Tag Archives: radio

Shortwave Radio: A Unique Collection from the Cold War Era

Posted on October 8, 2024 by kaysavetz

It was the mid-1980s, Chuck Vesei developed a fascination with shortwave radio. He used his portable radio to tune into shortwave broadcasts from around the globe. Because shortwave signals can travel farther than regular AM or FM broadcasts, Chuck heard voices and music from across continents.

Listening to the far-flung signals, foreign languages, and different types of music let Chuck discover the world far beyond his hometown. Those international radio stations broadcast news, religious programming, government propaganda, cultural programs, and educational content.

Tuning in was just one aspect of his hobby: he also sent postal mail to the remote radio stations that he heard. Those stations sent replies. He received airmail containing broadcasting schedules, newsletters, and handwritten notes from broadcasters. The stations sent trinkets such as QSL cards, stickers, and pennants. Chuck ended up with stacks of mail from radio stations. He saved all of it.

But Chuck wasn’t just any shortwave fan: Chuck Vesei was a high school student in Niles, Michigan.

Almost four decades later, he donated the collection to the Internet Archive’s Digital Library of Amateur Radio and Communications. Today, the entire collection is online. The Chuck Vesei Shortwave Radio Artifacts collection has hundreds of items that he received from shortwave broadcasters from 1984 to 1986.

The collection is a rich snapshot of Cold War-era radio, including broadcast schedules and program guides from Radio Baghdad, Radio Kiev, Radio Japan and many others. There’s a Christmas card from Voice of Free China, a card commemorating Radio Havana’s 25th anniversary in 1986, and wall calendars from Radio Beijing. Chuck also received hundreds of QSL cards — postcards confirming reception of a broadcast, each with unique designs and photos depicting the region and culture — and QSL pennants, collectable flags made of cloth or paper.

Three radio pennants: from Radio Canada, Radio France, and UAE Radio and Television in Dubai — QSL Pennants

“I developed an intense fascination with short wave radio, DXing, asking for QSLs from international broadcasters, and old radios in general,” Chuck said. “I grew up in a bilingual (Hungarian) household which cultivated a deeper interest in the world at large and especially with nations and cultures behind the Iron Curtain. In the mid-80’s the Cold War was in full swing and this type of thing was extremely fascinating to a teenager like me.”

He started with a Uniden CR-2021 portable radio, and over the months acquired a few more radios, including a Hallicrafters S-40 receiver and a Heathkit GC-1A Mohican receiver that his father built in the 1960s. “My father was an engineer who had a lot of expertise with old radios. I was fascinated by how radio signals could travel so far and under different atmospheric conditions.” His father’s engineering background inspired Chuck’s appreciation of radio’s magic: how signals could travel immense distances, influenced by the atmosphere and time of day.

Today, thanks to Chuck’s foresight in preserving these artifacts, anyone with an internet connection can step back into the 1980s and experience the wonder of shortwave radio as Chuck did—a high schooler in a small town, tuning in to a much larger world.

Experience this remarkable collection firsthand at Chuck Vesei Shortwave Radio Artifacts. It’s just a slice of the material available at Internet Archive’s Digital Library of Amateur Radio and Communications.

QSL Card from Radio Beijing features an expressively drawn tiger

Archiving “The Famous Computer Cafe”

Posted on August 19, 2024 by kaysavetz

A previously lost cache of celebrity and historical interviews from a long-dormant radio show have been discovered, digitized, and made available for all.

The Internet Archive is now home to 53 episodes of The Famous Computer Cafe, a 1980s radio show about the new world of home computers. The program included computer industry news, product reviews, and interviews, and aired from 1983 through 1986 on radio stations in southern and central California.

The creators of The Famous Computer Cafe saved every episode on reel-to-reel tapes, but over the years the tapes were forgotten, and, ultimately, lost. Earlier this year archivist Kay Savetz recovered several of the tapes in a property sale, and recognizing their value and worthiness of professional transfer, launched a GoFundMe to have them digitized, and made them available at Internet Archive with the permission of the show’s creators.

While full of time-capsule descriptions of 1980s technology news, the most exciting aspect of the show has been the variety and uniqueness of the interviews. The list of people that the show interviewed is a who’s-who of tech luminaries of the 1980s: computer people, musicians, publishers, philosophers, journalists. Interviews in the recovered recordings include Timothy Leary, Douglas Adams, Bill Gates, Atari’s Jack Tramiel, Apple’s Bill Atkinson, and dozens of others. The recovered shows span November 17 1984 through July 12, 1985.

Many more of the original reel-to-reel tapes — including shows with interviews with Ray Bradbury, Robert Moog, Donny Osmond, and Gene Roddenberry — are still lost, and perhaps are still waiting to be found in the Los Angeles area.

The stories of how The Famous Computer Cafe was created — and saved, 40 years later — is explored in an episode of the Radio Survivor podcast. The podcast interviewed show co-creator Ellen Fields and archivist Kay Savetz, providing a dual perspective of how the show was created and how it was recovered.

The recovery of these interviews, 40 years after their original airing, holds out hope that many more relics and treasures still await discovery.

A view into a cardboard box filled with 27 smaller boxes, each carefully labeled with a radio station call letters, date, and interviewee name. For instance, KFOX - 12/28 - DR. TIMOTHY LEARY

DLARC Adds Over 1,300 Items to New College Radio Collection

Posted on July 25, 2024 by kaysavetz

By Jennifer Waits, Curator of the DLARC College Radio Collection

In fall 2023, after learning about the amazing breadth of The Internet Archive’s Digital Library of Amateur Radio and Communications (DLARC), I started to dream about what a college radio version of that collection would look like. I shared with curator Kay Savetz some of my “wish-list” items, which developed into a plan to develop a college radio collection within DLARC.

Cover of the February 1967 issue of College Radio magazine. A large image shows a woman and a man using a large radio control board.

Launched in February 2024, DLARC’s college radio collection now contains more than 1,300 items related to student radio’s past and present. Materials in the collection include ‘zines, radio station program guides, flyers, playlists, correspondence, books, academic theses, magazines, and more.

Publication highlights include KDViationS, the ‘zine/program guide produced by student radio station KDVS at UC Davis; RiFLe from University of Kentucky’s college radio station WRFL; and program guides from WHRB (Harvard), KUCI (UC Irvine), and WMBR (MIT).

Additionally, we’ve created a handful of radio station collections for KFJC (Foothill College), WKNC (North Carolina State University), WTUL (Tulane University) and WSUA/WCDB (University at Albany). Take a trip back in time to find 1970s “music surveys,” punk flyers from the 1980s, radio station handbooks, brochures, and other ephemera.

College radio’s storied history stretches back to the early days of radio, with the first student stations launching in the 1920s. One of the initial goals of DLARC’s college radio collection is to locate items from not only the early days of college radio, but also from long-standing college radio trade organizations like The Intercollegiate Broadcasting System (IBS). Established in 1940, IBS began as a trade organization for campus-only AM carrier-current radio stations. It has been producing newsletters, publications, educational manuals, and conferences since its inception.

Despite IBS’ long history, it does not maintain its own archive; so it’s significant that we have built an Intercollegiate Broadcasting System collection within DLARC’s college radio collection. Now at over 200 items, the IBS materials include conference guides, promotional pieces, IBS newsletters from the 1950s, 1960s-era correspondence with radio stations, and nearly 80 issues of College Radio/The Journal of College Radio from 1966 to 1982. Full of station profiles, FCC updates, music industry reports, engineering tips, and more; College Radio/The Journal of College Radio was produced from 1965 to the early 1990s. We are still filling in gaps in the collection and are searching for more issues of this publication, as well as IBS’ earlier publications from the 1940s and 1950s (IBS Bulletin and IBS Newsletter).

DLARC College Radio also includes collections for two other student broadcasting organizations: The National Association of College Broadcasters (which existed from 1988 to 1998) and College Broadcasters Inc. (1999 to present).

These materials give scholars and college radio enthusiasts a richer picture of the history of college radio and the ways that student radio practitioners have intersected with both the broader radio community and music culture. If you have college radio materials that you’d like to donate to DLARC, please reach out!

The Digital Library of Amateur Radio & Communications is funded by a grant from Amateur Radio Digital Communications (ARDC) to create a free digital library for the radio community, researchers, educators, and students. DLARC invites radio clubs, radio stations, archives and individuals to submit material in any format. To contribute or ask questions about the project, contact: Kay Savetz at [email protected].

TV Historian Relies on Internet Archive for Teaching and TikTok

Posted on June 19, 2024 by Caralee Adams

Whether Taylor Cole Miller is assigning a project for his communication studies classes or putting together a video for TikTok (@tvdoc), this TV historian says he appreciates tapping into vintage video and audio material from the Internet Archive.

The vast collection of old radio and television shows available at archive.org has allowed his students to analyze the early days of broadcasting and inform their work, says Miller, an assistant professor of media studies at the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse. While the wide variety of materials help students understand the breadth of media history, one item in particular has become an indispensable part of Miller’s curriculum: On September 21, 1939, CBS affiliate WJSV was asked by the National Archive to record an entire day of radio programming — a gem now for students to get a glimpse at 19 hours of news, soap operas, and commercials that aired.

Listen to Complete Broadcast Day (1939) at the Internet Archive

“What you get is basically everyday radio, which you wouldn’t normally have access to,” Miller said of the resource available through the Internet Archive. “It’s a real opportunity for my students to listen and get a sense of what broadcasting was like.”

What his students hear that day is Franklin Roosevelt addressing the U.S. Congress about the proposed revision to the country’s Neutrality Act in WWII. Students are exposed to racism in the dramas, and ways advertisers were influencing people to buy products from Alka-Seltzer to Mounds candy bars.

At the time, federal regulations mandated and enforced balanced coverage of news — rules like the Mayflower Doctrine and its predecessor the Fairness Doctrine, which President Ronald Reagan eliminated in 1987. This provides an important lesson in navigating today’s media landscape. “Getting them to experience what news was, in order to understand what news is, is also broadly useful,” said Miller, who is director of the university’s Communication and Media Lab.

Just as an English professor needs books to teach, Miller said, he relies on the artifacts at the Internet Archive to show his students different samples of media over time. Miller’s students review episodes of The Shadow and listen to War of the Worlds to discuss media literacy as the supposed panic from the fictional radio show about a Martian invasion was more likely newspapers perpetuating a myth to delegitimize radio news.

Miller also teaches digital media production, where students make their own podcasts, and the historic audio can demonstrate techniques of storytelling, the power of sound effects, and the influence of advertising on the process. Students choose events to research and make their own radio dramas or TikToks.

Miller said he finds students invest more time in the research and production of assignments that are posted for the public since they know they will be seen by a wider and more critical audience.

That reach is also why Miller himself has been active on TikTok since 2021. As @tvdoc, Miller regularly creates 3–6 minute videos about everything from coverage of the O.J. Simpson car chase to behind-the-scenes tales from the classic sitcom, Bewitched. Miller said he likes to introduce viewers to publicly available resources so they can discover more about TV history on their own.

“The Internet Archive provides opportunities for amateur researchers to make a difference in our understanding of media history — and that is so critically important, particularly for local or syndicated television,” Miller said.

Miller’s TikTok audience includes other academics, fans of early TV, and the public at large.

“I think of it as an extension of my teaching,” Miller said. “I’m providing an opportunity to show the nuance of media history as it relates to American cultural history.”

Miller hopes his efforts bring needed attention to the role of preserving and analyzing media history. He was recently asked by the U.S. Library of Congress and its National Radio Preservation Task Force to promote the work of scholars in this field.

“Teaching the public is not only rewarding, personally, but it’s important for helping expand media literacy,” Miller said.

DLARC Preserves “Ham Radio & More” Radio Show

Posted on January 30, 2024 by kaysavetz

Ham Radio & More was a radio show about amateur radio that was broadcast from 1991 through 1997. More than 300 episodes of the program are now available online as part of the Digital Library of Amateur Radio & Communications (DLARC).

Ham Radio & More was the first radio show devoted to ham radio on the commercial radio band. It began as a one-hour show on KFNN 1510 AM in Phoenix, Arizona, then expanded to a two-hour format and national syndication. The program’s host, Len Winkler, invited guests to discuss the issues of the day and educate listeners about various aspects of the radio hobby. Today the episodes, some more than 30 years old, provide an invaluable time capsule of the ham radio hobby.

Photograph of dozens of cassette tape cases, each with hand-written labels indicating air date and topic of that episode. — just some of the HR&M cassette tapes

Len Winkler said, “I’m so happy that the Digital Library of Amateur Radio & Communications took all my old shows and made them eternally available for everyone to hear and enjoy. I had the absolute pleasure, along with a few super knowledgeable co-hosts, to interview many of the people that made ham radio great in the past and now everyone can go back and listen to what they had to say. From the early beginnings of SETI (search for extraterrestrial intelligence) to Senator Barry Goldwater to the daughter of Marconi. So much thanks to the Digital Library of Amateur Radio & Communications for doing this amazing service.”

Other interviewees included magazine publisher Wayne Green, Sheriff Joe Arpaio, Bob Heil, Bill Pasternak, Fred Maia, and other names well known to the amateur radio community. Discussion topics spanned the technical, such as signal propagation, to community issues, including the debate over the Morse code knowledge requirement for ham radio operators—a requirement eventually dropped, to the benefit of the community.

The radio programs were recorded on cassette tapes when they originally aired. Winkler digitized 149 episodes of the show himself in 2015 and 2016. The digitizing project paused for years. In January 2024 he sent the remaining cassettes to DLARC. Using two audio digitizing workstations, we digitized another 165 episodes in about three weeks. The combined collection is now available online: a total of 464 hours of programming, most of which have not been heard since their original air date. The collection represents nearly every episode of the show: only a few tapes went missing over the years or were unrepairable.

The Digital Library of Amateur Radio & Communications is funded by a grant from Amateur Radio Digital Communications (ARDC) to create a free digital library for the radio community, researchers, educators, and students. DLARC invites radio clubs and individuals to submit material in any format. To contribute or ask questions about the project, contact: Kay Savetz at [email protected] or on Mastodon at [email protected].

Radio Ngrams Dataset Allows New Research into Public Health Messaging

Posted on January 7, 2021 by Alexis Rossi

Guest post by Dr. Kalev Leetaru

Radio remains one of the most-consumed forms of traditional media today, with 89% of Americans listening to radio at least once a week as of 2018, a number that is actually increasing during the pandemic. News is the most popular radio format and 60% of Americans trust radio news to “deliver timely information about the current COVID-19 outbreak.”

Local talk radio is home to a diverse assortment of personality-driven programming that offers unique insights into the concerns and interests of citizens across the nation. Yet radio has remained stubbornly inaccessible to scholars due to the technical challenges of monitoring and transcribing broadcast speech at scale.

Debuting this past July, the Internet Archive’s Radio Archive uses automatic speech recognition technology to transcribe this vast collection of daily news and talk radio programming into searchable text dating back to 2016, and continues to archive and transcribe a selection of stations through present, making them browsable and keyword searchable.

Ngrams data set

Building on this incredible archive, the GDELT Project and I have transformed this massive archive into a research dataset of radio news ngrams spanning 26 billion English language words across portions of 550 stations, from 2016 to the present.

You can keyword search all 3 million shows, but for researchers interested in diving into the deeper linguistic patterns of radio news, the new ngrams dataset includes 1-5grams at 10 minute resolution covering all four years and updated every 30 minutes. For those less familiar with the concept of “ngrams,” they are word frequency tables in which the transcript of each broadcast is broken into words and for each 10 minute block of airtime a list is compiled of all of the words spoken in those 10 minutes for each station and how many times each word was mentioned.

Some initial research using these ngrams

How can researchers use this kind of data to understand new insights into radio news?

The graph below looks at pronoun usage on BBC Radio 4 FM, comparing the percentage of words spoken each day that were either (“we”, “us”, “our”, “ours”, “ourselves”) or (“i”, “me”, “i’m”). “Me” words are used more than twice as often as “we” words but look closely at February of 2020 as the pandemic began sweeping the world and “we” words start increasing as governments began adopting language to emphasize togetherness.

*“We” (orange) vs. “Me” (blue) words on BBC Radio 4 FM, showing increase of “we” words beginning in February 2020 as Covid-19 progresses*

TV vs. Radio

Combined with the television news ngrams that I previously created, it is possible to compare how topics are being covered across television and radio.

The graph below compares the percentage of spoken words that mentioned Covid-19 since the start of this year across BBC News London (television) versus radio programming on BBC World Service (international focus) and BBC Radio 4 FM (domestic focus).

All three show double surges at the start of the year as the pandemic swept across the world, a peak in early April and then a decrease since. Yet BBC Radio 4 appears to have mentioned the pandemic far less than the internationally-focused BBC World Service, though the two are now roughly equal even as the pandemic has continued to spread. Over all, television news has emphasized Covid-19 more than radio.

Covid-19 mentions on Television vs. Radio. The chart compares BBC News London (TV) in blue, versus BBC World Service (Radio) in orange and BBC Radio 4 FM (Radio) in grey.

For now, you can download the entire dataset to explore on your own computer but there will also be an interactive visualization and analysis interface available sometime in mid-Spring.

It is important to remember that these transcripts are generated through computer speech recognition, so are imperfect transcriptions that do not properly recognize all words or names, especially rare or novel terms like “Covid-19,” so experimentation may be required to yield the best results.

The graphs above just barely scratch the surface of the kinds of questions that can now be explored through the new radio news ngrams, especially when coupled with television news and 152-language online news ngrams.

From transcribing 3 million radio broadcasts into ngrams to describing a decade of television news frame by frame, cataloging the objects and activities of half a billion online news images, to inventorying the tens of billions of entities and relationships in half a decade of online journalism, it is becoming increasingly possible to perform multimodal analysis at the scale of entire archives.

Researchers can ask questions that for the first time simultaneously look across audio, video, imagery and text to understand how ideas, narratives, beliefs and emotions diffuse across mediums and through the global news ecosystem. Helping to seed the future of such at-scale research, the Internet Archive and GDELT are collaborating with a growing number of media archives and researchers through the newly formed Media Data Research Consortium to better understand how critical public health messaging is meeting the challenges of our current global pandemic.

About Kalev Leetaru

For more than 25 years, GDELT’s creator, Dr. Kalev H. Leetaru, has been studying the web and building systems to interact with and understand the way it is reshaping our global society. One of Foreign Policy Magazine’s Top 100 Global Thinkers of 2013, his work has been featured in the presses of over 100 nations and fundamentally changed how we think about information at scale and how the “big data” revolution is changing our ability to understand our global collective consciousness.

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