Swl Short Wave Listening Hobby

Listening to radio became a hobby probably from the first days of existence of the radio itself. There were always radio stations broadcasting signals and there were always people who listened to these broadcasts from their homes, work places, rest places, in noisy factories and quite offices. Very often people listened to radio for the sake of listening, not even going deeply into the information they received. That made a difference in types of radio listeners.

Today radio listeners can be divided in several groups dependent on the type of radio signals they receive and process, but in general radio listening can be either hobby or profession. In this article I want to talk about listening radio as a hobby and here are a few different types of signals that received and processed by those people. Major groups are divided by length of radio waves and by received modulation of radio signal, and here we have

• Broadcasting stations listeners on long waves, middle waves, short waves, and ultra high frequencies;
• Special stations listeners who listen to the signals from space stations, sattelites, boats, emergency stations etc.; 
• Various Amateur radio listeners who are listening to the conversations of amateur radio operators on assigned HAM radio bands. Here I can also mention listeners of amateur TV stations as well as amateur Ultra High Frequency stations

This topic is very large and describing every aspect of this hobby and every type of listeners would take quite some time. I will talk here about Short Wave Listeners (SWL) who are listening amateur radio bands. 

In old times most of the world radio licensing institutions were issuing special listening identification numbers (call signs) and those call signs were looking quite different from the operational calls, however, they contain the same parts: prefix, number and suffix (very often listener’s calls don’t have suffix and/or have special prefix) In general prefix contains information about location of the station (in operational calls part of the suffix and number can serve the same purpose), number in SWL call is the mane identification of certain listener, it is unique for the issuing institution. The suffix in SWL call can be avoid or sometimes bears the identification of issuer organization/club. For example I can show you my own SWL call – SM6011SWL SM6 – is a prefix meaning that I’m located in western part of Sweden, 011 – is a unique identifier, SWL – suffix means I’m part of SWL radio club.