What is there to listen to on analogue radio in 202x?
This list is biased toward MF and HF listening and toward what's easy to hear in Central Europe
Broadcasting
Government shortwave broadcasters
The following broadcast in English as of 2025
- Radio Romania International
- China Radio International
- Voice of Vietnam
- Voice of Turkey
- Radio Taiwan International
- Radio Vaticana
- Radio Slovakia International
- KBS World Radio (South Korea)
- Radio New Zealand
- Voice of Korea (North Korea)
Religious broadcasters
Private and pirate stations
Amateur radio operators ("hams")
In general, hams are not exactly scintilating conversationists and most of what you will hear if you focus on SSB voice comms is people exchanging signal reports and that's about it. In addition to occasionally stumbling upon a rare "rag chew" where people talk like normal human beings, there are digital modes (such as FT8 and WSPR) which can be very interesting to monitor for a technically-interested non-ham. Genreally you can leave a program (like WSJTX) running unattended decoding these modes, resulting in a list of stations heard with distance from you and signal strength included. By comparing these lists at different times of day and of the year, or with different antennas or receivers, you can both learn a lot of about HF propagation and see which of your antennas/radios are better suited for picking out weak signals!
Utility radio
Aviation
- VOLMET stations (airport weather reports, usually speech-synthesised, transmitted in SSB on HF frequencies, some non-stop on their own frequences, e.g. Shannon VOLMET in Europe, others share a common frequency with co-ordinated-timeslots)
Maritime
- Digital Selective Calling (DSC) test messages are sent frequently on 2187.5 kHz by many, many coastguard operations in Europe, there are also HF stations
- Narrow Band Digital Printing (NBDP) on many shared HF frequencies
- Daily MF SSB voice announcements from Oostende Radio in Belgium
- Short voice announcements of other activity from many European stations on 2182 kHz
Weather
- Weather fax
- Weather RTTY (DWD only?)
Time
- WWV and friends from the US
- RWM in Russia
- DCF77 (LF at 77.5 kHz) in Germany
Navigation
- LF GPS-related signals
- LF NDBs from airports (becoming rare!)