Before the Internet Heard Everything: Twenty Years of Pirate Radio Reports
B efore the internet placed the world inside a search box, people sat beside shortwave radios after midnight and waited. Out of the static came distant governments, religious broadcasters, political revolutionaries, pirates, propagandists, hobbyists and voices whose origins were never entirely established. Signals faded in and out. Languages collided. A station might exist for one evening, change frequencies without warning or disappear before anyone determined who was operating it. Some listeners wrote down everything they heard. The Review of International Broadcasting , a shortwave-listening newsletter published between 1978 and 1997 is such an interesting study. Edited by broadcaster and radio historian Glenn Hauser, the publication documented unusual programs, legitimate international stations, pirate broadcasters, transmission schedules, equipment and reports from listeners scanning the bands around the world. Many of the newly digitized issues came from Hauser’s ow...