Hello friends
We've had two frustrating weeks with out Friday 1300-1330 UTC broadcast, 15770 kHz from WRMI Florida -- which is usually the transmission that reaches the farthest in world. Last week, Shortwave Radiogram was missing, with the Overcomer Ministry in its place, due to an error in the WRMI automated playout system. The previous week, Shortwave Radiogram from the week before was heard because of an uploading error on my part. This week, let's hope for a return to normalcy.
Shortwave Radiogram listeners have noticed the absence of WINB DRM transmissions, Friday 1400-1430 UTC on 15735 kHz from WINB Pennsylvania. In my weekly email to WINB (to let them know that SWRG has been uploaded), I asked about this. "DRM is not on the air anymore," was the reply. No further details.
The WINB DRM transmission did not have much of an audience because the signal usually did not reach the threshold for a successful DRM decode. Few listeners have the devices needed to decode DRM (although the KiwiSDRs have a DRM mode, which works if the signal is very good). The 8.28 kbps bitrate resulted in grainy MFSK images, but it was fine for MFSK text if the signal was good enough.
That low bitrate may have been due to the fact that WINB was only using half of the 10 kHz bandwidth of a typical DRM broadcast signal for its voice content, and for our MFSK tones. The other half -- sometimes the lower half, sometimes the upper half -- was for some unspecified data. I suspect no content was actually being transmitted on the data half
