Shortwave Listening (SWL)
No licence, no exam, no transmitter: just a receiver, a length of wire and a clear night on the prairie.
Shortwave listening, or SWL, is the hobby of tuning the high-frequency (HF) radio spectrum, roughly 3 to 30 MHz, plus the “tropical” bands just below it. Signals on these frequencies bounce off the ionosphere and can travel thousands of kilometres. From a kitchen table in Lethbridge you can hear Europe, Asia, ships at sea, aircraft over the Atlantic and ham operators all over the world.
It is also the gentlest possible way into radio. Many amateur operators started as shortwave listeners, and everything you learn about bands, propagation and antennas carries straight over if you later decide to transmit.
The legal bit, in plain words. In Canada you do not need a licence to listen. The Radiocommunication Act requires a radio authorization to install or operate radio apparatus, but section 4(1)(b) excludes equipment that can only receive broadcasting. Ordinary shortwave and communications receivers are sold and used across Canada with no licence.
What the law does limit is what you do with what you hear. Section 9(2) says that, except as prescribed, no one may intercept a radiocommunication and then make use of it or divulge it without the permission of the sender or the intended receiver. Section 9(3) exempts broadcasting, so you can talk about a BBC or Radio Romania program all you like. For two-way traffic (aircraft, ships, businesses, other people’s FRS or CB chatter) the safe rule is: listen and log for your own interest, but don’t pass the content on or act on it. Decoding encrypted subscription signals is a separate offence under section 9(1)(c). This is a plain-language summary, not legal advice.
What shortwave broadcasting looks like today
Shortwave is quieter than it was in the 1980s, when dozens of national broadcasters competed for listeners. Many big names have cut back or left the air entirely, but the bands are far from empty.
What has gone
- Radio Canada International ended its shortwave service on 26 June 2012, and its Sackville, New Brunswick transmitter site was dismantled in 2014.
- CHU, Canada’s shortwave time station near Ottawa, went silent on 22 June 2026 at 14:10 UTC after nearly a century. NRC still provides official time by internet (NTP), web clock and telephone.
- Gander VOLMET, NAV CANADA’s HF aviation weather broadcast, was decommissioned on 12 June 2025.
- US government international broadcasters went through deep cuts in 2025. Check a current schedule before you hunt for them.
Who is still there
- Recent lists of English programs for North America still include Radio Romania International, KBS World Radio (Korea), Radio Prague, Radio Slovakia International, Polish Radio, RTÉ (Ireland) and others. Several big national broadcasters in Asia and elsewhere also stay on shortwave.
- Many of those smaller programs reach North America through relay stations in the United States. Frequencies such as 5850, 7730, 7780 and 9395 kHz turn up again and again on English-to-North-America lists.
- CFRX in Toronto, the 1 kW shortwave relay on 6070 kHz, was still being logged in 2025, which makes it a nice “home” catch from Alberta.
- Religious broadcasters, hobby stations and digital (DRM) transmissions fill in the gaps.
The broadcast “metre bands”
Broadcasters cluster in bands named for their approximate wavelength. Ranges below are the commonly published allocations. Stations often sit just outside the edges, and channel spacing is 5 kHz.
| Band | Range (kHz) | When to try from southern Alberta |
|---|---|---|
| 120 m | 2300 to 2495 | Winter nights. Mostly local tropical stations; hard to hear here. |
| 90 m | 3200 to 3400 | Winter nights. Tropical, weak, a DX challenge. |
| 75 m | 3900 to 4000 | Used for broadcasting mainly in the Eastern Hemisphere. In Canada this is the amateur 75 m phone band, so expect hams. |
| 60 m | 4750 to 5060 | Night. Tropical stations; WWV sits at 5000. |
| 49 m | 5730 to 6295 | Evening and night, all year. The best band to start on. |
| 41 m | 7100 to 7600 | Night. In the Americas, 7000 to 7300 is the 40 m ham band, so look above 7300. |
| 31 m | 9250 to 9990 | Evening and night; daytime in winter. Very busy. |
| 25 m | 11500 to 12160 | Around sunset, and day or night in summer. |
| 22 m | 13570 to 13870 | Daytime, best in summer. |
| 19 m | 15030 to 15800 | Daytime. WWV sits at 15000. |
| 16 m | 17480 to 17900 | Daytime. |
| 15 m | 18900 to 19020 | Seldom used. |
| 13 m | 21450 to 21750 | Daytime, when solar activity is high. |
| 11 m | 25670 to 26100 | Very little broadcasting. Don’t confuse it with the 11 m CB band at 26.965 to 27.405 MHz. |
Ranges as listed by the HFUnderground wiki. Some lists stretch or trim a band edge by a few kHz, and naming of the 16 m and 15 m bands varies between sources.
Time and frequency stations
Time stations are the shortwave listener’s test signal. They are on the air around the clock, on fixed frequencies, and they tell you instantly which bands are open.
WWV, Fort Collins, Colorado
2.5, 5, 10, 15, 20 and 25 MHz (25 MHz is run as an experimental signal). Male voice announces the time each minute.
WWVH, Kauai, Hawaii
2.5, 5, 10 and 15 MHz. Female voice. WWVH and WWV share frequencies, so on a good night you can hear both, one after the other.
Curious how GPS keeps even better time than these stations, and why its clocks are set slightly wrong on purpose? See How GPS keeps time.
CHU is gone. Older guides list Canada’s CHU on 3330, 7850 and 14670 kHz. Those transmissions ended on 22 June 2026. If you hear something there now, it isn’t CHU.
What else is on shortwave
Amateur radio
Hams use bands such as 80, 40 and 20 m. In Canada, 40 m runs from 7.000 to 7.300 MHz and 20 m from 14.000 to 14.350 MHz. Voice is usually single sideband (SSB), so your receiver needs an SSB or BFO setting. See the band-by-band guide.
Aviation (VOLMET and oceanic control)
VOLMET stations read airport weather to aircraft in upper sideband. New York VOLMET is listed on 3485 kHz (night), 6604 and 10051 kHz (24 hours) and 13270 kHz (day). Gander’s VOLMET on the same frequencies closed in June 2025. You can also hear oceanic air traffic control position reports.
Maritime
Ship-to-shore voice, marine weather and weather-fax broadcasts live in their own HF marine bands; part of the 49 m broadcast band overlaps the 6 MHz marine band. A free decoding program turns weather-fax tones into charts on your screen.
Utility and digital signals
Military, government and data signals of all kinds. Telling them apart is a hobby in itself, and online signal-identification wikis help.
Why night and day sound so different
The ionosphere is built by sunlight. In daytime the upper layers are strongly charged and can bend high frequencies back to Earth, so 19, 16 and 13 m come alive. Meanwhile the lowest layer (the D layer) soaks up lower frequencies, which is why 49 m and 60 m sound thin at noon.
After sunset the D layer fades within an hour or so. Lower frequencies now travel long distances, and the higher bands close because there isn’t enough ionization left to bend them. That is the whole rule of thumb: high bands by day, low bands by night. Winter nights on the prairie, long and quiet, are the best low-band listening of the year.
Grey line is the band of twilight that circles the Earth at sunrise and sunset. Along that line, absorption is low on one side and the ionosphere is still active on the other, so signals from places also in twilight can be surprisingly strong. Listen in the half hour around your local sunrise and sunset.
Solar conditions matter too. More sunspots generally mean higher usable frequencies. Solar Cycle 25 reached its maximum around October 2024, so conditions are slowly easing toward the quieter years. A solar flare can wipe out daytime HF for an hour; a geomagnetic storm (high K-index) can make the higher-latitude paths from Alberta to Europe noisy or dead for a day or two.
Receivers: from a portable to an SDR
Portable shortwave radio
A battery set with a telescopic whip. Look for one with SSB if you want to hear hams, aviation and maritime, and for direct frequency entry. Good for the truck, the trailer and the campground.
SDR dongle and a computer
A USB software-defined radio (SDR) shows a whole slice of the band as a moving “waterfall”, so you can see signals before you hear them. Some inexpensive dongles cover HF directly; older ones need an upconverter. Dedicated HF SDRs perform better with a wire antenna.
Desktop receiver or ham transceiver
A tabletop communications receiver, or the receive side of an HF ham radio, handles strong signals and big antennas best. Many listeners buy one when they get their amateur qualification.
Simple listening antennas
The whip on a portable works, but a wire outdoors works far better. You don’t need anything fancy:
- Random wire. Ten to twenty metres of insulated wire, run as high and as far from the house as you can, clipped to the antenna jack. An SDR or receiver with an external antenna input benefits most.
- Loop antennas. Small loops pick up less household noise, which matters in town where LED lights, chargers and solar inverters fill the bands with hash.
- Stay safe. Never run a wire over or near power lines. Disconnect outdoor wires during thunderstorms and when you’re away.
More ideas: antennas, wire antennas and portable antennas.
Online receivers: listen from anywhere
Volunteers around the world share their receivers over the internet. Pick one near the station you want to hear, tune it in your browser, and compare it with what you hear at home.
- KiwiSDR receivers cover 10 kHz to 30 MHz. The public list and map is at rx.kiwisdr.com.
- WebSDR, the original browser receiver from the University of Twente in the Netherlands, lets many people tune one receiver at the same time. Directory: websdr.org.
Online receivers are also the best teaching tool there is: listen to the same frequency in Alberta, Ontario and Europe, and propagation stops being theory.
Finding out what you’re hearing: schedules
Broadcast schedules change twice a year, at the end of March (“A” season) and the end of October (“B” season). These three free sources are the ones most listeners use:
| Source | What it is |
|---|---|
| EiBi (eibispace.de) | A free, downloadable text-file list of broadcast schedules, compiled by Eike Bierwirth. KiwiSDR receivers use it to label stations on screen. |
| HFCC (hfcc.org) | The High Frequency Coordination Conference, where broadcasters coordinate frequencies. Its public operational schedule is free to download. It shows what is planned, not always what is actually on. |
| Aoki (Nagoya DX Club) | A long-running free frequency list published by the Nagoya DX Club in Japan. |
For English programs aimed at North America, the NASWA “traditional shortwave broadcasts to North America in English” list is also handy. All of these are volunteer efforts; treat them as a guide.
Logging, reception reports and QSL cards
Keep a log. It can be a notebook or a spreadsheet. For each catch, write down:
- Date and time in UTC. Alberta Time is UTC−6 all year now, so 8 pm in Lethbridge is 0200 UTC the next day.
- Frequency in kHz, and the mode (AM, SSB, DRM).
- Station, language and what you heard: program names, music, IDs.
- Signal quality, often written as SINPO: Signal, Interference, Noise, Propagation (fading) and Overall, each scored 1 to 5.
- Your receiver and antenna.
A reception report sends those details to the station. Many broadcasters still reply with a QSL card or an e-QSL to confirm your report. Include enough program detail to prove you heard them, keep it short, and be patient: replies can take months. Never send reports about two-way communications you have heard; the divulging rule above applies.
Try this tonight from Lethbridge
- Wait until about an hour after sunset. Take your receiver outside or clip a wire to it, away from LED lights and chargers.
- Find WWV on 5 and 10 MHz. Note which is louder. That tells you how far the low bands are reaching tonight. If you also hear a woman’s voice, that’s WWVH in Hawaii.
- Tune slowly across 49 m (5.8 to 6.3 MHz), then 31 m (9.3 to 9.9 MHz). Try 6070 kHz for CFRX Toronto and 5850 or 9395 kHz for relayed European programs. Write down every station with the time in UTC.
- Open PropMap and compare its picture with what you heard. Repeat at noon on 19 and 16 m to feel the difference between day and night.