent than even HF, but you need massive transmitting antennas due to the large wavelengths involved.
HF also generally wins for distance covered per watt - despite the massive power of Radio 4 longwave, I’d have no chance of hearing it reach Australia.
The Droitwich transmitter used to transmit on exactly 200 kHz which I always thought was very cool, but it moved to 198 kHz in 1988 to better harmonize with European stations.
The program was mostly the same as BBC Radio 4 but it used to diverge at certain times of day. I used to be woken up at 5am every day by my parents clock radio with the farming news which was very dull, but easy to sleep through.
"Although the transmitter was in Ireland, the signal's reach meant that it was often looked upon as a "UK national station". Reception reports were received from such locations as Berlin, Finland, Ibiza and Moscow."
"Longwave", usually written without a space, is an informal and not well-defined term for radio frequencies lower than the AM broadcast band, which in Europe is known as "medium wave".
In the USA there have never been commercial longwave stations, though various WWV time signals are broadcast in that band.
That is too bad, you would think these could be kept active for historical purposes. But seems these services are all being turned off even though I heard a few were very useful in this day and age.
I got my RTL-SDR to see what I could listen to, and by the time I tuned in, nearly all the short wave stations I could tune to were just broadcasting evangelical religious stuff, or other crazy conspiracy stuff. It's remarkable that these powerful stations spend most of their broadcast day transmitting that content.
This transmitter doesn't really have the range for reliable global communication, it's optimised for covering the UK. For the global communication usecase, there are other networks of military transmitters (DHFCS) that are much better suited for the job, and they aren't being shut down any time soon.
What it did provide was a simple but reliable way to maintain emergency broadcast to general public within Britain. And it probably should have been kept online just for that reason.
We do spend out quite a lot here in the UK for the BBC. They could easily dump a couple of expensive presenters and use the savings for vacuum tubes, if that is what is needed.
No idea where vacuum tubes were invented but I'm sure the BBC could find someone to make them.
> No idea where vacuum tubes were invented but I'm sure the BBC could find someone to make them.
The BBC has just cut its budget by £500 million, in an apparent attempt to limit the damage from the latest charter renewal process - which determines its funding. The new director general (ie ceo) is an ex-Google person, and they seem to be pivoting to become a social media content provider. So I'm pretty sure that spending licence fee money on making vacuum tubes to broadcast a signal that nobody under forty listens to wouldnt get past a value for money test.
(I like the BBC and its radio output, and I'm one of those weirdos who still pays the licence fee despite never watching tv or any of the stuff that the licence fee is required for. But it is becoming increasingly lost to me: focussed on triviality and politically cowed. Sadly, I no longer expect it to last.)
I'm sure they could, but sourcing people willing to manufacture heavily equipment/processing intensive speciality products for tiny runs will be MINDBLOWINGLY expensive.
This isn't about the little tubes that go in a guitar amp... we're talking about tubes that may well be too large for a single person to lift.
What's more, everyone who knew how to build things is either dead or in a retirement home. You'd have to re-engineer much of it from scratch.
https://archive.ph/pNwm9
That's such a pity. Building a simple AM radio receiver was a simplest and coolest electronics project to do with kids.
You need two transistors, a ferrite coil and a small set of simpler elements. And it is so simple you can actually explain what every part of the circuit does.
And then the reward... Once built you could listen to BBC regardless of where you are in Europe. My kids just LOVED IT, no Netflix K-Drama replaces this experience. My daughter was listening to BBC on her radio every night going to sleep.
I'm very sad to see this go.
I was listening to DAB in the car, not so far from here last weekend, and it kept cutting out. Whereas you could get LW everywhere!
I developed a love of cricket on Test Match Special from a very young age. A tiny inexpensive radio could get it anywhere. I actually never minded the interruptions from the Shipping Forecast, the real reason they kept this service up for so long. I know there are many ways to get a forecast now, none of which is as reliable as radio 4.
A/The real reason was that electricity meters were built around a part of the signal being used to switch between price tiers but recently phased out.
Digital radio was always going to be crap, it doesn't degrade gradually as signal gets worse They should have just put all the money into a better 4G network and ran radio through that.
Some things in life happen for the very last time and we never realize it. Where were you when Jim Maxwell interrupted the test match coverage, for the final time, to declare that “listeners on long wave will now hear the shipp-ing four-cairst”? :)
With apologies to Affabeck Lauder
IMO, when the last LW transmitter shuts down, the whole band needs to be reallocated to hams. Realistic small-ish antennas are shockingly doable with a capacitance hat, loading coil, and counterpoise.
There’s still a lot of utility stations in the LF/longwave band. Particularly time signals (WWVB in the US, ALS162 in France, DCF77 in Germany, JJY in Japan, etc.) and NDB beacons.
At least in VK/Australia, there’s the 2200 meter band, but it’s quite limited (1W power limit, CW/digital only, 135.7–137.8 kHz).
At the same time, as much as I don’t want the AM broadcast band to die, I’d love an amateur band in the lower/middle part of MF/MW.
> There’s still a lot of utility stations in the LF/longwave band. Particularly time signals (WWVB in the US, ALS162 in France, DCF77 in Germany, JJY in Japan, etc.)
I meant just the broadcast band 148.5-283.5 kHz. (Though I'd love if 2200m and 630m were just a bit wider.)
> and NDB beacons.
Good point[1]. So 148.5-200 kHz in ITU Region 2 (and keep LowFER allowances on 160-190kHz as a consolation prize.)
[1]https://www.dxinfocentre.com/ndb.htm
In the UK we have 2200m but it's 1W *ERP*, so you're probably running a good couple of kW to get there with any practicable aerial.
We've also got a chunk just off the bottom of MW around 475kHz, which ought to be good for long-range night-time communications. It's licenced for CW, QRSS, and narrow-band digital modes.
I hate to rain on your parade, but a lot of interests want the low-frequency spectrum. It will absolutely never be allocated to amateur radio.
"Longwave" has no universally agreed defintion, but good news, amateur radio already has usage of 135.7 kHz to 137.8 kHz.
Building equipment that works on frequencies this low, and avoiding natural interference, can be extremely difficult.
That station is said to be one of the signals used by the UK’s nuclear subs to assess the state of the country in a war scenario.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Letters_of_last_resort#:~:text...
Suspect it is the Anthorn station these days.
Imagine if the end of humanity is caused by everybody assuming somebody else told the captains about this.
I hope they update their protocols
List of longwave radio broadcasters - including those that have shut down. The shutdown list is much longer than those remaining (only 7 remaining).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_longwave_radio_broadca...
Radio Society of Great Britain reaction: https://rsgb.org/main/radio-sport/rsgb-contest-club/bbc-long...
Rather defensive press release thing from the BBC: https://www.bbc.com/mediacentre/articles/2026/radio-4-broadc...
Side Note - VLF ( Very Low Frequency ) signals (3-30 kHz) propagate via surface wave or skywave, offering stable communication for submarines through saltwater.
Seems like everyone's shutting down radio services. CHU and Weather radio in Canada too :(
These transmitters consume insane amounts of power. Per Wikipedia, that's 500 kW of rated transmission power for this one [1], so probably a solid megawatt of grid power input.
At 30 ct/kWh, that's 300€ per hour, 7200€ per day and about 2.6 million € a year - for a customer base that is only decreasing.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Droitwich_Transmitting_Station
Is that emitted power, consumed power, or effective radiated power? Without knowing that, your power calculations have no meaning.
Radio stations are usually measured by the last of those: Effective radiated power.
You can have a radio station with a 50,000 watt ERP, but running only a 2,500 watt transmitter.
For FM radio stations, it's all about the height of the transmitter above average terrain. For AM, it's about the ground conductivity and frequency.
I once worked at a 1,000-watt AM station that had a signal much larger and clearer signal than the 5,000-watt AM station a few miles away.
I'm not a radio engineer, but I'm sure there are plenty on HN who can correct and clarify what I've written.
Also bear in mind that Droitwitch is radiating 3 different services. Talk Sport (1053 kHz), Radio 4 (198 kHz) and Radio Five Live (693 kHz).
My suspicion is that this means an exciter and a stack of amps per service, which then go through a two stage combiner and out to the antenna. There might even be a pair of exciters and amps per service depending on redundancy.
The combiners (certainly for FM/DAB/TV services) also cause cumulative attenuation as the signal gets combined each time, so even if all 3 are radiating at the same power, the first in the chain might need twice as much amplification to make up for losses.
edit: MB21 (of course) has some fantastic technical info about Droitwitch: https://tx.mb21.co.uk/gallery/gallerypage.php?txid=1454&page... and there's some great pics here, too: https://www.radiorewind.co.uk/radio1/droitwich.htm
I believe they're still using a pair of Marconi B6042 transmitters (250kW each, in parallel) to provide at least one of the services.
As far as I know the medium wave services aren’t transmitted from the same antenna as Radio 4 LW, they have separate antenna, albeit with one of them (5 Live) doubling up as one of the support towers for the large long wave T antenna slung between the two large towers on site. Although I suspect the plan would be to move 5 Live to the currently unused Absolute / Virgin antenna eventually so they can demolish the long wave setup.
> Is that emitted power, consumed power, or effective radiated power?
Going by [1], emitted power.
[1] https://www.bbceng.info/Operations/transmitter_ops/Reminisce...
Doesn't excuse CHU: two 3kW, one 5kW ERP.
And by the virtue of shortwave propagation, it could be heard across the world. For the past month and a half (from when the news of its impending shutdown was revealed) I was regularly picking it up in Australia right up until the bitter end.
Wave skip? (Naieve question)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skywave
Bounce off ionosphere
HF propagates through skywave (most reliably from 5-30MHz), which is where the signal bounces off the ionosphere.
In the MF (AM broadcast) band, you can observe this at night - in Australia I can pick up the 50kW Melbourne ABC station (public broadcaster) at 774kHz with a good radio, just about across the entire country.
In the LF (longwave) band, the earth’s surface and the ionosphere start to behave more like a waveguide than skywave. This is actually more reliable/consistent than even HF, but you need massive transmitting antennas due to the large wavelengths involved.
HF also generally wins for distance covered per watt - despite the massive power of Radio 4 longwave, I’d have no chance of hearing it reach Australia.
The Droitwich transmitter used to transmit on exactly 200 kHz which I always thought was very cool, but it moved to 198 kHz in 1988 to better harmonize with European stations.
The program was mostly the same as BBC Radio 4 but it used to diverge at certain times of day. I used to be woken up at 5am every day by my parents clock radio with the farming news which was very dull, but easy to sleep through.
It was my father's morning alarm, too. But he was a couple of thousand miles away in New York state.
That, and Atlantic 252 (I believe now long gone) were what he woke up to every morning.
Despite the name I would not have guessed you could pick up Atlantic 252 in the US. The quality of it wasn't great for listening to music.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlantic_252
"Although the transmitter was in Ireland, the signal's reach meant that it was often looked upon as a "UK national station". Reception reports were received from such locations as Berlin, Finland, Ibiza and Moscow."
Thanks for mentioning the actual frequency. The article says "long wave" many times without specifying what it actually means.
"Longwave", usually written without a space, is an informal and not well-defined term for radio frequencies lower than the AM broadcast band, which in Europe is known as "medium wave".
In the USA there have never been commercial longwave stations, though various WWV time signals are broadcast in that band.
Online stream for those without a LW AM receiver: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ugd8G5w-Sfo
That is too bad, you would think these could be kept active for historical purposes. But seems these services are all being turned off even though I heard a few were very useful in this day and age.
IIRC, their operation relies on enormous vacuum tubes that the BBC can’t get replacements for any more.
In some way it is short-sited, as radio is a good backup medium for global communications in case the entire Internet ever goes down.
Vacuum tubes also aren't vulnerable to nuclear weapon electro-magnetic pulses.
However, other than ham radio enthusiasts I guess no one listens to analogue radio anymore.
I got my RTL-SDR to see what I could listen to, and by the time I tuned in, nearly all the short wave stations I could tune to were just broadcasting evangelical religious stuff, or other crazy conspiracy stuff. It's remarkable that these powerful stations spend most of their broadcast day transmitting that content.
They still broadcast on FM.
... on a patchwork off different frequencies across the UK due to the poor propagation of VHF
This transmitter doesn't really have the range for reliable global communication, it's optimised for covering the UK. For the global communication usecase, there are other networks of military transmitters (DHFCS) that are much better suited for the job, and they aren't being shut down any time soon.
What it did provide was a simple but reliable way to maintain emergency broadcast to general public within Britain. And it probably should have been kept online just for that reason.
Very few radios can pick up long wave now. My car certainly won’t.
Even when they can most people Wouldn’t have a clue to listen to it.
There’s a reason LW isn’t critical national infrastructure.
We do spend out quite a lot here in the UK for the BBC. They could easily dump a couple of expensive presenters and use the savings for vacuum tubes, if that is what is needed.
No idea where vacuum tubes were invented but I'm sure the BBC could find someone to make them.
> No idea where vacuum tubes were invented but I'm sure the BBC could find someone to make them.
The BBC has just cut its budget by £500 million, in an apparent attempt to limit the damage from the latest charter renewal process - which determines its funding. The new director general (ie ceo) is an ex-Google person, and they seem to be pivoting to become a social media content provider. So I'm pretty sure that spending licence fee money on making vacuum tubes to broadcast a signal that nobody under forty listens to wouldnt get past a value for money test.
(I like the BBC and its radio output, and I'm one of those weirdos who still pays the licence fee despite never watching tv or any of the stuff that the licence fee is required for. But it is becoming increasingly lost to me: focussed on triviality and politically cowed. Sadly, I no longer expect it to last.)
I'm sure they could, but sourcing people willing to manufacture heavily equipment/processing intensive speciality products for tiny runs will be MINDBLOWINGLY expensive.
This isn't about the little tubes that go in a guitar amp... we're talking about tubes that may well be too large for a single person to lift.
What's more, everyone who knew how to build things is either dead or in a retirement home. You'd have to re-engineer much of it from scratch.
It's hard to believe that civilisation has lost the ability to build longwave radio transmitters.
As long we still have DCF77…
I wonder how many of the Van Allen radiation belts is held up by this