FM/AM/SW : The Secret Wonders of The Airwaves After Dark
As you read this, you are surrounded by people talking. It’s hard to believe, but they’re travelling through your walls and chatting right through your head. They’re playing pop music, reporting on the news, discussing the traffic. Can you hear them?
If you’re in possession of a radio, then you should be able to pick most of these conversations up. On the FM band you’ll find familiar stations: the ones that have soundtracked the school-run, sessions in the hairdresser's and dentist’s waiting rooms across the country. Flip over to the AM band and you’ll start to find more voices - people from overseas speaking in different languages and accents, and commentary from sports games that you didn’t even know were on. With a short wave radio you’ll find voices from even further across the globe, more obscured by the fuzz and interference, but still audible. All of this is happening all at once, all the time, and is perpetually making its way to the radio waves that populate your room.
If you were born after 1920, the year the first radio station began broadcasting, then you’ve had the secret luxury of never really being alone, not even for a second. There have always been people in the airwaves trying to talk to you. You only have to tune in.
My personal love for radio really kicked off in the summer of ‘21, when I was working at a children’s summer camp. Despite the site’s relative proximity to the M25, the phone signal was dire and the wifi non-existent. This was, for the most part, a blessing. With nothing to entertain us in the rooms of the staff accommodation, we spent endless sunny evenings pitched between the trees, chatting in our hammocks and exchanging life stories. Rainy weather was for gathering around card games and organising chess tournaments, or standing by the singular TV provided between 60 staff members to mutter through that night’s episode of Love Island. I loved it.
There was, however, one problem: the nights. My roommate had the interesting habit of eating crisps in their sleep between lengthy bouts of snoring. I would lay awake for hours with only the wafting smell of sour cream and onion to occupy my mind. I couldn’t text anyone, couldn’t check the news, couldn’t look at what my friends were doing with their summers on social media. I would drift off with an uneasy sort of loneliness, feeling that things were happening out there in the world but that I had no way of reaching them.
After one particularly awful night, I took a bus to the nearest town and bought myself a silver Panasonic radio. It was about the size of a pack of cards and came with a headphone jack. That night I turned it on and found, to my amazement, a connection! I felt like a caveman discovering fire! In this cabin, so completely excluded from the outside world, I found stations from London, Belfast and Paris. I listened to callers from up and down the country, chipping in on discussions about every topic under the sun. I realised the wonderful luxury of being able to hear the news every hour, and I delighted in catching a favourite song. Here was the noise of the world at the twist of a dial. The final piece of my perfect summer had fallen into place.
Now, years later, the radio continues to serve as my companion through the nights, and my fascination with the airwaves has only grown. Whilst that little Panasonic will always be a prized possession, I have also come to adore
the mysteries of short wave transmissions, which - despite their name - have led me to stations from Asia, Europe and America. By day I might feel trapped in a small town in England, but by night I’m a cultural explorer of the globe. Armed with Google Translate’s microphone feature, I can understand broadcasts in any language, from pirate stations and international news channels to fundamentalist preachers and lone ‘ham’ operators speaking into the unknown. I can fleetingly tune in to cryptic messages: long strings of numbers read out for reasons I’ll never discover and morse code that could contain secrets, or simply be the result of some inexplicable interference. I catch all of this from the aerial protruding just a few feet above my bedframe, and fall asleep in awe of the scale and intrigue of the world around me.
You too can go fishing in these infinitely fascinating radio waves for just the cost of, well, a radio! For all the technological advances of the last thirty years, the humble radio still provides the most impressive form of communication. It is portable, affordable and global - all whilst remaining independent of wifi, bluetooth or a major power source. So go on, twist the dial, find higher ground: you never know who or what you might find.
written by Charlotte Harris
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