Drill: No decoration: a landing page using ONLY typography, spacing, and alignment. No gradients, no illustrations, no decorative SVG, no glassmorphism. Target: looks designed, not empty.
Interpretation: Built a quarterly shortwave broadcast listening guide (Meridian Wireless, B26 season) — a domain chosen for inherently numeric content (kHz, UTC windows, kW, metre bands) so pure typography has real data to organize. Constraints: fully achromatic warm-ink ladder on #faf9f7, zero decoration beyond hairline rules, one inverted black band, all figures derived from a single 18-row dataset. Aesthetic reference: regional-newspaper frequency-count columns (WRTH style) — dense, tabular, editorial candor.
An independent listener's guide to longwave and shortwave, compiled at 64.14° N, 21.94° W. Every frequency below was heard on air between 12 and 26 October 2026. Times in UTC. Frequencies in kilohertz. Corrections welcome, and necessary.
A winter schedule for people who still turn a dial — chosen for staying power, not signal strength alone.
Verified on a 1969 Sony ICF-5800 and a length of wire thrown out the window. If a station matters, it survives bad receivers; if it only sounds good on equipment, it belongs in another magazine.
Shortwave behaves like tide, not territory: the same frequency is open at dusk and dead at noon. The ionosphere — charged by sunlight — lifts higher frequency paths into service as it warms and drops them after dark. Below 10 MHz think night; above it, think day.
| Band | Range kHz | Propagation | Listed |
|---|
Reading the table. “Listed” counts this issue's schedule entries on each band (longwave and mediumwave carry their own tables in §04). Wavelength in metres ≈ 299 792 ÷ frequency — the 49-metre band's 6 MHz is close enough for conversation.
Ordered by start time, UTC. “Power” is the transmitter's rated output, not what reaches you — distance, darkness, and the sun's mood do the rest.
| Time UTC | Freq kHz | Band | Station | Programme | Lang | Site | Power kW | Note |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Candour before complaint. Two or three of these will drift, retune, or vanish before spring — owners move transmitters, rent airtime by the season, and jam each other with enthusiasm. The schedule is a starting point, not a contract.
A frequency is a promise written in physics. Any receiver, anywhere, can check it.
Web streams fail quietly — a URL rots and the station is gone before you notice. A printed frequency cannot rot. It either carries the station tonight or it doesn't, and you will know which within ninety seconds of listening, which is more honesty than most software offers.
This schedule is verified, not transcribed. Each entry was logged on air this October, at the coordinates on our masthead, on equipment a working listener might actually own. When reception is marginal we say so in the note column rather than printing an optimistic silence.
Shortwave rewards patience with the one thing no stream delivers: distance you can hear.
Scale runs 1 (unusable) to 5 (excellent). A honest 33233 teaches a station more than a polite 54555 ever will.
Two families broadcast without seasons, schedules, or mercy: time stations that state the second, and longwave giants that have held their channels for most of a century.
| Station | Frequencies kHz | Note |
|---|
| Freq kHz | Service | Site | Power kW | Note |
|---|
Why they matter to the listener. Time stations mark your dial better than any scale ever printed, and their stated accuracy makes a free reference for receiver calibration. The giants, meanwhile, are the last signals you will lose as conditions collapse — when nothing else propagates, 183 still does.