VOA Radiogram is a Voice of America program experimenting with digital text and images via shortwave broadcasting. It is produced and presented by Dr. Kim Andrew Elliott.
This weekend’s VOA Radiogram will include sample text in Vietnamese and Russian. Vietnamese has all sorts of diacritics, and Russian uses a Cyrillic alphabet, so this will be a real workout for your decoding software. Your character set should be UTF-8. In Fldigi, this adjustment is via Configure > Colors & Fonts.
The program will also attempt to improve the performance of RSID (Reed-Solomon Identification), the brief signal at the beginning of a digital mode transmission that automatically switches decoding software to the correct mode and audio frequency. I produced the program using Fldigi 3.21.74AB. You will need Fldigi 3.21.73 or newer for the MFSK64 and MFSK128 RSIDs to work correctly. If you have a previous version of Fldigi, or another decoding software, I have provided time for the mode to be changed manually.
Here is the lineup for VOA Radiogram, 31 August/September 1 2013:
2:55 MFSK16: Program preview
3:10 MFSK32: Vietnamese and Russian text samples
2:58 MFSK32: Discussion of RSIDs
1:50 MFSK64/Flmsg: VOA News re dung beetles*
:56 MFSK32: Image of dung beetle
3:07 MFSK128/Flmsg/Base64: VOA blue logo*
2:16 MFSK64: VOA News re China hack attack
2:38 MFSK32: VOA Khmer radio photo contest
2:31 MFSK32: Image of submitted radio photo
1:10 MFSK16: Closing announcements
:15 Surprise mode of the week
*To make Flmsg work with Fldigi, in Fldigi: Configure > Misc > NBEMS, under Reception of flmsg files, check both boxes, and under that indicate where your Flmsg.exe file is located.
VOA Radiogram transmission schedule
(all days and times UTC)
Sat 1600-1630 17860 kHz
Sun 0230-0300 5745 kHz
Sun 1300-1330 6095 kHz
Sun 1930-2000 15670 kHz
All via the Edward R. Murrow transmitting station in North Carolina.
Please send reception reports to radiogram (at) voanews.com
