Halloween is over but the fun is not. This weekend coming up is the first revival of the Global HF Weekend. I wrote about it in the October issue of The Spectrum Monitor. If you aren't subscribed and are interested, check here.
Here's what I wrote about the Global HF Pirate Weekend:
DXers love tuning in long-distance
stations. Pirates love to experiment and be heard across long
distances and in obscure places. Dating back to the late 1970s, some
stations, such as RX4M and Radio Confusion, announced tests on high
frequencies. The latter broadcasts were regularly publicized in FRENDX (now NASWA)
and some of the European radio newsletters, bringing in many reports
from two continents.
The problem with announcing tests in
advance is that it can make a pirate more susceptible to an
enforcement action, whether official or vigilante. Although most
stations that ran announced tests did so successfully, there are a
few examples of stations that ran into problems with enforcement.
On a worldwide scale, the first hugely
successful mass tests of pirates were the Global HF Pirate Weekends
organized by Finnish DXer Harri Kujala in the early 2010s. Kujala had
a fascination with logging stations of all sorts (licensed or not)
from foreign cultures. Within the pirate niche, this meant logging
hundreds of Dutch and Balkan MW pirates and Irish church services on
the CB band. In addition to hardcore DXing of these stations, Kujala
even took trips to the Netherlands and Serbia and visited a number of
the operators.
Kujala's pirate webpages and blogs
attracted radio fans from around the world to read of things like new
pirates from Russia and Hungary, and tests from new stations hoping
to be heard in distant locations. Finally, he organized what he
called the HF Global Pirate Weekend, when he published schedules of
different pirates testing on high frequencies. A number of pirates
participated and were very successful in reaching listeners in
different continents. In particular, Cupid Radio and Borderhunter
Radio received a number of reports from listeners in India, Japan,
New Zealand/Australia, and countries from the former Soviet Union.
Kujala hasn't updated the pirate
portions of his websites for several years and the intercontinental
tests have essentially disappeared over that time. But some of those
who tuned in or tested have not forgotten.
A few of the operators from those
years said “I'm always up for these special tests and experiments.
I can't believe the last Global Pirate Weekend was 4 years ago. Time
really flies.”
“I
always love to do this kind of broadcasts. I was thinking about this
two years ago, I got great memories on the weekend from 2012, youtube
is filled with clips from the pirates then.”
Such a day weekend has been scheduled
for this year and it's coming up soon, so mark your calendars.
Some of the European hobbyists have been busy contacting others who would be interested and I've e-mailed a lot of people about it as well. I've had listeners from South America, Asia, and Eastern Europe tell me that they were excited about the chance to hear North American stations. Likewise, I think a number of North American listeners would like the chance to hear stations from other continents with hopefully some good signals. Also, if conditions are good, it should enable North American stations from either coast to be well heard on the opposite coast.
That all said, I do plan to mention schedules on the blog if any operators want to let me know in advance. But I will not include the station names. It will be something like: "A station let me know that it will be on Saturday 11/5 from 1500-1600 on 15070 kHz" This system seemed to work when Harri organized the activities. This time, there is no organizer but I'm happy to report what I hear.
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