David wrote:

On Sun, 10 Jul 2005 20:06:25 +0200, "John Plimmer"
wrote:


That's absolute nonsense - there are thousands of Tropical Band stations
going strong,
and the WRTH is still the most authoritative source of information for
Mediumwave and Tropical Band that has ALL the info a serious DXer needs.
The blue pages are really for casual listeners to major broadcasters.
WRTH is kept uptodate by a comprehensive worldwide network of contributors
and there is no other publication to match it.
WRTH is published every year early December
see http://www.wrth.com/


There are 14 pages of Tropical Band stations listed in the Blue Pages.

That being said, this is from a review of WRTH 2005:

''RECEIVERS
We read that there continues to be a marked and continuing decline for
analogue broadcast systems worldwide, with digital radio becoming
widely accepted in many regions. We learn that the rate of
introduction of new SW receivers is in a downward spiral, with only a
very small number of new models appearing, except very cheap, limited
performance HF radios emerging from Asian sources.

WRTH strongly suggests that HF monitoring is now becoming mainly an
interest for technical hobbyists.''

If that is indeed true, it's sad. The internet has technical limitations
that become obvious as soon as Country X has a major natural disaster or
terrorist attack and the Real Audio servers belonging to their national
broadcaster crash from all the people piling on at once. Satellites
often require the reciever to be line of sight to the bird, something
that may not be a problem for a fixed dish like a DirecTV dish on a
house but can be a big issue with XM or Sirius in a car.

Satellite services are usually controlled by one big corporate entity
who decides what gets broadcast and what doesn't, and that corporation
is subject to pressure from governments or major power blocs. Look at
the controversy with New Tang TV or whatever it's called that was on
Eutelsat until Eutelsat signed a deal with the CCP that required that
New Tang be yanked off the bird. Also, rumors persist that the US govt
forbade satellite services to carry an Iranian TV channel broadcasting
in English, calling it "intellectual terror" (an oxymoron?).

Digital services may have better fidelity, but you sacrifice the
flexibility inherent in analog broadcasting, and especially in HF. It's
like the current trend of young people not buying CDs because they can
always download music for free off the net with CD quality-it looks like
a good deal now, but if it keeps accelerating there won't be much of a
music industry left after a while. Musicians won't want to perform if
they can't get paid, and music companies won't want to put out CDs if
they're not going to get paid for them. Soon there won't be any music to
download.

If analog broadcasting-MW, SW, FM, TV-is killed off, it will make big
corporations happy and it will make governments happy, but the big
losers will be us, since we'll have to rely on tightly controlled
sources for news, and that news will be mostly entertainment. The Daily
Show-a fake comedy newscast shown on The Comedy Channel-has a higher
percentage of news viewers than any of the traditional nightly news
broadcasts, especially among youth. People expect to be entertained by
the news, not informed by it, and the news will deliver, leading to a
proliferation of Daily Shows and the death of real news. And without SW
radio, we'll have to accept infotainment as fact, since we'll have no
alternative.



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