Radio Cairo: Egypt's evening service to Europe on 9900 kHz

What you hear

Radio Cairo is the station listeners recognise by its sound rather than by its words. The carrier on 9900 kHz is big and steady; the audio riding on it is often muffled, overdriven, buzzing with hum, and at times so distorted that you can tell a man is speaking English without catching a sentence. On a good evening the modulation is merely dull and you can follow the news from Cairo, a talk on Egyptian history, Quran recitation and a block of Egyptian and Arabic music. On a bad one, the music is a rumble under a carrier. Both happen on the same transmitter in the same week, which is why the station has had a cult following among DXers for decades.

The evening on 9900 kHz is for Europe. English has traditionally occupied a slot from around 19:00 UTC, with German, Italian, French and other European languages on this or neighbouring frequencies before and after it. Exact times drift from season to season, and the station has a habit of vanishing for days.

Who transmits and why

The station is the external service of the Egyptian Radio and Television Union, the state broadcaster in Cairo, and the transmitters stand at Abis, on the Nile delta east of Alexandria. Egypt was one of the first Arab countries to build a large shortwave external service, and in the 1950s and 1960s Cairo's voice carried weight across Africa and the Middle East. The multilingual European output is a survivor of that era. Why the audio has been so poor for so long is not explained by anyone official; listeners put it down to ageing transmitters and modulation chains that nobody has the budget or the orders to fix. That is a guess, though a widely shared one.

When and where to listen

The European evening, from about 18:00 UTC until the station signs off late at night, is the window; 9900 kHz sits in the 31 metre band, which carries well from Egypt to all of Europe after dark. The signal is strong in the Balkans, Italy and central Europe and still easy in the north-west; distance is not the problem, the sound is. Try a receiver in Greece, Italy or Austria for the strongest carrier, though a stronger carrier does not make the audio any clearer.

The catalogue mode is AM. For this particular station it is worth experimenting: a synchronous AM detector, where the receiver offers one, or a sideband setting with the receiver placed exactly on the carrier, sometimes pulls a little more intelligibility out of the distortion, and a narrow audio filter removes some of the hum. Do not expect miracles; the fault is at the transmitter.

In ShackDeck

In the program the entry is at Station catalogue → Shortwave broadcast → Radio Cairo. Click it and ShackDeck finds a public receiver that covers 9900 kHz, tunes it and sets AM as stored in the catalogue; no receiver, antenna or account of your own is required. Look at the waterfall before you judge the sound: a fat, bright stripe with thin, ragged sidebands is Radio Cairo as everyone knows it, and the picture tells you the station is on even when the audio refuses to.