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.
(but yes I do miss those simpler days - but I guess the basics now is making an Arduino flash an LED)
Or
mplayer 'https://a.files.bbci.co.uk/ms6/live/3441A116-B12E-4D2F-ACA8-C1984642FA4B/audio/simulcast/dash/nonuk/pc_hd_abr_v2/aks/bbc_radio_fourfm.mpd'
vlc 'https://lsn.lv/bbcradio.m3u8?station=bbc_radio_fourfm%22&bitrate=320000%22'
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.
(Also doesn’t analogue FM also kinda cut off fairly abruptly?)
Really soured me on this digital radio technology.
With apologies to Affabeck Lauder
Building equipment that works on frequencies this low, and avoiding natural interference, can be extremely difficult.
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.
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.)
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Letters_of_last_resort#:~:text...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_longwave_radio_broadca...
Rather defensive press release thing from the BBC: https://www.bbc.com/mediacentre/articles/2026/radio-4-broadc...
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
Going by [1], emitted power.
[1] https://www.bbceng.info/Operations/transmitter_ops/Reminisce...
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.
In the USA there have never been commercial longwave stations, though various WWV time signals are broadcast in that band.
That, and Atlantic 252 (I believe now long gone) were what he woke up to every morning.
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."
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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.