I recently bought a cheap SW radio to play with my kid and I got surprised by the amount of stations from china broadcasting strong signals over basically anything.
A great site for this is http://radio.garden/ which shows a globe with lights showing stations. Click on a station and it starts streaming. It is quite fascinating.
Radio.garden has been discussed a few times on HN. Here is one such discussion [1] that contains useful links to other world radio exploration resources.
I love radio too. I still remember the time I got to use a super het Zenith AM / SW radio. It was tube type, sensitive as heck, and had a few nice features, including three bandwidth presets: 3.5khz, 5khz and 8khz.
My grandfather had it connected to an excellent outdoor antenna too!
At night, there was not a single spot on the dial where no station could be heard. It was amazing!
One could hear "the noise of our world" and listen to stations from all over the place, and it would vary some due to propagation changes naturally occurring.
SW was as good and the difference being stations from all over the world. You know this, of course, but I wanted to paint a picture for others.
So there I was listening, and grandma would run the mixer, and the neighbors electric fence, a car starting, maybe a bit of atmosphere noise from a small lightning discharge all combined into the program, plus the world piped right into my ear.
Most of the time this sounded way better than I am writing here.
It is like having another sense! And it present, immediate, right here with me, right now.
And in my mind, I pictured the world, far away places like points of light. On a good night, it was like no light pollution where one can see so many stars!
And one of those little portables might be like in town, not so many stars, but plenty of bright ones.
In my mind they are all transmitting and we get to listen and get news, happenings, brought to us as fast as possible.
There are few effective differences. Noise being one. It will be what the world is doing there, not here. Other things may crop up. It may be night there.
AM radio was the first tech I considered magic. The world is alive and so are we! And that radio being like another sense invokes strong feelings in some people. Did in me.
There was a time when more households had am radios than electricity. A time when hams constructed their own rigs in a shack in the back yard - the ozone and noise from the spark gap and the stink of the battery acid was not tolerated in the house.
Many hams still construct their own equipment, especially for low power (QRP) operating [1].
I was captured by the same magic as you were. When you are in that dark, with only a kerosene lantern, to be able to listen to the all sounds carried through the ionosphere and bouncing off the Heaviside layer is a transformative experience.
Another thing you can listen to is the "dawn chorus"[0].
It's astonishing that, at any instant, there is a single voltage to be measured at the terminals of an antenna. Yet, through the magic of resonance, it is possible to separate all the manifold signals that have additively combined to produce that single, complicated waveform.
[0] https://naturalradiolab.com/natural-radio-signals/ [1] http://www.qrparci.org/
Makes me want to get the tube radio I scored at the yard sale last year tuned up. It works, but needs caps and an alignment. Maybe this summer.
In this way, I feel fortunate to have experienced those old radios. A good one, restored has a compelling sound that I consider timeless.
It is astonishing! And yes, additive is where the magic is at, at least where I feel one can experience it most directly. Great call on the lantern. That is a compelling experience worth having period.
Thanks for the samples! They are pretty good ones though hearing them through earbuds is a bit different experience. I feel they have a bit more presence when delivered by dual paper cone in a solid cabinet and the pre-emphasis in play. Don't get me wrong though. They are accurate and well produced.
I held a license for a while. May get another one in the future when I really feel that itch. My gear was all older school stuff and it all needed a repair or two. Rite of passage. Contacting the people who set me up on air was the point of it all.
I noticed the exact same thing about Chinese radio stations. At first I thought I was lucky to find some reflections from the other side of the world. But globally tuning around via kiwisdr.com made me realise that these must be locally repeated. This is a remarkable phenomenon.
Together with a load of other government supported stations from the US, Britain and France and the occasional apocalyptic warnings by Christian radios, this makes the air full of someone's propaganda. Realising that was a bit sad.
Regarding China: I've recently discovered that Chinese radio has Polish language programme. It's mostly (Chinese) music, but it's the first time in my life I've heard Polish spoken with Chinese accent, and it's quite unique. (Not "unique" like engrish or other stereotypes; it's just that Polish isn't particularly popular as a second language.)