Radio Prague, which makes its final shortwave transmissions on 31 January, will continue to produce its 30-minute programmes in six languages. However the Head of Radio Prague, Miroslav Krupicka, has told the station’s English programme Mailbox that “We wanted to make the programme cheap and we’ll play music – Czech music on Sundays.”A listener from the US enquired about the possibility of utilizing the longwave transmitter at Topolna [on 270 kHz] covering a large part of Europe for Radio Prague’s foreign language programmes for part of the day. However, Mr Krupicka said that was not an option: “It’s quite tough because currently, the longwave is allocated to domestic broadcasts. But overall, longwave is being considered for closure as well, for budgetary reasons, for financial reasons, because to maintain longwave and well as shortwave is quite expensive and Czech Radio cannot afford that. So probably the days of longwave broadcasting are numbered within Czech Radio as well. So there is no long term prospect for Radio Prague being on longwave.”
The complete transcript and audio of the programme is available on Radio Prague’s website.
(Radio Netherlands Media Network Weblog)