Médi 1 on 171 kHz: Moroccan radio in Arabic and French from Nador on long wave

What you hear

Médi 1 switches between Arabic and French from one item to the next, sometimes within the same sentence, and that mix is its signature. Expect news bulletins in both languages, magazine programmes about the Maghreb and the Mediterranean, business and sport, and a great deal of music: French chanson, Arabic pop, Moroccan music and international hits. The station is on the air 24 hours a day, so there is nothing to wait for; late at night it is mostly music. On 171 kHz the sound is long-wave AM, deliberately narrow, with a carrier so strong that on most European receivers it is the first thing you see at the bottom of the waterfall.

Who transmits and why

Radio Méditerranée Internationale was founded in 1980 as a joint Moroccan and French venture, with studios in Tangier and a mission to speak to the whole western Mediterranean in its two languages. The transmitter is at Nador, on the Mediterranean coast of eastern Morocco near the Spanish enclave of Melilla, and the catalogue lists 1600 kW, which puts it among the most powerful broadcast transmitters in the world. Long wave at that power was the way to cover Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia and the south of Europe with one signal, and it still does: a Moroccan driver in France or Spain can keep the station on the whole way home.

Most of Europe has left long wave, and Médi 1 is now one of a handful of broadcasters that keep the band alive, together with Poland on 225 kHz, Romania on 153 kHz, Algeria on 252 kHz and the BBC on 198 kHz.

When and where to listen

Darkness matters less here than anywhere else in the rubric. At 171 kHz with 1600 kW the ground wave alone covers the Maghreb, Spain, Portugal, France and Italy by day, and a sky wave at night carries the signal across Germany, Britain, Poland and Scandinavia with the slow fading of a long path. From central Europe it is audible in daylight and strong after dark; from the north it is a reliable night signal in winter. The usual limit on long wave is local noise, not the transmitter, so a public receiver away from cities hears it best.

171 kHz is not crowded, and the only common problem is a receiver whose tuning does not go this low. Receivers in Spain, Portugal, France and Italy hear Médi 1 like a local station; those in Germany, the Netherlands and Britain hear it well at any hour. The program tunes AM; if the audio sounds thin, that is the station's long-wave bandwidth, not a fault, and a sideband mode with a wide filter sometimes gives a cleaner result than AM on a receiver with a noisy AM detector.

In ShackDeck

Station catalogue → Medium and long wave → Médi 1 171 kHz (LW). ShackDeck looks for a public receiver that covers long wave and hears 171 kHz, tunes it and sets AM. Not every public receiver tunes this low, so the choice is narrower than on short wave, but no receiver, antenna or account of your own is needed, and from southern Europe almost any receiver that reaches the band will do.