More from Ukraine

Saw this morning that Russian forces are closing in on Kiev. Former Ukrainian president Petro Poroshenko was on the street armed with an AK-47. He and his civil defense group are preparing to fight the invading army. Really surreal.

I heard back from ULX2. Last night, he said "Thank you for your support! I'm OK at the moment, but situation is quite anxious in Kyiv: distant explosions were heard now and then. It is due to missile attacks on our military airfields." He has been much more active on his blog than I've been on mine, with updates as recently as three days ago. You can check out his Ukrainian DX Blog here.

At least one Ukrainian shortwave pirate was on the air yesterday. Radio Europe was reported from 1630-2036 UTC on 5835.2 kHz by Ray Lalleu in western France. Ray heard Ukrainian punk and rap, with some talking mentioning Ukraine. If its signal can be heard in France, Radio Europe should be audible across nearly all of Europe if it is able to continue broadcasting. I don't have recent audio of it, but here's a clip from August 2018. It was reported in the video as a Russian station, but it was later determined to be Ukrainian. Here's a video of the transmitter in operation. 

This morning, Radio Mir, a Pirates for Peace station, was running an audio loop with a message in Russian, calling Putin a dictator (comparing him to Hitler) and the song "Russians." This ran from 1040 to 1306 UTC on 6295 kHz. It was reported by about a half-dozen listeners on HFU, including Kostiantyn Pravotorov, also a Ukrainian DXer. It was heard on SDRs from Ireland to Germany, but not in Eastern Europe.

And I can't forget the station that was playing music and sending waterfall messages and images over the Russian military station UVB-76 on 4625 kHz in January. Here's a YouTube video and another. The SWL Channel has a live stream of UVB-76 running on YouTube. It's not too exciting, but more than 70 people were on while I was checking it out. I guess the news of the day has people focused on stations like these because I can't imagine people just sitting around listening to it otherwise.

 Log via SDRs in Germany & Switzerland

Radio Europe (presumed, based on frequency): 5835.2, approx. 1715-1830 UTC VG signal with pop songs from the 1960s that you could hear on American radio, such as Archies "Sugar Sugar," Dixie Cups "Chapel of Love," Chris Montez "Let's Dance." Then went into some live songs by Hendrix.