Finnish radio enthusiasts tune in to Battlefords’ airwaves

Dec 7, 2016 | 9:00 PM

Radio in the Battlefords is so good listeners are travelling past the Arctic Circle just to hear a crinkled clip.

AM radio enthusiasts Vesa Rinkinen and Ismo Kauppi live in Finland, and spend much of their free time listening to distant radio waves. During a recent trip to a cabin roughly 300 km North of the Arctic Circle they heard a radio broadcast from the Battlefords, nearly 6,000 km away.

What they heard was distant and covered in static noise, but they say 1050 CJNB radio could be made out.

The pair mainly listens in from home in southern Finland, but made the recent trip North to see what else they might be able catch on their AM receivers.

For most people, travelling to a cabin in the middle of nowhere to hear a radio station from halfway across the world is the last thing they would consider fun, but the two friends said it can be very exciting, at least for them.

“It is the excitement that you can never know what stations you can hear as the radio conditions vary every day. Sometimes during the dark winter nights we can hear some U.S. AM stations, but the next day you might catch South-American stations,” Rinkinen and Kauppi told battlefordsNOW reporters in an email.

The two keep track of the stations they’ve heard, and send out emails to confirm they’ve identified the right one. Once confirmed, they put it into their log books. Rinkinen alone has over 2,500 stations logged.

Self described “semi-pros”, the two have heard over 7,000 radio stations collectively since they’ve started listening in. The logs range from countries all over the world, including Canada, the United States, Argentina, Japan, and New Zealand.

The hobby started at a young age they said. Being young in Finland during the 70s and 80s, the local radio didn’t offer much for two young boys and that’s when they started looking around the globe instead.

“It was mainly because in Finland we had only two government-owned radio networks and the content was not really [interesting] for young boys like us,” their email said. “A lot of youngsters tuned in to Radio Luxembourg on medium waves for rock and pop music. In general, it was ‘the Internet’ of that time.”

Even with the Internet of our time, the two Finnish radio buffs stick to the old fashioned way of finding radio stations they’ve never heard before, including ones here in Saskatchewan.

 

Katherine.svenkeson@jpbg.ca

@ksvenkeson