Polish Radio 1 on 225 kHz: long wave from Solec Kujawski

What you hear

Jedynka, the first programme of Polish Radio, is a general speech and music channel: news on the hour, current affairs in the morning, magazine programmes, radio drama, Polish and international music, and at midnight the national anthem. It is in Polish throughout. On 225 kHz the audio is long-wave AM, deliberately limited in bandwidth, which gives it a slightly muffled but very steady sound; unlike medium-wave stations it hardly fades, and you can leave it on for hours without touching the dial.

Who transmits and why

The transmitter stands at Solec Kujawski between Bydgoszcz and Toruń, and the catalogue lists it at 1000 kW. It was built at the end of the 1990s to replace the famous mast at Konstantynów, for a time the tallest structure in the world, which collapsed in 1991 and left Poland without its long-wave voice for several years. The new site uses two masts and has carried Jedynka ever since.

Long wave is expensive, and most of Europe has given it up. Poland keeps it because a single transmitter covers the whole country and far beyond with a ground wave that does not care about hills or the time of day, and because it still reaches Poles abroad, drivers on the road and listeners in places where FM and the internet are patchy. There is no sign of it closing soon, but long-wave transmitters have been switched off across Europe with little warning, so hear it while it is there.

When and where to listen

This is the one entry in the rubric where darkness matters least. At 225 kHz with a megawatt, the ground wave alone reaches Germany, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, the Baltic states, Belarus and western Ukraine in full daylight; Scandinavia, Britain, France and Hungary get a usable signal too. After dark a sky wave adds to it, and the signal grows stronger and may start to flutter slightly where the two paths meet, but it rarely drops out. On winter nights it is heard across the whole of Europe and into the Mediterranean.

The practical limit is noise rather than distance. Long wave picks up everything from switching power supplies to thunderstorms, so a public receiver in a quiet village hears Jedynka better than one in a city centre, even if the city is closer. Receivers in Poland, Germany and Scandinavia give the cleanest result. The catalogue tunes AM, which is right for this signal; if a receiver's AM filter is wide and noisy, a sideband mode with a 4 kHz filter gives the same audio with less hiss. Note that the frequency sits just below the 234 kHz channel of Luxembourg, which went silent years ago, and above 198 kHz, where BBC Radio 4 is still on long wave; sweeping between them shows how empty the band has become.

In ShackDeck

Station catalogue → Medium and long wave → Polish Radio 1 (225 kHz). ShackDeck looks for a public receiver whose tuning range goes down to long wave, picks one that hears 225 kHz, tunes it and sets AM. Not every public receiver covers this low, so the program's choice is narrower than on short wave, but no receiver, antenna or account of your own is needed.