💾 Archived View for zaibatsu.circumlunar.space › ~solderpunk › gemlog › radio-208-in-the-cabin.gmi captured on 2024-08-18 at 17:56:19. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
⬅️ Previous capture (2024-02-05)
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In December my wife and I took a sort of "zero frills mini-break" and spent a few nights in a small cabin on a garden allotment, offered for rent on AirBnB, in a small city in the part of Czechia known (rather aspirationally) as Bohemian Switzerland due to the surrounding mountains. This is the way we desperately cling to the appreciation for "mökkielämää" we acquired in Finland. The place had electricity, so we were definitely playing on easy mode, but at least the mains water supply was turned off for the winter. We had a great time, despite the lack of sauna.
I brought the Sony ICF-7600A that I bought about a year before with me and spent some time in the evenings very casually DXing the MW and SW bands. The reports of excellent MW performance by this radio do not appear to be exaggerated! For the first time ever I heard Radio 208 from Denmark on 1440 kHz. Now, Denmark to Czechia is not exactly a long distance by any stretch of the imagination, but this is a very low power station, just 0.6 kW according to mwlist.org. I suspect it's the least powerful station I've ever heard. This probably wouldn't be considered impressive by today's SDR crowd, but I was and am very happy.
My 2022-12-30 gemlog post "Radio updates" mentions buying the ICF-7600A
Radio 208 is obviously a passion project, probably run by a single individual, probably at not inconsiderable out-of-pocket expense. It has no adverts and no announcements, it just plays classic prog rock around the clock. To my surprise, it is a relatively young station, having started in 2018, and it began as an internet radio station before becoming "real", which must be an extremely unusual direction to transition between those states these days! Tiny stations like this are absolutely a dying breed and I fully expect them to go extinct within my lifetime. It was a real treat to stumble upon one.