August programming from FTIOM and Uncle Bill's Melting Pot

 

From the Isle of Music, August 2026

This month, we feature some of the winners of various categories of Cubadisco 2026. Cubadisco is Cuba's most prestigious discographic awards. 

Friday, August 14, 2026, 9670 kHz, 1800 CEST (1600 UTC), repeat on 3955 kHz at 2400 CEST (2200 UTC)

 

Uncle Bill's Melting Pot, August  2026

This month, special guest Ian Brennan, a GRAMMY-winning producer with a massive trove of world music projects will help us present some of his unique work, including the new Oman Bagpipe Singers release and other fascinating recordings from around the world.   

Friday, August 21, 2016: 9670 kHz at 1800 CEST (1600 UTC), repeats on 3955 kHz at 2400 CEST (2200 UTC) 

 

In addition to terrestrial listening, we do accept reception reports using remote sdrs provided both your own physical location and the location of the sdr are included. EQSLs only for either.

William "Bill" Tilford, Owner/Producer 

Solar Eclipse over parts of Western Europe on August 12

 

For additional information and  path maps, consult https://nationaleclipse.com/maps/main/2026-total-solar-eclipse-maps.html

A reminder that there will be a rare Solar Eclipse visible over part of Western Europe, including the UK, tomorrow late afternoon/evening, which could have some interesting effects on propagation on MW/LW and the lower SW bands. 

The total eclipse starts in the Arctic around 1700 UTC, passing through part of Greenland and Iceland, but the main area of totality will be in Spain where it ends just after 1830 UTC over the Balearic Islands.  Map and more details in August Communication - pages 5 and 6 and also in the attached page in case your printed copy has not arrived yet. 

Here in the UK the partial eclipse will peak around 1810 UTC (1910 BST) with between 90 and 95% totality. But DX could be possible in the half hour or so before and after this peak.

Some possible MW stations to try for:

Spain: 540 (Barcelona), 666 (Barcelona), 783 (Barcelona), 873 (Zaragoza & Santiago de la Compostela), 990 (Bilbao), 999 (Madrid), 1026 (Oviedo), 1044 Valladolid), 1081 (La Coruña), 1179 (Valencia), 1287 (Burgos).                    

Portugal (630 Miranda do Douro & 666 Bragança) 

Algeria (LW 252, 531, 576, 891, 981, 1422)                          

Morocco LW 171.

531 kHz could be an interesting channel with initially the Faroes and then Algeria potentially being enhanced. 

Listeners in the south of England could also try for BBC Radio Scotland on 810 kHz

It may help to check the bands the day before (i.e today!) or the day after to enable you to make a comparison during the eclipse. And if you have an SDR, you could to record sections of the band during the eclipse 

I noticed when DXing during previous solar eclipses in 1999 and 2015 (in the far north of Scotland) the effects on propagation were quite short-lived, but those eclipses occurred during the daytime whereas this one is happening towards the onset of sunset when DX signals start to fade in under normal conditions. 

Good luck, and do let us know what you hear!

(Dave Kenny/BDXC) 

Updated Music on Shortwave, Version 4

 

an updated version (version 4) of my "Music Programmes on Shortwave" PDF file for the current A-26 broadcast season is now available to download from the permanent link at https://app.box.com/s/kbdxb4c5lwpju0kpoi27aiwc35br2g2a 

Tiny URL http://tinyurl.com/shortwaveprograms 

You will also find here my "at-a-glance" single-page PDF A-26 program grids for the English language programmes on shortwave of CGTN Radio, Voice of Turkiye, and Radio Romania International, along with recently updated grids for BBC World Service and Radio Taiwan International.

I hope that you find these of interest.

As always, I appreciate any updates or corrections.

(BDXC/Alan Roe, Teddington, UK)

Update on Radio Taiwan International French service

 

Classic RTI QSL

Dear listeners,

The French service of Radio Taiwan International is pleased to remind you that, during August 2026, we will be broadcasting live from the Taipei Tamsui transmission centre in northern Taiwan to Europe and North Africa.

To mark the occasion, our French-language program will be broadcast on shortwave every Friday, Saturday and Sunday from 7 to 30 August. Here are the frequencies and broadcast times:

15145 kHz: from 17:00 to 17:30 (UTC)

11850 kHz: from 17:30 to 18:00 (UTC) 

Due to recurring interference on the 11995 kHz frequency, reported by our listeners during the German service's broadcasts in July, the French service will use the 11850kHz frequency. We would like to thank all listeners who have helped us over the last few days to check the feasibility of using this frequency.

A special QSL card will be sent to you in confirmation of any listening reports you may send us by email to the RTI French Service address:

fren @ rti.org.tw

(WWDXC Top News 1661/10 Aug 2026)

Update on NHK World Radio Japan broadcasts

 JAPAN   

NHK World Radio Japan has reduced their temporary Japanese transmission to the Middle East from August 1; via KDDI, a national telecommunication provider at the Koga-Ibaragi-Yamata Japan site and MBR Nauen, Germany.

The new schedule from August 1 is as follows:

from Yamata JP transmitter site

1700-1900 12060 (regular transmission) 300 kW  305 deg

2200-2350 17800 (regular transmission) 300 kW  305 deg

From Nauen transmitter site

0100-0300  9440 125 kW  117 deg

0300-0400 11960 250 kW  117 deg

0400-0500 13750 250 kW  117 deg

The programs are also available online at

https:\\www3.nhk.or.jp/nhkworld/ja/  (outside Japan only)

(WWDXC Top News 1661/10 Aug 2026)

Weekly Propagation Forecast Bulletins-August 10, 2026

 Product: Weekly Highlights and Forecasts

:Issued: 2026 Aug 10 0153 UTC

# Prepared by the US Dept. of Commerce, NOAA, Space Weather Prediction Center

# Product description and SWPC web contact www.swpc.noaa.gov/content/subscription-services

#

#                Weekly Highlights and Forecasts

#

Highlights of Solar and Geomagnetic Activity 03 - 09 August 2026

Solar activity was at very low to low levels throughout the period,

with no R1 (Minor) or greater events observed. Other activity three

CMEs associated with DSFs on 03 Aug, which arrived on 07 Aug, as

well as two CMEs without clear source locations on 04 Aug, which

arrived at Earth on 08 Aug. 

No proton events were observed at geosynchronous orbit.

The greater than 2 MeV electron flux at geosynchronous orbit was at

normal to moderate levels throughout the period. 

Geomagnetic field activity reached G1-G2 (Minor-Moderate) storm

levels on 08 Aug following the arrival of CMEs that left the Sun on

04 Aug. Active conditions were observed on 03-04 Aug following the

arrival of a CME that left the Sun on 30 Jul. Quiet and quiet to

unsettled levels prevailed throughout the remainder of the period. 

Forecast of Solar and Geomagnetic Activity 10 August - 05 September 2026

Solar activity is expected to range from very low to low levels

throughout the outlook period. 

No proton events are expected at geosynchronous orbit.

The greater than 2 MeV electron flux at geosynchronous orbit is

expected to reach high levels on 12-16 and 22-23 Aug. Normal to

moderate levels are expected to prevail throughout the remainder of

the period. 

Geomagnetic field activity is likely to reach G1 (Minor) storm

levels on 11 Aug due to the anticipated arrival of a CME that left

the Sun on 08 Aug, and again on 19 Aug due to recurrent CH HSS

influences. Active conditions are likely on 10 and 17-18 Aug, while

quiet and quiet to unsettled conditions are likely to prevail

throughout the remainder of the outlook period. 

Product: 27-day Space Weather Outlook Table 27DO.txt

:Issued: 2026 Aug 10 0153 UTC

# Prepared by the US Dept. of Commerce, NOAA, Space Weather Prediction Center

# Product description and SWPC web contact  www.swpc.noaa.gov/content/subscription-services

#

#      27-day Space Weather Outlook Table

#                Issued 2026-08-10

#

#   UTC      Radio Flux   Planetary   Largest

#  Date       10.7 cm      A Index    Kp Index

2026 Aug 10      90          12          4

2026 Aug 11      90          20          5

2026 Aug 12      92          10          3

2026 Aug 13      92           5          2

2026 Aug 14      95           5          2

2026 Aug 15      95           5          2

2026 Aug 16      95           5          2

2026 Aug 17     100          15          4

2026 Aug 18     105          12          4

2026 Aug 19     105          20          5

2026 Aug 20     105           8          3

2026 Aug 21     110           5          2

2026 Aug 22     115           5          2

2026 Aug 23     115           5          2

2026 Aug 24     115           5          2

2026 Aug 25     115           5          2

2026 Aug 26     110           5          2

2026 Aug 27     105           5          2

2026 Aug 28     105           5          2

2026 Aug 29     110           5          2

2026 Aug 30     110           5          2

2026 Aug 31     105           5          2

2026 Sep 01     105           5          2

2026 Sep 02     100           5          2

2026 Sep 03     100           5          2

2026 Sep 04      95           8          3

2026 Sep 05      95           8          3

(NOAA)

U.K. Propagation Update

 

RSGB

RadCom Assistant Editor | August 7, 2026

Compiled by G0KYA, G3YLA and G4BAO on 6 August 2026.

The Sun was mostly settled last week with very little to report.

The solar flux index declined to 108 by Thursday, 6 August, with most of the sunspot activity being on one half of the solar surface.

Geomagnetic conditions have also been settled with a Kp index mostly below 3 for the past few days.

A coronal mass ejection impacted the Earth and pushed the Kp index to 5.67 on Sunday, 2 August, but conditions recovered within 24 hours.

We’ve even been almost solar flare free with, at the time of writing, only seven minor C-class events over the past three days.

So this all bodes well for HF propagation.

24 and 28MHz are mostly only open to Sporadic-E. Some multi-hop paths are still opening up to the Far East especially, so don’t write off 10m, even if you have to listen to noise for much of the day.

F2-layer propagation still favours North-South paths on the 10m band.

Next week, DX to be worked includes :

• E51KEE from the Cook Islands;

• YS/WE9G in El Salvador;

• UK/SP9DLM from Uzbekistan;

• OX3LX operating from Greenland.

Later in the week look for A50QO in Bhutan; J68TT from St Lucia and OJ0JR and OJ0YL working from Market Reef.

NOAA predicts that next week the Sun will remain pretty calm and be in the 105 to 110 range. The Kp index is forecast to be mostly around 2 to 3 so conditions should remain fair but not disrupted.

And don’t forget the solar eclipse on Wednesday, 12 August. The RSGB has many activities planned, including two HF contests, WSPR activity and medium- and long-wave monitoring.

See the August issue of RadCom for details.

VHF and up propagation: 

Compiled by G3YLA and G4BAO.

The main theme of the weather during the coming week is one of some settled high pressure with tropo options, especially early in the week. This is likely to be interrupted by occasional periods of low pressure with rain for northwestern areas.

The summer weather patterns typically produce a more showery type of rain, even from fronts, giving a reasonable chance of rain scatter. However, activity may be low in the south and east.

Of the two modes mentioned , next week will probably be more biased towards tropo than rain scatter.

The Kp index made a brief excursion to 5 last week but seems a bit quieter now. However, it’s useful to check now and again in case we find some radio aurora.

The meteor scatter options feature strongly this week as the Perseids meteor shower peaks around Wednesday, 12 and Thursday, 13 August. It’s quite interesting to simply leave a receiver on a meteor scatter calling channel to hear the transient signals.

The Sporadic-E season continues and, since meteor debris plays a role in providing the ionisation required, the Perseids week is always worth checking for a surprise opening.

In terms of jet stream weather patterns, the stronger hints come from looking east towards the Baltic. However, other directions are not to be ignored since even quite small features, such as a slow-moving severe thunderstorm, can have an influence.

For EME operators, Moon declination reaches maximum today, 9 August, when Moon window length and Moon elevation will be at their peak.

Path losses are at their lowest at perigee tomorrow, 10 August. 144MHz sky noise is low to moderate until Wednesday, 12 August, when the Sun is close to the Moon in the sky due to the partial eclipse that day.

https://rsgb.org/main/blog/news/gb2rs/propagation-news/2026/08/07/propagation-news-9-august-2026/

(Mike Terry, UK?BDXC)

Jen's Special: The Music of Alt-Punk Music Fest on August 9

 

Get ready and tune in to Jen's August 9 program at 1700-2100 UTC+

Jen's Special: The Music of Alt-Punk Music Fest in Blackpool, GB.

http://uk4-vn.mixstream.net:8104/index.html 

For your contact pleasure

Jenur@proton.me

Jen In The Rad

Throwback Thursday - American Navy Station NAA

 

Welcome to Throwback Thursday. This week's edition originally broadcast on February 4, 2001  

The huge wireless station NAA in Arlington, Virginia, was one of the most celebrated wireless stations in the world, according to the American radio magazine Popular Communications back a few years ago.  It was also a very old station; it was established before World War I under the original callsign NAV.

Station NAV-NAA was located at Fort Myers on the edge of Virginia, and the super-tall towers were visible for many years, overshadowing Arlington 

National Cemetery where Presidents William H. Taft and John F. Kennedy lie buried.  Many different postcards from the era before and after World War I picture the huge antenna system at NAA from different angles.

NAA was in use as a massive spark gap transmitter communicating by Morse code with naval vessels at sea, with other American wireless stations at widely separated locations, and with similar stations in Europe.  One of the major stations in Europe that was in frequent communication with NAA was station FL on the Eiffel Tower in Paris. 

It was through the use of radio signals between FL in Paris and NAA near Washington, DC that the exact distance between Europe and the United States was measured with an accuracy of just a few yards.  Station NAA was also famous for the accuracy of its time signals, which were broadcast at hourly intervals, and these time signals were used to establish the exact boundary between two states down under, South Australia and Western Australia.

During the early part of World War II, station NAA was also in voice communication with FL in Paris as one of the earliest regular forms of voice communication by wireless.

One of the massive towers at NAA Arlington stood 600 feet tall, and the two others were 450 feet high.  The transmitter building was located in the middle of the triangle of towers, and several feed lines went up to the antennas suspended between the towers.

During World War II, the usage of station NAA as a naval communication station was phased out and taken over by NSS at Annapolis in Maryland.  The antennas were dismantled, the callsign was taken over by a station in Maine that is used for communication with submarines, and the property is now in use by the Defense Communications Agency.

Thus all that is left of the huge NAA facility is a few postcards that depict the station from various angles.  You can often see some of these cards at postcard exhibits, and you might want to buy one or two as a perpetual reminder of this famous and historic old wireless station.

(Adrian Peterson, AWR Wavescan 04 Feb 2001) 

NAA photo via Wikipedia

A closer look at Collins Radio

     

Thank you to the staff from Wavescan for this week's feature on Collins Radio Company.

Jeff:  For four decades, Collins Radio Company of Cedar Rapids, Iowa set the absolute standard for American communications engineering.  No other manufacturer in the country came close to what Collins built, or how reliably they built it.  One of their communications receivers, the R390-A, was well-known to DXers of a certain age, but the Collins brand disappeared and hasn’t been heard of for decades.  So, what happened?  Here's Ray Robinson in Los Angeles to tell us the story.

Ray:  Thanks, Jeff.  When I first became a shortwave listener around 1970 or so, I avidly devoured information from club magazines and DX shows that then were carried by various international broadcasters.  I was awed by the range of communication receivers some listeners detailed along with their DX catches, which were way beyond my meagre budget at the time.  Two receivers that stand out in my mind from back then were the American-made Collins R-390A, and the British-made Eddystone EC-10, banks of which could be seen in photos of the BBC Monitoring Service at Caversham Park near Reading, England.  (What an amazing job that must have been – they actually paid people to sit at state-of-the-art communications receivers and seek out distant shortwave signals!)  Anyway, my mind got to thinking recently about the R-390A, and why we don’t hear of Collins Radio anymore these days.  So, I did some research, and here’s what I found.

At one time, Collins Radio was regarded as being the best communications equipment company in the world.  The United States Military trusted it for their bombers.  NASA trusted it for the moon.  And for four decades, it earned every bit of that trust.

So, why did it collapse?  It wasn’t because of competition or bad engineering.  It turns out the founder of the company, Arthur A. Collins, ended up destroying the company by being right about the future, but at exactly the wrong time.

In the basement of his family home in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, 22-year-old Arthur Collins began building radio transmitters by hand in 1931.  He founded the company two years later on First Avenue in Cedar Rapids with a single obsession – to build the most reliable, most precise communications equipment that American engineering could produce, with no shortcuts, no mass-market compromises – just performance, tested to its limits.

In that same year, 1933, Admiral Richard E. Byrd selected Collins Radio to supply communications gear for his second Antarctic Expedition.  The challenge was brutal.  The equipment had to survive sub-zero temperatures on the Ross Ice Shelf, mechanical punishment during transport across Antarctic terrain, and the unpredictable atmospheric interference of the auroral zone at the bottom of the world.

Collins supplied a complete shortwave broadcasting station built around a massive 20-B transmitter.  On February 3, 1934, from a base camp called Little America, the team successfully transmitted the first live voice radio broadcast from Antarctica to the United States.  Battling gale-force winds and temperatures below -20F, Collins Radio equipment kept the signal clear, carrying Byrd’s voice across thousands of miles to New York, from where CBS carried it to a national audience.

The equipment had been built in a Cedar Rapids factory that had existed for less than a year, but word spread fast.  Military and commercial broadcasting contracts followed, and by the start of World War II, Collins was a respected regional manufacturer.  By the end of the war, it was an industrial power house.

The war transformed Collins because of one specific problem it solved:  frequency changing under fire.  Aerial warfare required radio operators aboard bombers to switch communication frequencies rapidly.  In a B-29 

Super Fortress at 25,000 feet over the Pacific with enemy fighters on the wing, the traditional process of manually tuning variable capacitors across multiple amplifier stages took minutes – minutes that crews did not have.  Collins solved this with the ‘Autotune System’.  It was an electro-mechanical assembly of motors, cams, slip clutches and limit switches that physically rotated every tuning element in the transmitter to a preset position with absolute mechanical repeatability.  A radio operator selected one of ten preset channels on the ART-13 airborne transmitter, and the machine retuned itself across its oscillator, multiplier and power amplifier stages in under 25 seconds.  The system even automatically reduced output power by 50% above 25,000 feet to prevent the risk of high-voltage arcing in thin air.

By the end of the war, 90,000 ART-13 units had been manufactured

But with the close of the war, Collins pivoted hard into the commercial and amateur markets.  The equipment they produced in the late 1940’s and 1950’s became known collectively as ‘the black boxes’, named for their stark utilitarian cabinets with black crinkle-finish paint.  They were not glamorous products, but they were precise ones, and precision, as it turned out, was exactly what Cold War intelligence required.

In 1954, Collins introduced the R-390A receiver, designed for military and government intelligence use.  It became one of the finest tube-based radio receivers ever built, even if it was the very definition of a ‘boat anchor’ radio.  The secret was the mechanical filter technology embedded in its intermediate frequency chain.  Instead of relying on electrical components to achieve selectivity, Collins engineers discovered that they could convert radio signals into physical vibrations, pass those vibrations through precision-machined metal discs made from a nickel alloy called Ni-Span-C and convert them back into electrical signals, because mechanical resonance achieves quality factors far higher than electrical circuits.  The result was what engineers called ‘brick wall selectivity’.

With this technology, the R-390A could isolate one shortwave signal from an adjacent jamming transmission with a sharpness that competing designs simply couldn’t match.  That was the kind of capability that made signals intelligence analysts very happy.  As a result, the U.S. Military contracted not just Collins, but also Motorola, Electronic Assistance Corporation, Stewart Warner, and several others, all to build R-390A receivers to Collins exact specifications.  Over 55,000 units were manufactured across a production run that lasted 30 years.

By 1958, Collins was ready to bring the same engineering philosophy to the civilian amateur market.  The result was the S-Line – a series of transmitters and receivers finished in light grey enamel.  And in the fall of 1959, Collins released the KWM-2 transceiver – a single chassis integrating the full capability of the S-Line transmitter and receiver, with a central tuning knob and signal meter.  It weighed just over 18 lbs, and covered from 3.4 to 30 MHz in 14 segments of 200 kHz each.

In the 1960’s, the U.S. Military used these models under very challenging conditions in Vietnam, where the operators reported that they simply ‘worked’.  When NASA was preparing to go to the moon, Collins became an indispensable partner in the Mercury, Gemini and Apollo programs.  Every astronaut’s voice from space in those programs passed through Collins equipment.  For the lunar missions specifically, they developed a ‘Unified S-Band System’ - a single unified radio link that could carry voice, television, telemetry, command signals and precision ranging data across 240,000 miles of space on one carrier frequency in the microwave S-band, around 2.2 GHz.  That, along with the ground-based tracking stations they built for the system in California, Spain and Australia, was no doubt the pinnacle of Collins’ achievement.  But unfortunately, it was then in the late 60’s and early 70’s that the company began to fall apart.  In the space of just two years, Collins Radio Company became functionally bankrupt.

The reason was a project called the C-System.  Starting in the mid-1960’s, Arthur Collins had become consumed by a vision for a fully integrated communication, computation and control network, one that would connect distributed computers – much as local area networking and the Internet does today.  He was right about where the world was going, but wrong about when it would get there!  The computer hardware of the 1960’s was too expensive, too physically large, and too slow to make the C-System viable.  But Collins poured thousands of engineering hours and increasingly desperate capital into its development.

At the same time, government contracts that had been plentiful during the Vietnam War and Apollo moonshot programs began to dry up, and competitors were releasing solid state equipment.  Collins couldn’t keep pace.  In the fiscal year ending August 3, 1971, Collins made a net loss of US $46.6 million.  Between 1969 and 1971, Collins had cut 40% of its workforce, but it wasn’t enough.  A few weeks later on September 2, 1971, North American Rockwell bought the company, and Arthur Collins was forced to leave the board.  By November 1973, Collins Radio had been fully absorbed into Rockwell International.

Arthur Collins died in 1987.  Today, more than 60 years after they were built, surviving examples of the R-390A receiver and KWM-2 transceiver still perform to their original specifications and they command serious money on the collector market.  And my budget still doesn’t extend to one, even now!

Back to you, Jeff.