Radio 24 is a nation wide commercial FM station in Italy. I received them on 93.2 MHz. This must be the 4kW transmitter in Gioiosa Marea, in the northeast of Sicily (1734 kms from my QTH). Not an easy catch as on 93.1 MHz I have the provincial station Radio M from Utrecht only 14 kilometers away with 630W. I can see their antenna from my roof terrace. Check my Youtube clip: Radio 24 93 200 MHz, 2024 06 02 17h00Z (youtube.com)
Radio 24 is owned by the editorial group Gruppo 24 ORE, which also owns the newspaper Il Sole 24 Ore. So no surprise that Radio 24 broadcasts a news/talk format.
Jonica Radio started in the 80ies in the city of Cosenza. Today they can be heard in the regions Calabria, Basilicata en Puglia, the most southern regions of Italy as shown in the picture below.
I heard Jonica Radio on 93.3 MHz. FM List shows three transmitters but without details on power. So the exact location is a little bit of a guess. And it wasn’t an easy catch. I heard their station name on 33 and 40 seconds in this clip.
I sent my report to info@jonicaradio.it and received this fully detailed QSL email within a day. I’m very grateful to the folks at Jonica Radio for listening to my noisy recording and sending a confirmation!
Radio Kiss Kiss is a commercial station with an Italy wide network on FM. They focus on soul, funk and disco. I heard them on 92.2 MHz. I made a Youtube clip so you can hear for yourself: Radio KissKiss, 92 200 MHz, 2024 06 02 17h52Z (youtube.com)
There are 5 stations listed on this frequency, with the 5 kW station from Cupello being the strongest. As I heard a few other stations from that part of Italy I assume this might be the transmitter I received.
Email to QSL reception of Radio Kiss Kiss on 92.2 MHz
I sent my report to info@kisskiss.it , and received an answer within a day. In addition to Radio Kiss Kiss I also heard Kiss Kiss Italia en Kiss Kiss Napoli on June 2nd. They have the same parent company: Media Radio . Unfortunately I did not receive a reply on my reports for them yet.
The spectacular sporadic E opening on June 2nd resulted in quite a few QSLs. One of the first stations I heard was Radio Radicale on 88.6 MHz. Most likely from Rocca di Papa, some 20 kilometers southeast of Rome (1291 kms from my QTH). With 251 kW (listed) the transmitter is probably one of the strongest in Italy. As I couldn’t find an email address I filled in the webform their on their site. Within a day I received a simple reply attached to my message:
Yes,it’s Radio Radicale Thank you very much
Radio Radicale was founded in 1975-76 as the radio station of the Italian Radical Party. When I saw their logo I thought this would be a socialist party (as the rose is symbol of socialism). But apparently the ideology was liberal. “Was” because the party was dissolved in 1989.
Radio Radicale continues however, but as you can read on Wikipedia, not without controversy. The station has no commercial advertisements. It relies for funding on the party and support from the Italian government as part of an agreement that Radio Radicale broadcasts parliamentary sessions. Which is exactly the sort of programme that I received, as you can hear on my YouTube clip.
While searching for sporadic E DX I came across this regional station that I had not yet listened to: Regio 90 from Leersum. Via a webform on their site I submitted a report. The next day I received a kind email from Jos Sterkenburg confirming my reception. I happened to have tuned in to his program:
With 300 Watt Regio 90 is operating on 91.7 from Leersum. They suffer a bit from interference from the 50 kW VRT1 station in Flanders. Target audience is the Utrechtse Heuvelrug and the region just south of it. This is one of my favourite areas for cycling and I can definitely recommend anyone to visit the many castles around Langbroek and Wijk bij Duurstede!
I was already checking the FM band almost every day to see if there were some Sporadic E (Es) conditions. On the FM list site I saw some colleagues making receptions from the Baltic a few days ago. But I didn’t receive a thing. Unfortunately in that direction my view is blocked by an apartment building. Between South East and West however I do have a relatively clean line of sight. But many of you know how it is: you start to doubt your set-up and coax connections if nothing materializes.
Yesterday afternoon the FM band almost exploded however. From 1400 h UTC I heard multiple stations. Initially from Algeria and Tunisia, towards the evening from Italy. I still have to browse through my recordings on the Elad FDM S3 (the first time that I tried to make 24 MHz full band width recordings) and see how that worked out. But below you can see what I already logged in parallel on the ICOM R8600. The antenna is a 5 elements Yagi at 7 meters.
Only problem is that in Italy many stations have multiple locations on the same frequency. So I guess that my receptions from Northern Italy are in fact from locations a little bit more to the centre of Italy around Rome. This makes more sense for a single hop. But I’m learning as I go.
Es logs on June 2nd, 2024.
87.6 ALG Radio Laghouat 88.2 ALG Chaîne 2 88.5 I RAI Radio1 87.5 I Radio Maria 87.6 ALG Chaîne 3 88.3 E COPE 88.4 I RTL 102.5 88.0 TUN Radio Zitouna FM 89.1 I RAI Radio1 88.6 I Radio Radicale 95.1 I Radio Maria 101.9 I Dimensione Suono Roma 107.3 I Radio Radicale 92.0 I Radio Kiss Kiss 91.8 I RDS 105.1 I Radio Kiss Kiss 94.6 I RAI Radio1
At the start of this post I want to make clear that I don’t intend to make jokes about the very kind people of WDR5. Read my explanation at the end of this post.
Last year I was testing my FM antenna… more about that later. I came across WDR5 Langenberg, Germany on 88.8 MHz. As I read somewhere that they were still issuing dedicated WDR5 QSLs I decided to send a report to wdr5@wdr.de. Two days later I received a polite email:
Vielen Dank für Ihr Interesse am Programm von WDR 5. Bitte haben Sie Verständnis dafür, dass die Bearbeitung Ihrer E-Mail ggf. etwas Zeit in Anspruch nehmen kann.
If you don’t speak German: “Thanks for your interest, asking for your understanding that it might take a while”.
Two weeks ago I realized myself that I never got answer. So I sent a kind reminder. Within a day I received this reply:
Da Ihr Anliegen etwas sehr komplex ist, geben wir dieses Intern weiter und werden uns nochmal bei Ihnen melden!
This translates as “your question is quite complicated… we will forward and let you know”.
And last week I received a nice fully detailed letter from the Technical Information Department to QSL WDR5 Langenberg:
QSL Letter for my reception of WDR5 Langenberg on 88.8 MHz
As promised at the start of this post, my take away: I am very grateful that WDR5 is still sending out physical letters to QSL reception reports from listeners. There are very few stations that still do so, and I applaud them for this. But the correspondence does show how unfamiliar the front office public relation desk is with anything related to “technical questions”. Steve Canney, former engineer and QSL Manager of CFRB/CFRX Toronto made me aware of this. And you can see that the reply is from the Technical Department. This is why, when sending QSL requests to bigger stations, I always try to direct them to Engineering or Transmitter Engineering departments.
To finish this post, the beautiful QSL card I received in 1980 for my reception WDR Langenberg on 1593 kHz medium wave… those were the days!
I got “Great!” as an answer on my reception report for Direct 107, a station broadcasting on 107.1 FM. Is it enough to count as a QSL or not? Probably not. But for me it is another nice souvenir from a holiday on Curaçao!
Nevertheless I’m still grateful to the people at the station for acknowledging my reception report. Nice logos on the email make up for the lack of detail! And I learned a new word in Papiamento: “Atministrashon”.
Direct 107 broadcasts in Papiamento, the language of the people on Aruba, Curaçao and Bonaire. On Curaçao it was recognized as an official language in 2007 (which is a bit late if you ask me). If you know a bit of Spanish and English you might be able to understand a bit of it. But the origin is Portuguese rather than Spanish. Which is a reminder of dark times when the Dutch “imported” slaves from the Portuguese colonies Cabo Verde, Senegal and Guinea Bissau to the islands.
Modern Papiamento is more a mixture of Spanish, English and Dutch though. There are 180.000 people on the islands that speak Papiamento. Together with the people from the islands that live in The Netherlands there are about 250.000 Papiamento speaking people in the world. I would have loved to send my report in Papiamento language, but there is no Google Translate for it…
Direct 107 is one out of two stations of Direct Media on FM. They also run a television program TV Direct13.
Maarten Schakel, station manager, was so kind to QSL Hitradio 915 Curacao. I submitted around 10 reception reports to various FM stations on Curacao. This was only the second report that got confirmed. Together with the email from Paradise FM it is the only detailed response I received so far.
I sent my report to info@hitradio915.com . Do visit the Hitradio 915 website. It is really very flashy and gives you that special Curacao holiday feeling: Bon Bini!
Since 2010 Curacao, a former Dutch colony, is an independent country. And thus the EDXC lists it as a separate radio country as well. Unfortunately, by the time I resumed my hobby about a year ago, the only medium wave station Z86 went bankrupt and is off air. The Dutch Coastguard in Willemstad, which I received often between 1980-1990, doesn’t have a significant HF presence anymore as ship traffic goes by satellite. All that is left is basically FM. So when I visited the island in March this year I decided to send QSL requests to the stations I heard, in an attempt to add Curacao to my collection.
Email to QSL Paradise FM.
Joris Reer from Paradise FM was the first to reply with an email confirmation of my reception. Joris, who is host of the afternoon show, also asked my phone number. Next day I was on the air in the “Reer in het Verkeer” show explaining what our beautiful hobby is all about. Unfortunately for English speaking readers the show, like the QSL, is in Dutch which is still the official language on Curacao, next to Papiamento and English.
If I did my homework correctly, Curacao is the 197th radio country in my collection. And yeah, Joris was correct that it is a bit of a “cheat” as it is obviously not really DX. The only other “cheat” in my collection is Liechtenstein. I received “Radio L” while traveling with my wife on a 1500 km bicycle tour through the Alps years ago. I drafted my reception report during a stop for lunch in the capital Vaduz. But if anything, the Paradise FM QSL is a nice memory of a beautiful holiday on Curacao!
BDXC : SWL 2262 PRe VERON : NL 14228 If you want to get in touch, just leave a message on one of my posts. Please note that I don't publish email addresses of verifiers which are not part of the public domain. So if you don't see the QSL address, just leave a message and I'll get back to you.
Feel free to copy anything on this weblog. I try to provide accurate information, but if I'm wrong: don't blame me! A link back to my site is appreciated when you copy info.
