World Radio Day – 13th February

Opposite photo is my Vega SW, MW & LW world radio was manufactured in the 1970s, Eastern Europe. Photo: PH Morton

Today, 13th February is the annual World Radio Day; celebrating the positive effect the airwaves can still have on the world.

Radio is still the single largest mass media in the world today. The radio audience is billions of people across the world, and yet many still do not have access to radio.

While Brit supergroup Queen went Radio Ga Ga, and Video Killed The Radio Star with the advent and evolution of TV, personal computers &  smartphones, smart speakers, there is still a place for the humble radio.

Listening and viewing habits have and are changing, but the radio is still the best, cheapest and easiest medium to communicate, educate, entertain and inform on a mass scale.

Remote and poorer areas rely on broadcasts to share knowledge etc. Radio can provide a voice for marginalised or oppressed people. Today recognises the power of radio.

From the earliest radio sets crystal sets, valve radio sets transistor, to the modern DAB (Digital Audio Broadcasting) and streaming, Radio still rules. Personally,  I sometimes enjoy listening to the radio more than watching TV, streaming etc.

The British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC)  is world-famous. BBC World Service (broadcasts in 28 languages) brought unbiased nonpolitical information, news, and indeed some comfort to many of those under repressive regimes, etc. Many still like to listen.

China Radio broadcasts more than 1500 hours in 61 languages.

I used to like to listen to BBC Radio 1, the pop music station, now I prefer to listen to more talk based radio such as BBC Radio 4,5 or World Service for news, views (intelligent talk as DAB display indicates!)  comedy quiz shows, documentaries, drama and more, also BBC Radio 4 Extra which plays archived shows from the 1930s to present day. Radio stations broadcasters like TV now have applications (apps) on PCs, smartphones etc., for allowing listeners to hear their favourite shows & programmes any time instead of missing or having to listen to live radio.

Radio can be a powerful communicator as demonstrated in October 1938, when Orson Welles’s radio adaptation of HG Wells science fiction classic ‘War of  The Worlds’ caused mass panic among listeners, who believed an invasion from Mars was really happening!

Here are some radio bits:-

It is recognised  that the first radio transmission was made from a temporary station set up by Guglielmo Marconi in 1895  from a base on the English (UK) Isle of Wight. Following pioneering work by a number of people including Alessandro Volta, André-Marie Ampère, Georg Ohm, and James Clerk Maxwell.   Nikola Tesla also experimented with producing radio waves in the late 1800s.

December 1906, the first voice and music signals heard over radio waves were transmitted from Brant Rock, Massachusetts (south of Boston), when Canadian experimenter Reginald Fessenden produced approximately an hour of talk and music for technical observers and any radio amateurs who might be listening.

Short Wave (SW) is still used to broadcast from distant radio stations as the signal/waves bounce off the ionosphere for long distances around the globe. SW is also popular with radio amateurs (HAM) & spy agencies with the mysterious ‘number stations.‘  Other frequencies used mainly by commercial, state & amateur radio stations are AM (amplitude modulation), FM (frequency modulation), LW (long wave) & MW (medium wave). Increasingly these frequences are being phased out and  DAB (Digital Audio Broadcasting) will replace them generally. Streaming of radio (& TV), is now also mainly done via the internet on PCs, tablet PC. smartphones & smart speakers.

Podcasts of which many are based on radio shows & programmes are increasingly popular.

The longest-running radio soap opera drama in the world is the BBC’s ‘ The Archers’, which started in 1950 & continues to this day. It was introduced to help new farming practices to farmers in rural Britain in an entertaining way, it then evolved into more drama-based plots! One of the actors who appeared in the first episodes remained until his death in 2009, over 50 years in the part!