Kossuth Rádió on 540 kHz: Hungary's national channel from the Solt transmitter

What you hear

Kossuth Rádió is the news and talk channel of Hungarian public radio, named after Lajos Kossuth, the leader of the 1848 revolution. It carries hourly news, political and cultural magazines, religious programmes on Sunday morning, radio plays, folk and classical music, and the time signal before the news. It is in Hungarian, a language unlike anything around it, which makes the station easy to identify even if you understand nothing: the stress always falls on the first syllable and the sentences have a rhythm of their own. On 540 kHz the audio is full, clean AM with a strong carrier.

Who transmits and why

The transmitter is at Solt, on the plain south of Budapest between the Danube and Kalocsa. The catalogue calls it powerful, and that is an understatement: the Solt station was built in the 1970s with a rated power of 2000 kW and a 300 metre mast, which put it among the strongest medium-wave transmitters in the world. It was designed so that one site could cover all of Hungary and the Hungarian-speaking communities in the neighbouring countries, in Transylvania, southern Slovakia, Vojvodina and Transcarpathia, with a single frequency. That is still its purpose.

Whether it runs at full power today is not something the catalogue records; large transmitters are often run below their rating to save electricity. Hungary has been one of the few countries in Europe to keep investing in medium wave for its public broadcaster, and the same operator runs the minority-language service on 1188 kHz from Marcali, which has its own entry.

When and where to listen

540 kHz is the lowest regular medium-wave channel in Europe, and low frequencies travel well along the ground. By day the Solt signal covers Hungary, Slovakia, Austria, Croatia, Serbia, Romania and much of the Czech Republic and Poland; from Germany and Italy it is often audible in the afternoon. Medium wave carries far only after dark, and after sunset the station grows into one of the loudest signals on the band across the whole of Europe, from Scandinavia to Spain, with the slow, deep fading of a long sky-wave path. Winter nights are best; in summer the band is noisier with thunderstorms and the dark hours are short.

Receivers in Hungary, Austria and Slovakia hear it at full strength at any hour. From further away, the 540 kHz channel is relatively uncrowded, so even a weak signal is usually clear. The program tunes AM; a wide filter does the station justice when the signal is strong, and a narrower one or a single sideband helps on the fringe. If the receiver you land on has a loop antenna, Solt is close enough to many of them that the carrier may push the gain down; that is the receiver protecting itself, not a fault.

In ShackDeck

Station catalogue → Medium and long wave → Kossuth Rádió (540 kHz). ShackDeck picks a public receiver that hears 540 kHz, tunes it and sets AM. You do not need a receiver, an antenna or an account; a receiver in central Europe gives the station by day, one further away after dark.