Rádio Clube do Pará on 4885 kHz: Belém in the 60 metre tropical band

What you hear

Rádio Clube do Pará sounds like a busy city station because that is what it is. The programme is in Portuguese and aimed at Belém and the state of Pará: news and talk in the morning, phone-ins, advertising read at speed, football commentary with the unmistakable long "gol" when the home side scores, and music through the evening. Religious programmes bought by churches take up part of the day, and the mood swings from preacher to sports desk within an hour. Identifications use the full name, "Rádio Clube do Pará", and the station is proud of its age: it has been on the air since 1928, which makes it one of the oldest in Brazil and the oldest in the Amazon region.

On shortwave the audio is narrower and rougher than the big international broadcasters, and the signal rises and falls with the tropical band. That is part of the appeal: this is a catch, not a utility.

Who transmits and why

The station is a private commercial broadcaster from Belém, the port city at the mouth of the Amazon. Its shortwave outlet on 4885 kHz exists for the same reason the tropical bands exist at all: in the humid tropics, medium wave suffers from thunderstorm static and short range, so countries in the band between the equator and the tropics were allotted frequencies between 2300 and 5100 kHz for domestic broadcasting. 4885 kHz is in the 60 metre segment, and a station in Belém can reach the interior of Pará with it in a way FM and medium wave cannot. Brazilian stations are the last big users of these bands, and this one has been among the most consistent.

When and where to listen

4885 kHz behaves like the amateur 80 and 60 metre bands: by day it is a local frequency, after dark it travels. From Europe the station is a night-time target, usually from about 22:00 UTC, improving through the small hours and peaking in the hour before sunrise in Europe, when the grey line runs from the Amazon to the listener. Winter nights are better than summer ones because there is more darkness on the path and less lightning static. Receivers in Portugal, Spain, the Canaries and the Azores hear it first and loudest; central and northern Europe get it on good nights. From North America the station is an easy evening catch.

The catalogue mode is AM. The tropical band is noisy and the station's audio is modest, so lower or upper sideband with a narrow filter often gives more readable speech than AM, and a receiver's noise blanker helps with static crashes.

In ShackDeck

The entry is under Station catalogue → Shortwave broadcast → Rádio Clube do Pará. ShackDeck picks a public receiver whose range covers 4885 kHz, tunes it and sets AM from the catalogue, so you need no receiver, antenna or account of your own. Look for a thin stripe at 4885 on the waterfall before dawn through a receiver in Iberia; if it is there, you are hearing Belém.