KBS World Radio in German on 3955 kHz: an hour from Seoul via Woofferton

What you hear

An hour of German from Seoul, every evening at 20:00 UTC. The German service of KBS World Radio follows the pattern of a well-run international station: news from Korea and the wider region, a review of the Korean press, and features that rotate through the week: Korean music from traditional to K-pop, Korean language lessons, business, life in Seoul, the Korean diaspora, and listeners' letters at the weekend. The German is native, spoken by the Seoul studio's own staff, and the production is polished, with jingles and a signature tune. At 21:00 UTC the hour ends and the transmitter goes on to another task.

The same site carries two other KBS services for Europe earlier in the evening: Russian from 18:00 to 19:00 UTC on 15265 kHz and French from 19:00 to 20:00 UTC on 6145 kHz, so a listener with time to spare can hear Korea in two other languages before the German programme starts.

Who transmits and why

KBS World Radio is the external service of the Korean Broadcasting System, South Korea's public broadcaster, and has broadcast to the world since the 1950s in a growing list of languages. German, French and Russian are its European services, kept on shortwave at a time when the station could easily have retreated to the web, because the audience of letter-writing listeners in Europe is still there.

The transmitter is not in Korea. Woofferton, in Shropshire in the west of England, is the last big shortwave broadcasting site in Britain, built during the Second World War and used by the BBC for decades; today it is run by a commercial operator and carries broadcasts for clients from many countries, KBS among them. From Woofferton, 250 kW on 3955 kHz covers Germany, Austria and Switzerland in the evening far better than any transmitter in Korea could.

When and where to listen

3955 kHz is in the 75 metre band, which is a night band for Europe: short to medium distances, from a couple of hundred to about two thousand kilometres, after dark. At 20:00 UTC the band is open across western and central Europe in every season, and the signal from Woofferton is strong in Germany, the Benelux, France, Switzerland and Austria, which is where it is meant to go. Receivers in Britain are close enough to hear it by ground wave and high-angle skip; Poland, the Czech Republic, Denmark and northern Italy are comfortable; Scandinavia and the Baltics are reachable on a good night, and beyond that it is a weak signal. 75 metres is shared with amateur stations in parts of the world and with other broadcasters in Europe, so some noise and the odd SSB voice nearby are normal. The signal is strong enough that AM is the right mode; if the audio suffers from deep fading, a sideband mode can steady it.

In ShackDeck

Station catalogue → Shortwave broadcast → KBS World Radio 3955 (German). The program picks a public receiver that covers 3955 kHz, tunes it and sets AM; no receiver, antenna or account of your own is required. A receiver in Germany or a neighbouring country gives the cleanest signal.