Radio DARC on 9670 kHz: the German amateur radio magazine, Sundays at 09:00 UTC

What you hear

Radio DARC is a radio programme about radio. Every Sunday from 09:00 to 10:00 UTC it brings an hour in German made by and for amateur radio operators: news from the DARC, the German national society, reports on contests and DXpeditions, explanations of a mode or a piece of equipment, interviews, a look at solar activity and what it means for the bands in the coming week, club announcements, and between the items music, mostly pop and rock from the 1960s to the 1980s. The pace is relaxed and the presenters sound like what they are, hams talking to hams. The identification is "Radio DARC", and the programme opens and closes with its own signature.

Even if your German is limited, the content is easy to follow for anyone in the hobby: callsigns, band names, mode names and numbers are the same in every language.

Who transmits and why

The DARC, the Deutscher Amateur-Radio-Club, is Germany's national amateur radio society, founded in 1950 and one of the largest in the world. It started Radio DARC in 2015 as an experiment in reaching hams and would-be hams through broadcast shortwave rather than only through its magazine and website, at a time when the big German broadcasters had left the bands. The Sunday hour in this catalogue comes from Woofferton near Ludlow in England, the former BBC transmitting station now run commercially, using a 125 kW transmitter aimed at central Europe. The programme has also been carried by Channel 292 in Bavaria, where it began, and the DARC publishes the current list of frequencies and repeats; the catalogue entry follows the Sunday Woofferton transmission.

When and where to listen

The slot is Sunday 09:00 to 10:00 UTC, mid-morning in Europe, and 9670 kHz lies in the 31 metre band, which at that hour is open across the continent in every season. From Woofferton the beam points at Germany, Austria and Switzerland, and receivers there hear a strong, clean signal; the Benelux countries, France, Poland and the Czech Republic do nearly as well, and Scandinavia and the British Isles get it from the side. In summer the band may be a little noisier at 09:00 UTC; in winter the signal is at its most solid. Outside Europe the transmission is not intended to be heard, though a receiver on the east coast of North America may catch it faintly at sunrise there.

The catalogue mode is AM. The transmitter is big and the channel is usually clean on Sunday mornings, so sideband is only needed if a neighbour appears.

In ShackDeck

The entry sits under Station catalogue → Shortwave broadcast → Radio DARC 9670 (Sun 09:00). ShackDeck picks a public receiver whose range covers 9670 kHz, tunes it and sets AM from the catalogue, so you need no receiver, antenna or account of your own. Open it on a Sunday a minute before 09:00 UTC and let a receiver in Germany or Austria carry the hour.