99% Invisible
Hosted by Roman Mars
Shortwave radio opened a portal to the world—then became a weapon in a high-stakes war of propaganda and power.
7,698 words · 31 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
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This is 99% Invisible. I'm Roman Mars.
I love podcasts, but like many people who work in this industry, my first love was the radio. I got my start working at my college radio station, W O B C 91.5 at Oberlin College. My musical taste and sense of humor were shaped by the DJs at W F M U in New Jersey, and my professional radio career and this very show began at my favorite public radio station, K A L W 91.7 here in the Bay Area. But there's a whole other radio universe that I have a lot less experience with. Shortwave radio is the less-used but further-reaching cousin of AM and FM. It requires a completely different radio set.
Long before the internet, shortwave connected people all across the globe instantaneously, and it became an information battleground and powerful propaganda tool.
This week, we are bringing you the first episode in the second season of The Divided Dial. It's a series from On The Media and longtime 99PI contributor Katie Thornton. In season one, Katie explored the history of political talk radio and how the radical right came to dominate the airwaves in the US. But her new four-part season is all about shortwave. I'll let Katie take it from here.
Zenith Transoceanics.
This is such a cool radio with the little...
Last summer, I met up with a journalist and radio fan named David Gorin.
These are like beautiful radios.
I went to his house in Brooklyn, New York, so that we could listen to the radio together. Not any old radio, not AM or FM, nothing you can pick up in your car, but shortwave radio, the little-known cousin of AM and FM with fuzzy stations that can reach insanely far distances. David's been listening to shortwave since he was a kid in the 70s, when his uncle gave him a radio.
And I turn it on, and it's like the radio like leapt out of my hand with the North American service of Radio Moscow.
Suddenly, the world was all within reach, available to him right there in this box.
In the 7th grade, I became the expert on the next five-year plan in the Soviet Union, the economic plan.
Today, he's part of the Library of Congress's Radio Preservation Task Force. And together, on a sweaty Thursday afternoon last July,
we sat down to hear what we could find on the shortwave dial today.
Just like when David was a kid, we heard lots of government-run stations, like Radio Marti.
The US broadcasting news and information to Cuba.
The Islamic Republic of Iran.
China radio, and also broadcasting in Spanish. Let's see, anything else strong?
On other days, David has picked up English-language shows from North Korea.
They have very strident, you know, military stuff.
And news from Cuba.
This is Radio Rebelde, Radio Rebel, and it goes back to the revolution.
On the short waves, the global tussle for influence plays out 24/7.
But we didn't just hear news and propaganda.
Well, let's just go up the dents. I thought we heard some more scat.
There were beeps and bloops.
Here we go.
Coded messages sent between amateur radio operators or between government officials who used the short waves to send military data or secret instructions.
Let's see what else we have.
And some of what we heard just sounded like normal radio, with lots of music and preaching.
Strong in the Lord and in the power of his might against the wiles of the devil. It was hidden just to hide the meaning and the power of the divine name that is inherent in the name of Yah.
Yes.
That's an end times ministry that also preaches that the earth is flat.
Which is very interesting because sure, we radio wouldn't propagate in a flat earth, you know? But details, details.
In just about an hour of surfing the short waves, we heard prayer and propaganda, news and conspiracy theories, so many languages, and some really decent jams from all over the globe.
I felt like I had been welcomed into a club that was somehow secret and yet right there for anyone to join. And I know it's cliche, but there was something magical about tuning into the world, training my ear to listen through the crackle, hearing the distance.
As it turns out, this practice of scanning the dial, finding out what you can hear and from how far away, is a century-old art. It was popular among radio's early adopters. These early "distance fiends," as they were known, uncovered something very strange about how radio waves traveled through space. And what broadcasters did with that information? Completely altered the trajectory of the 20th century.
This is season two of The Divided Dial. I'm your host, Katie Thornton. I've worked in radio since I was a teenager, sometimes behind the scenes, sometimes behind the mic. In season one, I investigated how right-wing talk took over AM and FM radio. But in all my years of radio research, I'd never really learned about shortwave radio before. And listen, I'm not going to tell you that shortwave radio is as influential today as the AM and FM talk radio we covered in season one. It's not. But I, and I think you, love the medium of radio. So this season, we're diving into the often failed promise of a medium that was once ubiquitous, connecting people around the world long before the internet
ever did. But like the internet, shortwave also took a turn for the chaotic. Over the next four episodes, I'm going to explain how shortwave radio became a propaganda tool for governments at war, and then a propaganda tool for American right-wing extremists and cults. And we'll explore what a little-known battle playing out on the shortwaves right now between radio fanatics and Wall Street can tell us about what happens when we cede control of our public airwaves. That's all coming up on this season of The Divided Dial. But let's get back to the story.
Radio broadcasting, as in from one to many, it didn't start on shortwave. It started on AM, taking off around 1920. And AM was inherently local.
Santa Larson, Mrs. Lester Larson. Happy birthday.
Signals reached up to 50, maybe 75 miles.
By the way, down Texas way, your home state. Can you take a bow? I will.
Girl, Ma Taylor up there at Lake Geneva says, "Happy birthday to us." You know, it's her birthday, too.
But at night, those listening at home noticed something strange.
As the sun set, more stations emerged from the static. And they weren't coming from down the street or the next town over. Sometimes, listeners in New York-
Edison Studios, WAM, located at 1 Bond-
-would hear stations from Chicago.
WCFL in Chicago.
A listener in Kansas might hear an opera or a boxing match from the East Coast.
After dark, it was like the world cracked open, and distant stations faded in and out on ghostly, mysterious winds.
Most people had never heard a faraway voice, period. Long-distance telephone calls were the costly domain of dignitaries and government officials, and even those were fed across long, scratchy copper lines. A disembodied voice, without a wire, without a fee, from hundreds of miles away? That awed and baffled people. Even scientists, some of whom believed that radio, perhaps, could be used to communicate with the dead.
But, of course, there was an explanation for these voices in the night.
Let us follow through the steps and the processes in transmitting or sending radio messages.
Here's what was happening. The way AM normally works is that radio waves get shot from the top of a tall tower, which is often on top of a tall hill.
The radio messages leave the antenna as electromagnetic wave and travel with the speed of light.
The waves travel over the ground, basically line of sight, from the tower to you. It's called a ground wave, and it's the thing that fades out a few dozen miles from the tower. But when you shoot out an AM signal, there's another thing that happens, almost a byproduct.
Radio waves are set up in all directions.
It's called a sky wave, and the sky wave goes up into the atmosphere.
The lower layers of the ionosphere, which are about 45 to 75 miles above the Earth's surface, they're like a huge sponge during the day, and they absorb the signals that pass through them.
Susan Douglas is a professor of communication and media at the University of Michigan. She says that these lower layers of the atmosphere are made up of ions that get all charged up by the sun, and in the daylight, those layers are where radio waves go to die.
But at night, when the sun sets, these layers disappear, and the ones above them, they combine to form a dense layer, and it acts like a mirror to sky waves.
At night, these sky waves, the sort of byproduct of AM transmission, they keep going until they bounce off this other layer of the ionosphere, and they come back down to Earth vast distances away.
When these waves strike the antenna of a receiving set, this entire process is reversed. We hear sound originating at that very moment, hundreds or even thousands of miles away.
That's what these late-night AM radio listeners were hearing, a radio wave that had ricocheted off the ionosphere to get to them. And it rocked their world. Long-distance channel surfing became a fad called fishing in the night, with listeners casting out into the ether and seeing what they could catch.
They had a map on the wall with map tacks, and every time they reeled in a station, they would put a map tack on where that broadcast emanated from. Was it Kansas City? Was it Washington DC? Wherever.
Radio manufacturers ran ads with slogans like "concerts from 14 cities in one evening." In newspaper editorials, distressed housewives and sometimes husbands lamented that their significant other was spending every evening out in their "radio shack."
But while AM broadcast listeners burned the midnight oil to marvel at all the faraway stations, there was one group of people who weren't so surprised by radio's ability to go long. They were the amateur radio operators, what you might know as ham radio. Basically, guys who weren't broadcasting but were tinkering with radio equipment just to chat, one-to-one, like long-distance walkie-talkies.
Back in the days before broadcasting, almost all radio transmission was one-to-one. The radio waves were mostly used by ship captains or the military and the hams, who were just having fun. But in World War I, the US government got worried about interference on those AM airwaves, so they eventually assigned specific frequencies for ships, for the military, and for those meddling amateurs.
They were kicked down to the waves that were thought utterly worthless, short waves.
Back then, people thought the short waves with short wavelengths—picture a really tight, squiggly line—just wouldn't go very far. Even Guglielmo Marconi, the father of radio, thought that longer wavelengths would mean longer distances. But the amateurs weren't put off.
They began experimenting with them.
And as it turned out, the short waves weren't the short end of the stick.
They were getting really far. They were getting stations in Australia and New Zealand, or stations in England and France.
For the most part, reception was clearer at night, but it didn't have to be dark to go the distance.
Amateurs reported spanning distances as great as 10,000 miles, which was unthinkable. Australia and New Zealand were described in the fall of 1923 as a bedlam of Yankee signals.
The amateurs proved something huge. Shortwave could do round-the-clock what AM could only do at night. It could use the ionosphere as a springboard.
And this changed the game for AM broadcasters who wanted their station to reach more people. In 1923, Pittsburgh's KDKA, the country's first commercial radio station, they got their station on shortwave and reached as far as South Africa. New shortwave stations started up in Switzerland and Japan and Venezuela. And with the scars of World War I still fresh, this burgeoning international medium was a source of hope.
There was a lot of utopian discourse around radio that, you know, having allowed people to communicate across all these borders, you know, would there be no more wars?
Michelle Helms is a retired professor of media studies who has written a lot about radio.
It would, you know, solve all kinds of problems. Just a huge enthusiasm over the possibilities of shortwave as a medium.
Entire magazines were devoted to helping people discover new shows on international radio. Listeners would write to far-flung stations, and the stations would reply with these beautifully decorated cards branded with the station name and maybe some imagery that evoked the national culture of wherever they were broadcasting from. They're called QSL cards. It's international code for "I confirm receipt of your transmission." Shortwave listeners around the world amassed collections of these ornate cards, tangible evidence of their part in an ethereal global community. By the late 1930s, almost all home radio sets had AM and shortwave settings.
But the piecenic aspirations for shortwave didn't last.
It was the first time that human beings had had it in their power to be heard around the world, and a lot of governments figured out that this could be a really powerful tool for the common good, but also, of course, for the waging of wars.
Lots of the world's governments had taken to the shortwaves by the 1930s, but no nation used them quite like Germany.
This is Germany calling. We are going to present tonight a vocal play entitled "Visions of Invasion."
Ziesn, Germany's state-run shortwave service, had spent years building a large following in America and around the world, playing things like orchestral music. But in time, they started pushing out Nazi propaganda, tailored for specific countries in 12 different languages. And with its own festering Nazi movement, the US was a key target.
You had people like Axis Sally.
This is Berlin calling. And I'd just like to say that from Berlin call, it pays to listen.
She was an American, living in Berlin. She became the first American woman to be convicted of treason. After the war, that she was broadcasting into the United States on short wave.
Women of America, waiting for the one who laughs. Thinking of a husband who is being sacrificed by Franklin D. Roosevelt.
You might have heard of a person called Lord Ha Ha.
The great exodus from Britain is well underway.
He was a British man named William Joyce, who was working in Germany, broadcasting on their short wave service.
The rich and affluent are removing themselves and their valuables as fast as they can.
There was also a big band called Charlie and his Orchestra, run by the German Ministry of Propaganda. They'd take popular big band and swing songs and add or change lyrics to berate Roosevelt or denigrate Jewish people.
All the Jewish family has the brain new heir. He's their joy heaven sent. And they proudly present Mr. Franklin D. Roosevelt Jones.
Yes, sir. They were trying to persuade Americans that, you know, that the Germans had the right side in the war and that it was crazy for them to fight.
Non-intervention, how he shows it. His decision to send troops along.
The US government had banned all editorializing on domestic radio stations during the war, making it illegal for Americans to promote the Nazi cause on the AM airwaves. But the feds didn't have any control over short wave broadcasts beaming in from Germany. So the content was still there for the many Americans who wanted to listen. Journalists at CBS and NBC launched counter-offensives.
The networks had what were called shortwave listening posts in New York.
Susan Douglas again.
And they had people who were fluent in foreign languages, monitoring international shortwave broadcasts.
And then they turned their findings into entertainment, like the hit CBS radio series hosted by a popular detective novelist named Rex Stout. It was called "Our Secret Weapon."
The truth is a weapon that isn't secret in our country, but it's a big secret to the people who live in Germany, Japan, and Italy. Our enemies don't have this weapon. They don't dare let their people know the truth.
Every week, radio sleuth Stout debunked enemy shortwave propaganda.
First, a broadcast of the official German news agency on August 2nd.
The meeting between Churchill and Stalin was very excited and hysterical. It assumed that to man-
On August 8th, being of England.
This morning Churchill shook hands with Stalin at the Kremlin.
As we now know, Churchill actually arrived in Moscow on August 12th. You can't beat that for a scoop.
The rest of the Allies were also busy fighting Germany's shortwave radio propaganda. It was during World War II that the BBC ramped up what would come to be known as the World Service on shortwave.
This is London calling in the overseas service of the British Broadcasting Corporation.
They broadcast news to the world with just a bit of pro-ally spin.
And the Danes have already had a taste of what German protection means. A better word for it would be plunder, for the Germans are seizing goods and property at will.
And in early 1942, the US followed suit. The federal government debuted its shortwave radio service, The Voice of America, with an in-language broadcast to Germany.
Hier spricht eine Stimme aus- This is a voice speaking from America. Our voices are coming to you from New York, across the Atlantic Ocean to London.
The Voice of America started as a government-run radio show, and they partnered with networks like NBC and CBS to get it out worldwide. NBC and CBS were already broadcasting overseas via shortwave.
But shortwave quickly proved so central to the war effort that the US government did something unprecedented. They nationalized all the roughly one dozen shortwave stations broadcasting from US soil, filling the international airwaves with approved broadcasts.
Daily at this time, we shall speak to you about America and the war. The news may be good or bad. We shall tell you the truth.
And for the most part, they did that. If a bit selectively. Michelle Helms.
They were walking a fine line between willful propaganda and sort of putting a good spin on things.
As the US sent more troops into battle, it used shortwave to boost morale.
They began to transmit entertainment programming via shortwave to the troops.
And this was so important during holidays like Christmas and New Year's, when there you are, freezing and alone and scared.
They had programs that would allow troops to speak to people back at home, you know? Oh, here's Mailbag, and we have letters from soldiers, and they would read them aloud.
Dear Mother, tonight I'm very lonely. I've never written that before, and maybe it's a shock to you. And then again, maybe you've read between the lines and have done it all along.
There was a very popular program called G.I. Jive with Jill.
Here's Jill and the G.I. Jive. Hi, you fellas. This is G.I. Jill with G.I. Jive.
You know, the World Series. 1942 World Series broadcast. You gotta have the World Series.
The Voice of America was very highly respected, and many people think that it, you know, did a great deal to help us win the war.
By the end of the Second World War, the Voice of America blanketed much of the world. It ran in about 40 languages. But they were about to get lots of company on the airwaves. Because in the Cold War, the shortwaves exploded.
That's coming up after the break.
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This is On The Media. I'm Katie Thornton, host of OTM's Divided Dial series. We're right in the middle of episode one of our second season. Before the break, we heard about how groups like the VOA dominated the short waves at the end of World War II. But during the Cold War, short wave would become so much more.
This is Tehran, Radio Iran.
The Australian Forces Radio.
The heart of Namdakht in Libya. You are tuned to the North American service of Radio Moscow.
The VOA, the BBC, the Soviet Union, China, Egypt, Iran, Argentina, and so many others were on short wave, broadcasting their national identity to the world in stories and song. They were joined by newly decolonized nations like Libya and Ghana, whose leaders saw the short waves as a way to promote their independence and to fuel an international anti-colonial movement. But the global superpowers, the US and the Soviet Union, were two of the most dominant voices on short wave. And short wave became one of the most ferocious battlegrounds of the Cold War.
At that for the Soviet Union was Radio Moscow. Founded in 1929, the USSR's government-run network broadcast in over 70 languages. With news, propaganda, and human interest stories, it offered a Soviet alternative to the BBC and the VOA.
America hit a new high in crime, and according to FBI reports to the president, nearly half of the criminals were young people. The causes of this menacing situation are well-known. The pornographic pictures distributed among adolescents and the exhibitions of abstract paintings and statues that say nothing to either the heart or the mind.
The BBC and the VOA were expanding too, sending more and more coverage over the Iron Curtain. But the United States government wanted to reach people in Eastern Europe with messages that weren't so obviously propaganda as the literal "Voice of America." So, they lied.
Radio Free Europe gets through with the truth every day.
Debuting in 1950, Radio Free Europe was a flamethrowing anti-communist shortwave network.
Into the closed communist countries of Poland, Czechoslovakia and Hungary, Bulgaria and Romania go the facts the people are not allowed to hear. The truth. The truth that helps them hold on to the will and the drive.
It was portrayed as grassroots, run by emigres and exiles. And it did employ those folks. But secretly, it was funded by the CIA, which was busy meddling in global politics and supporting pro-capitalist coups during these Cold War years.
Staff at Radio Free Europe launched weather balloons into the Eastern Bloc and airdropped over 300 million leaflets, instructing listeners on how to tune in.
The Soviet Union did not like any of this. They spent tons of money trying to drown out Western broadcasts. They'd flood the shortwaves with ear-splitting noises that listeners recalled sounding like a buzzsaw or a machine gun.
Sometimes the battle went beyond the airwaves, like when a Czechoslovakian double agent poisoned the saltshakers at Radio Free Europe's Munich office. That plot was foiled before any of the 1,200-plus employees sat down for lunch. Years later, a Radio Free Europe journalist died after allegedly being stabbed with a poison-tipped umbrella. But these US-run shortwave stations weren't just beaming out journalism.
Willis Conover speaking. This is the Voice of America Jazz Hour.
The music of jazz parallels the freedom that we have in America. Something that not every country has.
In the 1950s and 60s, music, especially jazz, was a key component in the US government's shortwave campaign.
This is the voice of America.
The federal government ran a jazz ambassador program that sent musicians like Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington on tours around the world. They focused on countries that the Soviet Union was also hoping to win over. All the while, though, many of these very same musicians faced racism and segregation at home. And on the shortwaves, Radio Moscow and others were ready to exploit this contradiction.
The revolutionary people of Cuba sympathize with all people who struggle for social justice.
In the early 1960s, Cuba's government-run service, Radio Havana, regularly beamed this show, "Radio Free Dixie," up to the United States.
It is in this spirit that we proudly allocate the following hour in an act of solidarity, peace, and friendship with our oppressed North American brothers. Radio Free Dixie invites you to listen to the free voice of the South.
"Radio Free Dixie" was hosted by US black power activist Robert F. Williams. He was on the lam in Cuba, fleeing drummed-up charges that were later dropped. And he broadcast a perspective that couldn't be found in the mainstream US media.
One Negro goes to the White House as a member of the president's cabinet, while another is gunned down like a wild dog for using a white folks toilet. It should be more than clear to us that if we are ever going to be free, we must liberate ourselves.
Outlets like Radio Moscow and Radio Havana won followers around the world with their mix of propaganda and just factual reporting on civil rights abuses in the US. Governments saw winning people over on shortwave as a key path to winning the Cold War. So even after the CIA's secretive role at Radio Free Europe was revealed in the early 70s, not much changed. In fact, Congress increased its budget, and they kept pumping out news and tunes. Increasingly, they played the defiant and oh-so-American sound of rock music, which was heavily censored in the USSR and Eastern Bloc. On the US's government-run, taxpayer-funded shortwave stations, they broadcast groups
like Metallica and Motley Crue to listeners around the world. By the early 1980s, the US government's shortwave stations reached an estimated 80 million people each week. It took tons of manpower, and it was a huge infrastructure project, too. The government had miles upon miles of fields filled with antennas. But one man didn't think that was enough.
We're as far behind the Soviets and their allies in international broadcasting today as we were in space when they launched Sputnik in 1957.
On the home front, Ronald Reagan had vetoed public broadcasting budgets and overseen a massive deregulation of the airwaves that allowed for big businesses and conservative and religious broadcasters to dominate AM and FM radio. You know, season one of The Divided Dial. But on international radio, on shortwave, the great deregulator had no qualms about spending taxpayer dollars. He poured public money into the VOA and Radio Free Europe.
I'm pleased to call on Director Wick and Minister Filali to sign this agreement, an important step towards strengthening the signal of the voice of America.
Reagan's administrators wrung their hands over what to do about rock music. Lots of them didn't believe it represented the best of Western culture. But after long internal debates, they decided to keep the rebellious racket going on the shortwaves.
Meanwhile, on the journalism side, Reagan led a shakeup by sidestepping one of the Voice of America's long-held tenets: the idea that a free press is the US's best advertisement. Sure, that idea hadn't always been perfectly executed, but Reagan opted instead for more heavy-handed anti-communist propaganda. Reagan's VOA ran explicit editorials on behalf of the administration. Many longtime leaders resigned, replaced by more amenable colleagues, including Richard W. Carlson, father of right-wing bloviator Tucker Carlson. And it was Reagan who launched a costly new shortwave service targeting Cuba with hard-line anti-communist messages.
"Today, I'm appealing to the Congress: Help us get the truth through. Support our proposal for a new radio station, Radio Marti, for broadcasting to Cuba."
While public broadcasting floundered at home, government-subsidized propaganda and bad-hair metal reverberated on shortwave, from the US to the world. In its first seven decades of life, shortwave transformed from an idealistic experiment in global cooperation into a hardened government tool of information warfare. And then, in the late 1980s, much of the medium's reason for being crumbled.
"In Eastern Europe, which the Soviets had held by force since World War II, Mikhail Gorbachev said that Moscow would no longer interfere." "Serious fighting begins in the early morning, a staccato of machine-gun bursts punctuated by cannon fire." "In the last weeks and months, we've seen one Communist Party after the other in Eastern Europe knocked off its perch by the people."
The Cold War was over. On this medium that seemed almost tailor-made for propaganda, there was vacancy, airtime for rent. And in the US, a particular group of people was ready to snatch it up.
You must form your militia unit. No heed to the federal government, which is a counterfeit enemy foreign government.
Are you a white woman such as myself who is sick of being harassed and tormented? Call Aryan Nation for a wider, brighter America.
We don't want to have to kill you. We hope to not have to kill you, but we can kill you. And if need be, we will kill you. Well, what are a few lives in the grand scheme of liberty?
I'm sure you are now seeing the reports of some things that are regularly said over the airwaves in America today.
These stations and the programs grew and they took over. They dominated.
What is associated in the public's mind with shortwave? It's no longer the BBC World Service. Now it's the guys who helped Timothy McVeigh bomb a federal building.
Next time on The Divided Dial, it's the shortwave story you've never heard. The private citizens who took over a fringe medium with a fringe message and used it to build a movement that fundamentally changed mainstream US politics.
Katie Thornton, it's so nice to have you back on the show. I love that episode.
Thank you so much, Roman. It's great to be here. Thanks for having me back.
I'm so excited to hear the rest of this series. So what made you want to do a series on shortwave radio at this moment? Which is not the peak of shortwave radio usage, but it's something that is so fascinating and so cool.
Yeah, you know, it's definitely not the peak of of shortwave radio usage. The internet really sort of took a bite out of it. But I was really interested in shortwave radio in part because I love radio and I had never really heard much about shortwave. I started volunteering at FM radio stations when I was in my teens. I worked at them throughout my teens and twenties. I obviously still make radio today. Like, I love radio. I love what it can do. I love that it moves through the air at the speed of light and it magically shows up in a box in your kitchen or your car or wherever. I think it's just sort of this magical thing. And yet I had never really heard about shortwave. And a friend of mine, after the first season of The Divided Dial came out, a friend of mine was like, hey, do you know about this station?
It's like... Really powerful, it reaches every continent. It's like a shortwave radio station. And I remember thinking like, shortwave, like, is that still a thing? That's like that Cold War medium, right? Like, that's the only context I had for it. And so I really wanted to find out what the history was, what it's like today, and some weird stuff that's gonna be coming up in the future on the shortwaves.
So one of the things you mentioned very briefly in the episode we just heard is something I'm completely fascinated by, and that is QSL cards. So first of all, can you describe what a QSL card is again for people who are unfamiliar?
Yeah, absolutely. A QSL card is almost like a combination thank you card and postcard that broadcasters send out. So they really started sort of in the late teens and early twenties when amateur radio operators were first starting to send their signals, you know, across the country, across national borders, across the world. And they wanted to know like how far they were reaching. Natural curiosity, you've got this new technology, you're like bouncing it off the ionosphere, you're like, where can you hear me? And so these people who were out there on the shortwaves, they would basically say, hey, if you're hearing this, please write me a letter, please tell me where you are, please tell me what you're listening on, and like, what did you think of the program?
Did it come through pretty clear? Things like that. So the listeners would send these letters, and the people who were putting the transmissions out there would send them these beautifully decorated cards as sort of thank you notes back. The broadcaster got information about just how far their signal was reaching, and the listener got to sort of amass this collection that really showed off, like, here's how good I am at listening to the radio. I have all these cards from all over the world, and they're all incredible.
So before we talk about the sort of design of the physical cards themselves, what does QSL actually stand for?
Yeah, great question, one that I had as well, and was slightly disappointed by the answer. It's not an abbreviation, it's just part of this what's called Q code. It's an international code that's basically an assortment of three letters, Q followed by two other letters, and then they mean something. Like if you're transmitting in Morse code, QSL, and on shortwave, QSL means, I confirm receipt of your transmission. And so it's sort of like a shorthand for the same way you would hear like on CB radio, truckers communicating with one another like 10-4, things like that. Yeah, it's like a little language.
So I've seen collections of these QSL cards and they're really beautiful. So could you describe to the audience what they look like?
Yeah, they really are so beautiful. I mean, some of them are quite simple. They have like your handle for the amateur radio operators in particular. They'll have like, you know, you have a series of letters and numbers that you go by on the radio. It's like your licensed name. And so some of them are just sort of that, just that plain text. But some people would decorate their cards super beautifully, you know, something personal to them or personal from where they were broadcasting from. But the people who like really went wild with the decorations were the broadcast stations. So on radio, you have like one to one transmission. That would be a lot of amateur operators. They're just trying to make contact like from one person to another person across a vast distance.
But in the, starting in the twenties, you started to have broadcasting on short wave. So that's like from one to many. It's actually like a term that early broadcasters borrowed from agriculture, like when you broadcast seeds, you basically like scatter seeds all over the place. So you're just trying to hit like as many people in the case of radio broadcasting as possible. And so after, there were some early AM stations that ended up transmitting their signal on short wave and getting into different countries. And a lot of these stations, especially by the thirties and the forties, were owned by governments. And so a lot of the broadcast stations, a lot of which were run by governments, they like went wild with the decorations on the QSLs.
But yeah, I mean, these stations would really, would really sort of use the QSL cards as an opportunity to paint a picture of how they wanted their, their home country to be perceived and understood sort of on the global stage.
Yeah. And they're like, they're kind of like tourist picture postcards. I mean, they have like maps and they have, you know, highlight, highlighted features of the landscape and things like that. They're really beautiful.
Absolutely. They're so beautiful. They are like, like postcards. Like imagine if the, the official government tourism bureau was like, we will make a postcard to represent everything about our country in one, in one image. That's sort of what they were trying to do with the QSLs was almost sort of like an element of this broader soft power campaign. Like, how do we want to broadcast ourself not just in sound, but in imagery to the rest of the world? So there's like beautiful maps, there's food items, there's like clothing that is specific to regions. There was a lot of like architectural feats would maybe be depicted sometimes in an artistic style that was specific to that country. Like they're colorful, they're beautiful, the fonts are amazing to watch change over time. One of the things
that I love about these QSLs is how many of them like have radio imagery. Like they're all so excited about the fact that they're using radio, especially the ones from like the 30s, 40s and 50s. They all have that sort of early radiographic of the lightning bolts, which to me is so cool because it was like, how do you, how do you demonstrate the power and the like excitement of this invisible thing? It's like, obviously it's got to be lightning bolts.
And so what is the status of QSL cards today? Like, is this still something people do? I imagine they're collector's items because the world of shortwave is a very, I don't know, it's a very like active subculture of very dedicated people.
Yes, absolutely it is. Absolutely it is. And it is still active. Like certainly they're collector's items. These are like beautiful historic objects, really. But there are still QSL cards that are going out today. Like I talked to a ton of people, a ton of broadcasters, a ton of listeners. And I was at a station where I was going through the QSL letters, you know, the initial letter where somebody's asking for a card. I was going through them with the station owner. And they had gotten letters from all over the place, you know, from the US and far beyond. And so, you know, I was going through the stack of letters where it's like, here's what I heard, here's how the reception was. And then in turn, he would mail back the station's QSL. You know, it's down from its
heyday, just like a lot of things in, in the shortwave world are, but it's still very much happening today, which is really neat.
So before we wrap up, could you tell me a little bit more about the whole series and where it's headed from here?
Yeah, well, the second episode is dropping in May 14th. This next episode is really going to dive into the pretty little-known role that shortwave radio played in the rise of the American right, especially sort of in the 90s and into the 2000s. We're also going to go visit a very particular, kind of peculiar, station operating out of the US, one of the most powerful broadcasting facilities on the planet that I did not know existed until quite recently, and play some very interesting material. And then we sort of end the series, the fourth episode, by talking about what's going on in the shortwaves today and what's happening in the future on the shortwaves. Because as I talk to people, I learned that there is a battle going on on the shortwaves
right now that is really representative, I think says a lot about how we value or don't value our public airwaves.
Well, I'm so glad that the series is back. The first series of The Divided Dial was amazing. It won a Peabody Award. And now I'm so excited to hear the second season. And it's all going to be released on On The Media's podcast feed and on the airwaves. So thank you so much for being back with us.
Thank you so much for having me. It was great to talk with you about this.
The Divided Dial was created by Katie Thornton and WNYC's On The Media, edited by OTM's executive producer, Katja Rogers, with music and sound design by Jared Paul. The series is also supported by the Fund for Investigative Journalism. 99PI's executive producer is Kathy Too, Kurt Kohlstedt is the digital director, Delaney Hall is our senior editor. The rest of the team includes Chris Berube, Jason DeLeon, Joe Rosenberg, Martin Gonzalez, Christopher Johnson, Vivian Le, LaShma Dawn, Swan Riel, Jacob Medina Gleason, and me, Roman Mars. The 99% Invisible logo was created by Stefan Lawrence. We are part of the SiriusXM Podcast family, now headquartered six blocks north in the
Pandora Building in beautiful Uptown Oakland, California. We are all over Blue Sky and our Discord server is thriving. We'll have links to those, as well as every past episode of 99PI at 99pi.org.
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