Alles Klar

Alles Klar bei die Mauer?, Prij, 30/06/06

The Padre bought me a small FM/AM-MW/SW portable radio back in April and I've got into DXing - probably because I listen to the shortwave samples on Dazzle Ships too much. I found Radio Prague pretty easily, but it's just a news magazine broadcast in a different language every 30 minutes.

I was listening to Voice of Russia this morning - bizzare to hear Soviet national anthem (broadcast without words, the Soviet/Russia anthems are identical). The programme was 'Moscow Mailbag' presented by Mikhail/Michael and Olga. Mike seemed to be a native English speaker, possibly Russian-American, whereas Olga had a very heavy Russian accent and somewhat stilted English - short, basic sentences; perhaps reading from notes. They read out and answered questions sent to the station from listeners around the world - about 90% of which came from the USA.

In between a Spanish station playing '(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction', I picked up Voice of [North] Korea at 1456 UTC on 15.24MHz. Very clear reception, given the distance. I only seem to receive it at the top of the hour, when all the stations play musical chairs and alternate frequencies - so all I heard was "The Voice of Korea, from the Democratic People's Republic of Korea [x3]. Dear listeners, the frequencies for 1500-1600 UTC are: [dodgy signal]... 11.71MHz, 12.01MHz... [drop in reception]... 15.24MHz" Then static at the hour. I haven't been able to pick up VoK so far this evening - Is it a coincidence that Voice of America is broadcasting on the one of the same frequencies? I definately want to hear the news on VoK.

• As of writing (2200 BST), I picked up a weak signal on 13.76MHz saying "Democratic People's Republic" and possibly the word 'news', but I can't make out anything intelligible now, and there's only another hour of English-language broadcast to Europe left.
  

Having waited since Friday afternoon to watch the launch on NASA TV, Disco finally took off at 1838UTC. I was going to record the launch with VLC's stream output, but I can't seem to get the bloody thing to work with NASA TV (probably due to Yahoo!'s distribution of the feed). I watched last year's launch on BBC News24, but NASA TV doesn't join the event with 1 minute to go and then cut to sport news after 3 minutes.

The whine as the SSMEs start up and the roar at launch is something I'd love to see in person, if it wasn't for my refusal to travel to that particular territory of the New World. I took 83 screenshots from launch to ET seperation (10 minutes)...

T+10 seconds

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