KBS World Radio in Russian on 15265 kHz: Seoul via Woofferton

What you hear

From 18:00 to 19:00 UTC, 15265 kHz carries the Russian service of KBS World Radio. The hour opens with news from the Korean peninsula, read in good Russian by the Seoul staff, and continues with the magazine programmes that external services do well: Korean culture and history, the economy and technology, Korean music from traditional pieces to K-pop, listener letters, and short Korean-language lessons that have been a KBS tradition for decades. The identification is "KBS World Radio" in Russian, and the hour ends as cleanly as it began. Outside that hour the frequency belongs to other broadcasters or to nobody.

The sound is that of a big European relay: a steady carrier, full audio, no drift. If you expect the thin, fluttery signal of a station in East Asia, you will be surprised; the transmitter is in Shropshire.

Who transmits and why

KBS World Radio is the international arm of the Korean Broadcasting System, South Korea's public broadcaster, and it has had a Russian service since the Cold War, when the audience was in the Soviet Union and the Korean diaspora there. Today the service is made in Seoul and the shortwave transmission to Eastern Europe is bought from the Woofferton transmitting station near Ludlow in England, a former BBC site now operated commercially, using one of its 250 kW transmitters. A relay on the European side makes sense: a signal from Korea would have to cross all of Asia and would arrive weak and unreliable, while Woofferton covers Eastern Europe and European Russia in one hop. The target is Russian speakers from Poland to the Urals, and the hour is chosen for the evening there.

When and where to listen

The transmission is 18:00 to 19:00 UTC, and the beam points east from England. Receivers in Poland, the Baltic states, Ukraine, Belarus and western Russia sit in the main lobe and hear it strongest. Receivers in Germany, Austria and Scandinavia get it well from the side; in the UK itself the signal is loud but arrives off the back of the antenna. The 19 metre band at 18:00 UTC is in good shape in summer and autumn, but in midwinter it may have closed over Eastern Europe by then, and the signal can be weak or fade before the end of the hour. If that happens, the station is not gone; it is the season.

The catalogue mode is AM. The relay is clean enough that sideband is only needed if a neighbour on 15260 or 15270 kHz appears.

In ShackDeck

The entry is under Station catalogue → Shortwave broadcast → KBS World Radio in Russian 15265. ShackDeck picks a public receiver whose range covers 15265 kHz, tunes it and sets AM from the catalogue; no receiver, antenna or account of your own is required. Start the receiver a minute or two before 18:00 UTC and you will hear the carrier come up and the opening announcement.