As I like to say, comparisons are odious. To outright compare eras, people, individuals, and even free radio stations suggests one is approaching from an analogous perspective to reach negative, pejorative conclusions, coming from a 'better in my day' standpoint, if you like.
There are many variables to consider when standing up the 1990s free radio against its modern day iteration. Societal changes, particularly but not exclusively perpetuated by Social Media have altered humanity, and of course how people access and produce aural content. The advent of internet radio stations obviously involves a different form of technology required to bring an 807 valve rig into life, but unless one is misty-eyed about the ways of the past and lamenting how Social Media and Machine Learning AI have dulled individual and critical thinking, there are few if any compelling arguments to state which is 'better'. Preferences are one thing, what is actually better is quite another, but that only really stands up if there are two (or more) different approaches (traditional and contemporary) that ultimately arrive at the same outcome.
My longwinded way of attempting but failing to get to the nub of comparison when in effect standing one era against another is, yes, odious. If I was going to find a criterion to laud one scene over another, it involves the wider significance of everything now being instantly accessible, rather than one having to work for it and wait. If only from an intellectual perspective, I feel it is correct to suggest that what is pondered over and then actioned is preferable to the instantly achievable.
Leaving aside tech, societal change and the changing face of media consumption from linear to one-demand - heck, I even listen to Weekend Music Radio on catch up - this blog post is going to look at the respective shortwave free radio scenes, and how they stack up against each other. Not from a critical standpoint, but merely how they have changed, or perhaps have not.
Firstly, there are still plenty of familiar voices on the bands that in some cases were taking their first tentative broadcasting steps in the 1990s, whilst others have been around even longer. Radio Pamela, Pandora, Weekend Music Radio, and the Xenon Transmitting Company (XTC but previously Radio Mutiny) as a collective are arguably more active on shortwave than they were 30+ years ago, whilst further afield the likes of Radio Delta / Delta Radio, Voice of the Netherlands, and even Radio Barones are still 'out there'.
It is obvious to me that several stations from the UK that have only appeared in relatively recent times involve older operators who were first introduced to the hobby in perhaps the 1980s, or earlier still. I am not suggesting that there weren't any older operators in the 1990s, but in those days 'start up' stations such as Radio Confusion (later Subterranean Sounds), Live Wire Radio, Radio Blackbeard, Station Sierra Sierra, and so on were founded by a much younger demographic than those today who are introducing new names to shortwave. This obviously suggests that the nuts and bolts of building a free radio station is not appealing to younger age groups, with the technology and processes to get on the airwaves in general, not just shortwave, being far different to what they were.
This leads me into broadcasters who like to relay other stations, not from cassettes sent to them a la the Northern Ireland Relay Service, but seemingly random choices from the internet that presumably correlate with the operators own interests / tastes, if albeit without the knowledge of anyone involved with the inadvertently relayed station. There was an example of this only the past week, as Dance UK, an internet collective of DJs, found itself being relayed onto 6.9 MHz. Another illustration of this is the intermittent relaying of Coast FM, a Tenerife or Canary Irelands-based station, for reasons only known to the relayer. If you enjoy a station, why not just listen to it in the comfort of your own home, rather than feeling the need to be a conduit between the originator, and a somewhat bemused shortwave audience?
I am not saying the relays other than those pre-arranged and paid for didn't occur in the 1990s, but I would say that in the main it is a far more recent phenomenon, and obviously reflects the number of stations worldwide instantly available online, and their commensurate accessibility. Perhaps the rig owner simply wants the thrill of broadcasting on shortwave, but without the effort of putting out their own programmes?
It has often been a moot point as to whether shortwave operators actually want to communicate with listeners, many of whom are slavishly devoted to QSL-card collecting rather than spending a greater length of time listening to what used to be semi-curated programmes, with a dash of off the cuff chat for good measure. I am though not a hypocrite; in my far younger days I was impatient to hear an ID, write down a track or two, before combing the band for other stations. To receive demands for a QSL on this basis must have really grated with some / many operators, to several of whom I was probably a borderline pain. This contrite author is now very much a poacher turned gamekeeper.
However, for those stations that did / do like to receive feedback (no pun intended) about their signal and modulation, listeners were far more important in the past than in the contemporary SDR waterfall times in which we live. It is now extremely easy to monitor your own signal using a remote SDR from just about anywhere in the world, which severely restricts the need to solicit contact from listeners. If a station operator can self-monitor whilst playing music they presumably like, where is the motivation to put out an email address? Talking of such, in the early 1990s until about 1996 contact was all about writing to 'snail mail' addresses, often to locations synonymous with the time: Victoria Road, Salisbury; Green Park, Bath and so on, along with often heard P O Box drop offs in Wuppertal, Merlin, and Herten. There would also be a few stations that would risk their own addresses being announced, or that of a trusted associate, but there would always be a risk that a listener would, for example, put Midlands Music Radio on the envelope, instead of the more vague but safer MMR.
After 1996, I recall mobile telephone numbers being announced and just before the turn of the millennium, email addresses would become more common. Nevertheless, when I left the hobby in 2002/3 (until about 2015) mailing addresses were still common, if albeit complemented by their email equivalent. Nowadays, it is exceptionally rare to hear a postal address or a mobile number being announced. The change from traditional to electronic mail is understandable, and of course is instantaneous, but phone contact, or the lack of it, suggests that many programmes are pre-recorded, removing the element of live interaction between operator and listener. There will though be individual reasons depending on the station in question, but the phone ringing in the studio during a live broadcast certainly added a frisson of interest, at least to this listener.
One counterintuitive downside to instant messaging is just that - its immediacy. Gone are the days when listeners would have to accept quite a wait to hear from operators, who in most cases would have to twiddle their thumbs before their box number or remote address forwarded their mail. Nowadays, listeners know that stations that announce an email address will receive their email straightaway, and in their minds will assume that a reply will be just as swift. For all the good things that Weekend Music Radio has brought to free radio, prompt replying has never been one of them ! However, I think I am right in saying that Jack has received emails complaining that a very recently sent previous email has not been replied to, even if it was only sent a day or two before. This is now though a societal norm; the instantaneous nature of technology and a cutthroat marketplace has brought up a generation hardwired to expect everything yesterday.
There will I am sure be other areas of free radio that are very different in the modern era to what is four decades ago, but the use of 3 MHz in the 1990s during the evenings precipitated a significant amount of enjoyment I gained from the hobby. As far as I am aware, 76 metres is not characteristic with the free radio scene of today, but back in the day was the backbone of much of what was broadcast from the UK. It has been addressed ad nauseum within this blog, but the likes of Subterranean Sounds, Radio Armadillo, Weekend Music Radio, Wizard's Magic Spell, and Live Wire made Saturday nights something to look forward to. If one station wasn't active, others would be. There was, it seemed, an etiquette of not broadcasting when one of your aforementioned contemporaries was active, compared to today when all the technology in the world doesn't seem to be enough for some operators to check a frequency before deciding upon it.
Previous posts have reminisced about bank holidays and shortwave free radio. Of the few bank holidays we have in the UK, this is perhaps the one that I associate the least with listening to hobby pirates, as conditions often worsened before rebooting in the late summer / early autumntime. Maybe I just had other things to do during the brief spells of nice weather normally associated with late May / early June. The realities of adult life means that will probably involve visiting a garden centre.
Has free radio changed of its own accord, or is it simply mirroring wider social change ? I personally think the latter, and whilst the Alan Deutschman book screams Change or Die, free radio will continue to buck trends in some ways, but in the end be just as influenced by moving with the times as any other part of life. Putting aside the futility of stating which era was better, I am though sure, for me at least, which I prefer.
