Greetings!

I hope everyone had a chance to sit down with their receivers and tune around. (If you don't own a receiver yet, or you are looking for a great deal on a 2nd receiver, please check out the incredible offer at the end of this newsletter.) If you didn't, don't worry, there's no final exam. If you were able to spend some time listening then hopefully you became a little more familiar with things like kilohertz (kHz) and megahertz (MHz) and realized that they represent the same thing. You probably heard the stations express their operating frequency in terms of MHz or kHz , as well as the bands they were using, such as the 31 metre band or the 49 metre band. Be sure to refer back to our first newsletter if this still doesn't seem clear; and keep listening too!

This time around we're going to talk about how to tell time when you're dealing with shortwave broadcasts. If you've been listening to shortwave broadcasts you will no doubt have heard them giving times in Coordinated Universal Time, or Greenwich Mean Time. They happen to be the same thing although Coordinated Universal Time (usually abbreviated UTC) is the most common name. UTC has been adopted by SW broadcasters to help ease confusion when stating the time. Imagine the following example:

You're listening to Radio New Zealand International on 17,675 kHz and they tell you their next Broadcast will start at 5 pm New Zealand time. You live in eastern North America, and among the first things you'll say to this is "That's just great! What's that in Eastern Standard Time?" After consulting your world atlas you realize that New Zealand is 17 hours ahead of us, so 5 pm in New Zealand is midnight local time. That wasn't too bad. All you have to remember is that you subtract 17 hours from New Zealand time to get Eastern Standard Time.

Now you tune to Radio Kuwait's English broadcast on 11,990 kHz. The mention that a program you'd like to hear starts at 10 pm Kuwait time. Again you go back to the maps, locate Kuwait, and calculate the time difference. This time they are 8 hours ahead of you, so 10 pm in Kuwait is 2 pm at your location.

Again, that wasn't too bad, but I think you can see the problem emerging if you have to keep track of the time difference between you and the dozens of countries you're interested in hearing on the radio! It gets unmanageable pretty quickly. Coordinated Universal Time to the rescue!

By mutual agreement, all of the major SW broadcasters use UTC, and you'll soon see the benefits of having a single universal time. Years ago, Greenwich Mean Time (GMT) was the commonly used name for universal time. It was agreed that GMT would be based on the current time at the Greenwich Observatory on England, which not coincidentally the Prime Meridian also passes through. The Prime Meridian marks zero degrees of longitude on all the world's maps, so if you're going to base all of the world's maps on the Prime Meridian then it just makes sense to base the universal way of stating time on the same line.

So, now we have most of the world's SW stations stating the time as if they were located in Greenwich, England. How does this help? Well, now instead of memorizing the time difference between your location and dozens of countries around the world, you just need to know how many hours ahead or behind UTC you are! For example, if you live in the Eastern Standard Time zone then you are 5 hours behind UTC. That means that midnight UTC is 7:00 pm Eastern Standard Time (add or subtract an hour depending on what time zone you're in. Central Standard time is -6 hours, Atlantic Standard Time is -4 hours, and so on), and from now on all you do is subtract 5 hours from UTC time to get EST! If Radio Japan (on 6120 kHz) tells you they will be signing on next at 1100 UTC, simply subtract 5 hours and you now know that they sign on at 6:00 am EST.

When we switch to Daylight Savings Time then the difference between us and UTC drop to 4 hours instead of 5. Midnight UTC becomes 8:00 pm EDT.

While listening, you may have also noticed that not only do they use UTC, but time is also stated in 24 hour (military) time format. In other words 1:00 pm becomes 1300 hours. Stating the time in 24 hour format is unambiguous and has become the preferred method in radio communications. It may sound rather awkward at first, but it will become second nature after you've used it for a while

There are a few exceptions where you won't find SW stations using UTC. These are mainly in the 60, 90, and 120 metre bands, which are also known as the Tropical Bands. These bands have been set aside by international agreement for use by stations in countries located between the Tropic of Cancer and the Tropic of Capricorn, the world's tropical zone. Stations that broadcast on the Tropical Bands are doing so only for people in their own or other countries in the region and not for us in North America. Since they have no interest in audiences outside their own country they state the time in their own local time rather than UTC. The Tropical Bands happen to one of the most fascinating bands to listen to and I'll be talking a lot more about them in an upcoming Newsletter.

Before we close down for another week, here's a list of SW stations that do nothing but broadcast the time (in UTC of course!) 24 hours a day. Give them a try. They'll help you figure out this new way of telling the time, and because they use super-accurate atomic clocks there's no more accurate signal to use to set your clocks and watches!

These stations broadcast on several frequencies across the SW bands, so if you don't hear them on one frequency then try another. And remember, as you're doing so try and keep track of which frequencies you hear them on, and at what time of day!

WWV (Fort Collins. Colorado, U.S.A.): 2500, 5000, 10000, 15000, and 20000 kHz CHU (Ottawa, Ontario, Canada): 3300, 7335, and 14670 kHz

Ken Alexander

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