harranth

A report on The Antwerp EDXC Conference organised by (the late) David Monson. This was an unusual meeting. We learned about the danger of solar flares on satellite communication. The BBC World Service had a rather boastful promo and an interesting speech from Andrew Popperwell. Brian Flowers of the Eurovision explains how their system works. Radio Moscow has started broadcasting its English programmes via the SatCOM satellite to North America. Radio Sweden announces it is on ASTRA. Page 496 has the schedule plus extracts of Sweden Calling DXers. We talk to Wolf Harranth about the QSL Card collection and what they are doing in Vienna to preserve the past. The DSWCI Tropical Band Survey is just out. There is news about Caroline on 558 KHz. Tom Walters explained that the BBC’s Hong Kong relay is performing well. Seychelles will also be used to serve East Africa. Radio Antilles is also important for the Caribbean. The launch of Newshour is announced. Wolfgang Pleines reports that DW Trincomalee is being reactivated. Feedback on this programme or the collection welcome to

An interesting catch-up show as we re-convene for a new season of Media Network. Diana Janssen is back from Asia and has some concerns about how the pace of change is leading to discussions of censorship. Andy Sennitt explains about challenges in Belarus. WorldSpace seems to be expanding. Karl Miosga of WRN explains a plan to carry their network overnight on SAFM. Alok Das Gupta has a new edition of his South-Asia listening guide. ORF KurzwellenPanorama (photo of editor Wolf Harranth) and MN celebrate 15 years of collaboration. Lou Josephs has been testing Shockwave from Macromedia. NOS has abandoned plans to produce a regional TV magazine

This programme contains a profile of Radio Austria International in Vienna. That station holds fond memories for me since I worked at the station briefly 1976-1980 in the days when the shortwave service was part of the ORF Zentrum out in the 23rd district. They subsequently moved back to the Argentinerstrasse across the road for the Funkhaus. Several listeners called and e-mailed after monitoring announcements at the weekend on Radio Austria International. The station is just putting the finishing touches to a new 100 kw shortwave transmitter at its Moosbrun transmission centre. But as Roland Machatschke, director of Radio Austria International, explained to us, it looks as though shortwave output from Moosbrun will be cut by 50%. 5.5 million dollars won’t leave much left over for programming. We also reported on the launch of the Sirius satellite radio system and noted that cassette holders were disappearing from shops, which is usually a signal that a format is coming to an end. We were still trying to work out whether to put old shows onto CD's for listeners before we realised we would never have the budget!

This podcast is actually two Media Network programmes rolled into one. We originated the show from Berlin on November 8th and 15th 1990, a year after the fall of the wall. I was keen to visit Radio Berlin International, the voice of the GDR, located in a former furniture factory on the Nalepastrasse. Because of its former owner, the building had huge empty hallways where the furniture was built and rather smaller offices alongside. The English section had mostly been dispanded by then, but there was familiar GDR propaganda material lying around in the office. If you want to understand more about the media situation in the GDR before the wall came down, check out the fabulous interview with Wolf Harranth who runs the radio documentation project in Vienna. Those videos are to found here http://www.vimeo.com/10320815 and http://www.vimeo.com/10320815 . What amazed me was realising that the RBI staff could see the wall from their office windows and that some of the presenters, like commentator John Peet, had gone across the wall the other way.

You will hear contributions from Wolf Harranth in some of the Media Network archive programmes. You might like to know that I interviewed him on camera for my video blog and that both parts of that tour are now on line. Wolf leads a team that has built the the world's largest documentation archive for radio. This reportage will definitely interest anyone who remembers or collected broadcast station QSL cards. In fact the millions of QSL cards, magazines, books and unique government records tell the story of communication across international borders. They survive on help from volunteers and I hope that this second video will help to explain why they are so passionate about preserving the golden age of international radio. It reminds me of an early version of Facebook. This site doesn't like embedded video. So more details here: Part One:http://vimeo.com/10320815 Part Two: http://vimeo.com/11129204