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.

[n2avh]

Just an update, this is gone already (at least today it is), way in advance of the projected closing date. As I suspected, the structure of the site was such that the Wayback Machine couldn't capture all of it, in particular the Shortwave News archive which is what I would have liked. Oh well! The station recordings and other content are saved pretty well, though.

[FOX]

I remember listening to some local stations from Papua New Guinea in strange languages ​​on 90 m.b. and received some QSL letters from them. There were also interesting local Indonesian stations.
By the way Danish Shortwave Club International published a form of reception report in Indonesian for sending reports to Indonesia

[n2avh]

I don't know if I ever picked up PNG except for the national service on 4890, but they sent me a 10-page program guide with a list of MW and SW stations, no date but probably 1980 or so. It must have come with a QSL but I no longer have it.

https://postimg.cc/mhM0mrsb

[n2avh]

Happy to report that the dswci.org website is back, so time for you to lift whatever content you'd like to lift before it goes dark in March 2025. The sad news is that Anker Petersen, who compiled the annual Tropical Bands survey, passed away sometime after preparing the most recent on June 1. I used Sitesucker to make a local copy of this site, as well as ontheshortwaves.com (see other thread), and despite my misgivings in the OP about the structure of the site everything was downloaded including what I wanted the most, the PDFs of the old issues of Shortwave News.

[BoomboxDX]

The last Tropicals I was able to hear (Vanuato on 41 M aside), were the two that were in Brazil on 60 M during the 2010's, one of them being Radio Clube do Para. Both those Brazilians are off the air permanently (one of them on MW, I guess).

In earlier decades, I used to hear Sutatenza, and several other Caracol stations out of Colombia. And Barquisimeto out of Venezuela.

At the time the Tropical bands had all that activity, we didn't really understand how good it was.

[n2avh]

Radio Brasil Central is still active on 4985 so that makes one