Catching the chatter

Growing up in Mangalore in the ’80s, our entertainment was limited to a visit to movie theatres on weekends, short drives to the beach or watching national television. My father had subscribed for me a magazine called Target aimed at middle and high schoolers. An issue had two articles on radio communications as a hobby; one on HAM radio and the other on Dxing- D for distance and X for the unknown.

Dxing involved listening to overseas radio stations and writing reception reports using the postal service. HAM radio sets were expensive, had to be imported and required a government license. Dxing required a simple radio receiver. I wrote a letter to the author based in Chennai, requesting more details. He promptly replied by sending cyclostyle copies of addresses of international stations, their frequencies and information on setting up a basic antenna.

Many metres of copper and galvanised iron wire were purchased. I set up the antenna on the slanting concrete roof of my room, between swaying palms of coconut trees on one side and a water tank on the other side. North to the northeast for copper and west to the northwest for the iron wire, each in multiple parallel lines.

Connecting the antenna wire, I dialled the analogue receiver and it gave out a crisp radio noise. The thrill of receiving radio waves beamed by a transmitter thousands of kilometres away and bounced off the atmosphere, to be captured by a homemade antenna was memorable.

Sometimes, I eavesdropped on vague chatter on the fringes of short-wave frequencies at night, which was imagined to be either police chatter or smugglers on the high-seas sending cryptic messages to their counterparts ashore. The monsoons were terrible as fallen coconut palms would invariably destroy the antenna.

A few stations based in countries which no longer exist after the fall of the Berlin wall — East Germany, Czechoslovakia, the USSR, Yugoslavia mailed in glossy publicity material. Their stamped acknowledgement cards are collector's items today. The United Kingdom and the USA replied with plain postcards. I lost interest in the radio through pre-university, medical college and the arrival of cable and satellite TV. Three decades later, I managed to get the radio to Bengaluru, though it remained in the storeroom.

It was an onerous task to keep my children engaged during the lockdown in May this year. I took out the radio and turned the dial on. The reception dwarfed in comparison to the clarity of digital FM or online radio stations. The stations from Western Europe and North America broadcast on fewer frequencies now.

The radio bands had multiple Chinese stations broadcasting state news and documentaries with superior command over the English language. We listened to state propaganda for a few minutes. As the children’s interest declined rapidly, I turned off the receiver and boxed the radio.

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