Another site to check out while you can, dswci.org

[n2avh]

Danish Shortwave Club International, which dissolved in 2016 but has published the annual Tropical Bands Monitor through this year, says the website will go away on March 5, 2025. Because of the structure of the website I suspect a lot of it won't be archived, especially the old (sample) copies of their Shortwave News newsletter, but if you're reading this after that date and want to give it a try, thr direct URL is (was!) http://www.dswci.org/dvd/swn-dvd.html.

[Sealord]

Thanks for posting this - already downloaded a few of the newsletters.

[NQC]

Hey All,

I was BIG into tropical Dx 9 million years ago.

It was SO long ago I can’t recall many or most of them. But a pretty good number of definite ones stand out.Most were South American, but I did grab others .

FWIW Peru ( my wife is from there) always seemed kind of hard to me,compared to Columbia or Venezuela.

One of the last serious tropical Dxpeditions ( Maine, 20 years ago) netted around 10 Peruvians in one night- unheard of .Probably my best night ever.

It is ASTOUNDING how many stations were on air back in the day .

I will go through them and copy down some of the list.

THANKS SO MUCH FOR POSTING !

NQC

[n2avh]

Peru and Bolivia were difficult, not so much because they were further away from North America, but because the stations were typically lower-powered. I don't recall any 10kw Peruvians, and maybe just one Bolivian. Ecuador had a couple of medium-powered ones not counting HCJB, and Venezuela had Ecos del Torbes on 4980 while Colombia had 50kw Radio Sutatenza (5095 and one other nearby) and several medium powered ones that hard-core DXers considered nuisances that blocked the Peruvians we wanted to hear! This is all c.1980 so a long time ago.

[kris]

   I am also half a world away from South America, in the seventies I listened in Central Europe to stations from Argentina, Brazil and HCJB from Peru on an ordinary home receiver.
 I probably owed this to a self-made multi-dipole antenna for the 49, 41, 31, 25 m bands.
 It was suspended above the roof of my house. The signal from the center of symmetry without a balloon was led to the receiver by a coaxial cable.
 I was stunned by the effectiveness of this antenna, because the receiver's sensitivity was probably at the level of 30 uV.