[HCDX]: Radio in India part 2 of 4
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[HCDX]: Radio in India part 2 of 4
(begin part 2)
I did not do a 'bandscan' since I think those should be
done for others who can actually use the results, but in
the daytime from Madras there are probably a half dozen
usable AM signals, most of which are IDed from the radio
listing from The Hindu (see part 4) Decent signals
included presumed Bangalore-612, Chennai-A on 720,
Chennai-B on 1395, "Vividh Bharati"-783, unID on 882,
Pondicherry-1215 and a few others I don't recall. Other
signals were present at night, mostly unID. The VoA from
Thailand-1575 was hrd only with fair signals in Special
Eng. a couple of evenings, but not every night. BBC-1413
was decent, once in Eng. (did not seem to be BBCWS), once
in I believe Arabic. The DW from Sri Lanka-1548 was always
in German when hrd, sometimes mixing with Kuwait VoA a bit
underneath and about 2 Hz apart. I never hrd 1548 in the
pre-dawn hours, though and they were never really strong.
The Saudi on 1440 however was consistently strong in Arabic.
1566 from Nagpur is called the "National Service" and was
never better than fair level in the South, always in Hindi,
occ. English, hrd at night only. I too suspect they are
beamed away from where we were.
Most Indian regionals sign on between 0545 and 0555 local
time which I recall is GMT + 5-1/2 hours. They put their
carriers on a lot earlier and run tone test of (?) 600
to 800 Hz intermittently, and tones appear manually set
(punching up several stations in memory, pre sign-on,
showed each tone slightly different). However, Nagpur-1566
was always on before I woke up, and may be on by 5 AM.
The regionals generally were in Tamil or Hindi and one
can hear just "All India Radio - Chennai ...." and they
will read the news, in local lang and sometimes a minute
later, repeat the same (?)in English, for 1 or 2 minutes.
Often the EE is obviously fed over a noisy phone line or
picked up off a slightly mistuned receiver and just
'patched into' the broadcast. But the night the Budget was
released, I hrd EE commentary on 720. I only heard time
pips (5 pips) once, generally there is no special ID or
fanfare music. I usually was too tired to hang around for
sign-offs. There are constant power allocation problems,
and stations would be missing at odd times during the day.
It's not unusual to lose power for a couple hours every so
often. It's still not yet the hot season, day temps were
about 36 C - by May, they will be 45 - 50 C in the plains.
The Tamil Nadu Electricity Board generates a lot of power
from coal but gets supplemental from hydro in the Western
Ghats, and that dries up in hot weather when they need it
the most.
(End Part Two)
c:\Dxing\India-2.txt
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