Long Wave radio era set to end with Droitwich switch-off

That station is said to be one of the signals used by the UK’s nuclear subs to assess the state of the country in a war scenario.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Letters_of_last_resort#:~:text...

IMO, when the last LW transmitter shuts down, the whole band needs to be reallocated to hams. Realistic small-ish antennas are shockingly doable with a capacitance hat, loading coil, and counterpoise.

List of longwave radio broadcasters - including those that have shut down. The shutdown list is much longer than those remaining (only 7 remaining).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_longwave_radio_broadca...

Radio Society of Great Britain reaction: https://rsgb.org/main/radio-sport/rsgb-contest-club/bbc-long...

Rather defensive press release thing from the BBC: https://www.bbc.com/mediacentre/articles/2026/radio-4-broadc...

Seems like everyone's shutting down radio services. CHU and Weather radio in Canada too :(

The Droitwich transmitter used to transmit on exactly 200 kHz which I always thought was very cool, but it moved to 198 kHz in 1988 to better harmonize with European stations.

The program was mostly the same as BBC Radio 4 but it used to diverge at certain times of day. I used to be woken up at 5am every day by my parents clock radio with the farming news which was very dull, but easy to sleep through.

Online stream for those without a LW AM receiver: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ugd8G5w-Sfo

That is too bad, you would think these could be kept active for historical purposes. But seems these services are all being turned off even though I heard a few were very useful in this day and age.

As long we still have DCF77…

I wonder how many of the Van Allen radiation belts is held up by this