fishing in the night (12. 457)

Roman Mars’ 99% Invisible cross-posting the work of a colleague and regular contributor directs us to a rather fascinating listen that synthesises a multitude of developments in radio and broadcasting that first forecasts how the medium previsions the internet and the miracle of instantaneous, round the world communication taken for granted by our modern perspective and seemingly by many contemporaries as well. The follow-on season focuses on shortwave, ceded to the pioneering amateurs with authorities considering that band to be of minimal utility and wanting safeguard AM and FM frequencies for tactical and commercial purposes with the outbreak of war. With a limited range but higher fidelity, broadcasters built antenna towers for amplitude modulation transmissions, usually reaching perhaps a county-sized audience, however after dark, listening audiences sometimes caught snatches when tuning the dial to programmes from very far afield. A phenomenon well known to the HAM radio community (see above), the signal boost was caused by the ionosphere becoming less charged by sunlight and able to refract and reflect errant signals back to ground-based receivers. Their shortwave leavings, the hobbyists discovered, had an incredible global and antipodal range which spurred the collecting of calling cards. As knowledge spread that programming and news was not restricted nocturnally, many members of the public, equipped only with standard AM receivers and spent many evenings engaged in the title practice, leaving families to bemoan these squandered evenings with their casting for transmissions in their “radio shack.” Once the potential of this belittled band was realised day or night with the potential for a station to bound around the world and picked up by anyone tuned in, however, once again the enthusiast community—as is the case with modern surfing the web—found themselves sidelined and marginalised with more licensing and crackdowns on commandeering the public airwaves when governments reclaimed the bandwidth for propagandising.