Blog or Die!

It was New Years Day 45 years ago when I opened my new Radio Peking calendar to the first page of the new year. And in that January 1 square I penciled in reception notes from what I heard on my new Realistic DX-300 receiver.

• Radio Relojio Brazil
• R. Quito, Ecuador
• R. Progresso, Ecuador
• R. Bare, Brazil 9895
• REE Spain
• VOA, Liberia 17870
• R. Kuwait, 11650
• R. Continente 5030

The DX-300 is long gone, but I still have the calendar, and I’ve hung it on the wall for 2026 as the week days and dates once again correspond.

Sadly, many of those stations are gone. The VOA transmitter in Liberia has been off the year for years, but as the months of 2026 pass, I’ll have warm nostalgia thinking about the younger version of me tuning the bands back when the noise floor was much lower and many more countries tried to make friends across the world through shortwave radio.

I bought the Zhiwhis version (ZWS-603) in April of 2022 and I learned that there had been firmware updates since my V1.6 radio to V2.4. Zhiwhis tech support told me that my older radio couldn’t be updated to the latest firmware; the circuitry had changed.