Lately I’ve been geetting into shortwave listening quite a fair bit, or SWL. Quite simply, despite being a licensed ham since 2019, I didn’t really realize it existed

You might ask “what, how!?” but remember, I’m a relatively young ham, born in 1989. I got my license on a whim after experimenting with SDRs to do computer-y type stuff, all in the 70cm band or above. By the time I learned of HF, it was all about how to talk to other radio amateurs. Then one day, about a month or two ago, someone in a chatroom I’m in posts a YouTube video, something about a food review, some sort of new pizza that came out of a collaboration between Little Caesar’s pizza and Batman. I watched a minute or two of it or so, didn’t really pay attention, but then I saw in the description that he had a radio show on 5850 KHz. My first thought was “oh, I love pirate radio!”

A few seconds later it hit me and I laughed, oh that’s right, I’ve accidentally tuned too high or low on one band and heard Brother Stair. I’d assumed that all of shortwave was religious broadcasting, which, no problem, great if people find happiness or deeper meaning in that. But I have my own religious teachers that I follow, and I’m quite happy with that.

Anyways, it wasn’t long after listening to ReviewBrah / Report of the Week / Voice of Report of the Week / VORW International that I started scanning around more and more on the shortwave bands, and finding all sorts of things that I really enjoyed. Music shows are top of the list, “Cruisin' the Decades”, Shortwave Radiogram is super awesome because I’m well-setup to decode digital signals from radio. Bluegrass State of Mind on WBCQ, New and old music, old music going back even before the 1920s, really, really cool stuff on shortwave radio!

More recently, I caught the last broadcast of Voice of Greece, which had some absolutely amazing music, and even Radio New Zealand

I was having a blast, but then work went from nightmare mode to something beyond, that we don’t even have words for, and I quickly found myself working upwards of 60 hours a week. I love my job and I’m not here to complain, but I have my ham shack in the basement, surrounded by concrete and extremely well-grounded, because I’m terrified of lightning strikes on or near my hundred-foot long antenna starting fires. Yet my office is in a very Zoom-call-worthy room of my house, the library. So, I wanted to be at my desk working as much as possible, but that takes me away from my radios. You see the dilemma. A man should not be deprived his radios.

Anyways, now that you’ve heard my entire life story, time for:

The actual darn recipe already, serves 4, prep 30 minutes

  • 1x $12 FM transmitter, the sort you can find at a gas station or truck stop, where you plug it into a cigarette lighter port, plug in audio and it transmits on milliwatt FM for your car’s stereo to hear
  • 1x laptop running your favorite SDR, connected to a good antenna, with TeamViewer installed, and the audio out going to the FM transmitter
  • As many cheapo FM radios as you can get your greedy hands on

Directions: combine. Use TeamViewer from work computer to tune radio, listen on cheap FM radios, rebroadcasted from computer in ham shack running SDR

This turned out to be a remarkably simple yet effective solution! Houses in Detroit tend to be mostly big and fancy yet astonishingly cheap, with many rooms, but while some shell out the megabucks for Sonos or something, this solution is basically garbage-picked! Sound quality really doesn’t matter, because well… shortwave is not the medium for audiophiles, that $12 gas-station FM transmitter from 50 feet away to a Baofeng UV-5R or transistor radio from the 70s is going to be significantly clearer than the shortwave signal itself is, coming into my actual house.

Also YMMV with the transmitters. They vary a lot, some would barely make it out of the room they were in, others I can hear from most of my house.