Internet Archive’s Digital Library of Amateur Radio & Communications, a library devoted to ham radio, shortwave, and related topics, announces a number of new collections to mark World Amateur Radio Day.
DLARC now offers a selection of each of the “big three” American amateur radio magazines: CQ, QST, and 73. The library recently added every issue of CQ Amateur Radio magazine published from its launch in 1946 through 1963, 230 issues in all. In addition, DLARC includes 530 issues of QST Magazine from its founding in 1915 through 1961, and every issue of 73 Amateur Radio: 516 issues published from 1960 to 2003.
73 Amateur Radio was published by Wayne Green W2NSD, who donated a complete set of the magazines to Internet Archive before he died so that they would be freely available to the world. QST is published by The American Radio Relay League, a membership organization for U.S. ham radio operators founded in 1914. CQ was published by Dick Ross, K2MGA. The issues of QST and CQ in the DLARC collections have entered the public domain. These three magazine collections are just a small part of the more than 9,500 issues of ham radio magazines available in the DLARC library.
In addition, DLARC has added a new collection of Review of International Broadcasting newsletters. Review of International Broadcasting was a newsletter devoted to the shortwave listening hobby, covering notable content heard on the air, news about legitimate broadcasters and pirate radio stations, program schedules, and radio hardware tips. The new collection includes 107 issues published from 1978 through 1997, many of which were scanned from the collection of publisher Glenn Hauser.
Finally, DLARC is home to a new collection of material from the Texas A&M Amateur Radio Club. The collection includes club newsletters, QSL cards, meeting minutes, slides, and other material collected and created by the group. Founded in 1912, the club is one of the oldest university radio clubs in existence.
World Amateur Radio Day is celebrated annually on April 18 to commemorate the formation of the International Amateur Radio Union in Paris in 1925.
Digital Library of Amateur Radio & Communications is funded by a generous grant from Amateur Radio Digital Communications (ARDC) to create a free digital library for the radio community, researchers, educators, and students. If you have questions about the project or material to contribute, contact me at kay@archive.org.
On February 13, World Radio Day acknowledges the importance of radio around the globe. The annual event has been taking place for a little over a decade, dating back to a 2011 proclamation by UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization) Member States and adoption by the United Nations General Assembly in 2012. The theme for World Radio Day 2026 is “radio and artificial intelligence.” UNESCO encourages radio stations to participate in the day and offers suggestions that align with the theme. One of the highlighted topic areas is memory and AI.
“Radio stations have thousands of hours of archives, often underutilized because they are difficult to index, browse or restore. AI can transform this dormant memory into an active resource, harnessing transcription, keyword searching, automatic summary and thematic upgrading. When direct reporting is impossible, coverage can be enhanced by historical archives.” – UNESCO
For much of college radio’s existence, the record of what was played was logged on paper playlists. Handwritten DJ playlists don’t always get saved, with station summaries of airplay or featured music more commonly found. These tops lists, radio surveys, adds lists, and airplay reports are compiled by radio stations and sent to record labels, musicians, trade publications, local newspapers, and zines. Results of the combined reports can be found in charts and lists published in CMJ New Music Report, Gavin Report, Rockpool, and similar publications.
DLARC College Radio recently received a large collection of digitized paper radio station playlists from the band Get Smart! Band members meticulously saved communication from college, community, high school and public radio stations that played their records in the 1980s. Representing stations from all over the United States and Canada, the playlists in this collection are mainly monthly summaries of the albums and artists that a radio station was playing. Sometimes they include commentary from station music directors or handwritten notes to the band. One thing that I love about these lists is that they are often printed on colorful paper, from a very 1985-feeling hot pink WHRB list from Harvard to an autumnal orange list from high school station KRVM-FM.
Additionally, a representative of the now-defunct Cleveland College Radio Coalition donated a collection of digitized copies of playlists, program guides and more. The group was formed in 1982 in order to help increase awareness for the college radio stations in Cleveland, Ohio and also produced a joint program guide.
Cover of the Spring 1983 joint program guide produced by the Cleveland College Radio Coalition. Source: DLARC College Radio (donated by Mary Cipriani)
One of DLARC College Radio’s newest collections is from KVRX-FM, the student-run college radio station at University of Texas, Austin. The Internet Archive digitized a wide variety of KVRX materials, including ‘zines, DJ notebooks, record reviews, organization documents, posters, and newsletters, spanning the years 1986 to 2025.
Cover of an issue of The Call Letter, an early newsletter from KTSB 91.7 cable FM, the predecessor to KVRX-FM at University of Texas, Austin. Source: DLARC College Radio (digitized from KVRX’s on-site collection)
Audio Transcriptions
Finally, in keeping with this year’s World Radio Day theme related to AI, the college radio collection has been enhanced by an AI-generated transcription tool within the media player of select audio items. This means that not only can one listen to recordings from college radio stations, but one can also read transcripts from radio shows, interviews, oral histories, and more. Audio with AI-generated transcripts in the DLARC College Radio collection includes:
The Digital Library of Amateur Radio & Communications is funded by a grant from Amateur Radio Digital Communications (ARDC) to create a free digital library for the radio community, researchers, educators, and students. DLARC invites radio clubs, radio stations, archives and individuals to submit material in any format. To contribute or ask questions about the project, contact: Kay Savetz at kay@archive.org. Questions about the college radio sub-collection can be directed to Jennifer Waits at jenniferwaits@archive.org.
The 15th annual World College Radio Day takes place on Friday, October 3, 2025, with stations from around the globe celebrating and bringing attention to student radio as an enduring form of media. The first licensed college radio stations launched in the United States in the 1920s and since that time student radio practitioners have been innovators in technology, music discovery and radio programming.
By nature, radio has traditionally been an ephemeral endeavor, with many shows never recorded and lost to the ages. While some stations meticulously save paper materials like internal newsletters and promotional materials sent by bands and record labels, many others regularly purge these bits and pieces of day-to-day operations. College radio has added challenges due to ever-changing groups of students, tight budgets and space constraints. In light of these factors, many college radio stations aren’t able to save and archive as much as they would like.
Spring 1988 DJ Comment book from Mount Holyoke College’s radio station WMHC. Source: DLARC College Radio (digitized from the Mount Holyoke College Archives and Special Collections Repository)
The Digital Library of Amateur Radio and Communications launched a dedicated college radio collection in February 2024 in an effort to preserve the materials associated with college radio culture. It now contains over 9,000 items from student radio stations and student radio trade organizations from across the United States and Canada. The wide-ranging collection includes radio station flyers, music charts, playlists, zines, program guides, organizational documents, correspondence, meeting notes, recordings of artist interviews, oral histories, scholarly articles, clippings, photos, training manuals, scripts, magazines and more. It is especially exciting to me that these items now exist in a central place online, so that college radio fans, participants, scholars and alumni can search and find materials from a variety of stations.
Cover of May 1946 issue of IBS Bulletin. This was a publication produced by Intercollegiate Broadcasting System. Source: DLARC College Radio/Samuel T. Arnold Papers (OF.1CA.A2), Box 7, Folder 112, Brown University Archives
We have been regularly adding items to DLARC College Radio from Yale University’s archives, including materials from Yale’s independent student radio station WYBC and from The Ivy Network. Formed in 1947, The Ivy Network was initially started by members of college radio stations at Ivy League schools, including those at Dartmouth, Yale, Harvard, University of Pennsylvania, and Princeton. The Ivy Network was “designed to further the aims and purposes of the member stations, to gain the advantages which the free exchange of information, ideas, and advice will bring, and to obtain advertising on a national scale,” according to its policy document.
In honor of College Radio Day, we invite you to explore and contribute to the growing collection of student radio materials in DLARC College Radio on the Internet Archive.
Episodes of WINGS (Women’s International News Gathering Service) newscasts from 1986 to present
Recordings from CFRC Radio’s Oral History Project done in conjunction with the Queen’s University radio station’s 60th anniversary
The Digital Library of Amateur Radio & Communications is funded by a grant from Amateur Radio Digital Communications (ARDC) to create a free digital library for the radio community, researchers, educators, and students. DLARC invites radio clubs, radio stations, archives and individuals to submit material in any format. To contribute or ask questions about the project, contact: Kay Savetz at kay@archive.org. Questions about the college radio sub-collection can be directed to Jennifer Waits at jenniferwaits@archive.org.
The following guest post from curator and amateur radio enthusiast Kay Savetz is part of our Vanishing Culture series, highlighting the power and importance of preservation in our digital age. Read more essays online or download the full report now.
A selection of cassette tapes from the “Ham Radio & More” radio show digitized by DLARC.
Amateur Radio has been a hobby for well over 100 years. For as long as there has been an understanding of electricity and radio waves, people have been experimenting with these technologies and advancing the state of the art. As a result, the world has moved from wired telegraphy to tube radios to telephones—fast forward a century—to GPS and high-speed digital communication devices that fit in your pocket.
Advances made by amateur radio experimenters have propelled the work of NASA, satellites, television, the internet, and every communications company in existence today. People fiddling with radios have pushed forward technological advances the world around, time and time again.
And yet, the people making these efforts, doing these feats, aren’t always the best at documenting and preserving their work for the future. That’s where Internet Archive comes in.
I’m the curator of the Digital Library of Amateur Radio and Communications. DLARC is a project of the Internet Archive, and my job is to find and preserve this rich history of radio and communications. DLARC collects resources related to amateur radio, satellite communications, television, shortwave radio, pirate radio, experimental communications, and related communications.
In the two years since the project launched, DLARC has preserved thousands of magazines and journals, manuals, product catalogs, radio programs, and conference proceedings. These materials were scattered worldwide, often inaccessible and in obsolete formats. We’ve digitized material that was on paper, cassette tape, reel-to-reel tape, CD-ROMs, DVDs. We’ve digitized video from 16mm film, VHS, U-Matic, Betacam and even more obscure video formats.
We’ve built a collection of more than 140,000 items and made them available to the world. Researchers, academics, and hobbyists use the library to learn from the rich history of this 100-year-old hobby.
Learn more about DLARC
One reason this preservation is necessary is that the people creating history don’t always realize at the time that they’re creating history. In 1977, the creators of Amateur Radio Newsline—a weekly audio news bulletin—probably didn’t realize that their project would still be going on in 2024, 47 years later. And for all of their amazing work, if they had realized they were documenting history, they might have made more effort to save those recordings: the first 20 years of their work are missing. (DLARC has found some recordings from 1996, then most of them since 2012.)
Sometimes creators do recognize the importance of their effort. For more than six years, Len Winkler hosted Ham Radio & More, a radio show about amateur radio. Winker recorded every episode on cassette tape and managed to digitize many of the shows himself. However, the process of digitizing hundreds of episodes is tedious and he wasn’t able to complete it. With his approval, DLARC stepped in to finish the job. They’re all online now, more than 300 episodes including interviews with many notable names in the radio community.
There have been other huge successes: the entire 43-year run of 73 Magazine is digitized and online thanks to the publisher, Wayne Green, who donated the collection to Internet Archive before his death. Most issues of The W5YI Report, a ham radio newsletter that was published for 25 years, are online as well.
Attempting to preserve material years, or sometimes decades, after the fact makes systematic preservation nearly impossible. For every success story of content saved and archived, there is a heartbreaking story of loss. When amateur radio enthusiasts die, their media collections are often disposed of by survivors who don’t have any connection to amateur radio. File cabinets and bookcases full of (sometimes irreplaceable) materials are emptied into recycle bins.
Another challenge to preservation and access is membership organizations that keep their material behind paywalls. They sometimes prevent any of their information from being lent in an online library, which it is their right to do. However while they actively thwart efforts at preservation, it remains unclear whether those groups are adequately preserving their own history.
Some material is preserved intentionally, but a good amount was saved purely by accident. The material we recover and digitize has come from attics and basements, from libraries discarding obsolete material, from long-forgotten FTP sites, from scratched CD-ROMs, and from the estates of people who have passed.
So we float where the radio waves take us, trying to preserve the past as much as possible, while encouraging today’s content creators to consider how to make their material accessible to future generations.
Highlights include 1980s radio interviews with LL Cool J, Sonic Youth and more, 1960s amateur radio footage, college radio oral histories, and radio station correspondence from the 1940s-1960s
By Jennifer Waits, Curator of the DLARC College Radio Collection
Feast your eyes and ears on the latest additions to the college radio collection within the Digital Library of Amateur Radio and Communications! Over the past few months we’ve added materials from numerous college radio stations and archives, including vintage and contemporary audio, film, and video pieces.
Most recently, the archivists at New York University student radio station WNYU-FM have contributed a number of 1980s radio interviews with music luminaries, including LL Cool J, ESG, members of Sonic Youth (Kim Gordon and Thurston Moore in 1984 and Kim Gordon in 1986), Billy Idol, and Jello Biafra. Also in the WNYU collection is audio from the station’s inaugural FM broadcast in 1973, plus paper items like program guides, flyers, and correspondence.
But perhaps my favorite recent audio-visual addition is a compilation of 1960s home movies that document activities of University of Pennsylvania’s amateur radio club. They reside in our new Penn Amateur Radio Club archive, which collects items from this historically-significant club that began as the Wireless Club of the University of Pennsylvania in 1909. Early student wireless clubs were the incubators for future broadcast stations, so we hope to increase the representation of both high school and collegiate amateur radio clubs in DLARC.
Another area of curatorial interest is college radio at women’s colleges, especially since many women’s colleges built radio stations during the early carrier current boom in the 1940s and 1950s. DLARC’s new Smith College Radio Club and Stations collection provides context for understanding the college radio landscape during this time and what it was like for new stations trying to get their start. Within the collection are numerous folders full of correspondence, items from college radio conferences (including one hosted by Smith College station WCSR), organizational documents, scripts, and program schedules. Newer materials include flyers and program guides from the currently operating FM station at Smith: WOZQ-FM.
Additionally, we continue to grow our collection of Intercollegiate Broadcasting System (IBS) materials. As mentioned in our July update, this college radio trade organization began in 1940 and has been hosting conventions and producing newsletters and other publications ever since. Since they don’t have their own archive, we’ve been piecing one together thanks to all the college radio stations and institutions that have carefully preserved IBS items over the years.
As part of this effort, we added over 200 pages of IBS correspondence and related items from Smith College and have also sleuthed out various missing issues of IBS’ Journal of College Radio from a variety of sources, bringing our grand total to just about 100 issues. Do you have copies of IBS’ Journal of College Radio in your own collection? Our wish list includes College Radio (Volumes 1-3), Journal of College Radio (Volume 13.2, 19.4, 19.5, 20-22, 25.4 and any subsequent issues), and IBS newsletters and bulletins from many eras.
Finally, we have some new collections that we are just starting to populate. Take a peek at the WFMU and WHUS collections for more college radio goodies. And be sure to scope around DLARC College Radio to find other gems from stations where we haven’t established a designated collection. One of my favorites is a short animation demonstrating a Valentine’s Day-themed ‘zine from Cal Poly San Luis Obispo’s college radio station KCPR.
The Digital Library of Amateur Radio & Communications is funded by a grant from Amateur Radio Digital Communications (ARDC) to create a free digital library for the radio community, researchers, educators, and students. DLARC invites radio clubs, radio stations, archives and individuals to submit material in any format. To contribute or ask questions about the project, contact: Kay Savetz at kay@archive.org.
It was the mid-1980s, Chuck Vesei developed a fascination with shortwave radio. He used his portable radio to tune into shortwave broadcasts from around the globe. Because shortwave signals can travel farther than regular AM or FM broadcasts, Chuck heard voices and music from across continents.
Listening to the far-flung signals, foreign languages, and different types of music let Chuck discover the world far beyond his hometown. Those international radio stations broadcast news, religious programming, government propaganda, cultural programs, and educational content.
QSL card from Radio Kuwait
Tuning in was just one aspect of his hobby: he also sent postal mail to the remote radio stations that he heard. Those stations sent replies. He received airmail containing broadcasting schedules, newsletters, and handwritten notes from broadcasters. The stations sent trinkets such as QSL cards, stickers, and pennants. Chuck ended up with stacks of mail from radio stations. He saved all of it.
But Chuck wasn’t just any shortwave fan: Chuck Vesei was a high school student in Niles, Michigan.
Almost four decades later, he donated the collection to the Internet Archive’s Digital Library of Amateur Radio and Communications. Today, the entire collection is online. The Chuck Vesei Shortwave Radio Artifacts collection has hundreds of items that he received from shortwave broadcasters from 1984 to 1986.
“I developed an intense fascination with short wave radio, DXing, asking for QSLs from international broadcasters, and old radios in general,” Chuck said. “I grew up in a bilingual (Hungarian) household which cultivated a deeper interest in the world at large and especially with nations and cultures behind the Iron Curtain. In the mid-80’s the Cold War was in full swing and this type of thing was extremely fascinating to a teenager like me.”
He started with a Uniden CR-2021 portable radio, and over the months acquired a few more radios, including a Hallicrafters S-40 receiver and a Heathkit GC-1A Mohican receiver that his father built in the 1960s. “My father was an engineer who had a lot of expertise with old radios. I was fascinated by how radio signals could travel so far and under different atmospheric conditions.” His father’s engineering background inspired Chuck’s appreciation of radio’s magic: how signals could travel immense distances, influenced by the atmosphere and time of day.
Today, thanks to Chuck’s foresight in preserving these artifacts, anyone with an internet connection can step back into the 1980s and experience the wonder of shortwave radio as Chuck did—a high schooler in a small town, tuning in to a much larger world.
By Jennifer Waits, Curator of the DLARC College Radio Collection
In fall 2023, after learning about the amazing breadth of The Internet Archive’s Digital Library of Amateur Radio and Communications (DLARC), I started to dream about what a college radio version of that collection would look like. I shared with curator Kay Savetz some of my “wish-list” items, which developed into a plan to develop a college radio collection within DLARC.
Launched in February 2024, DLARC’s college radio collection now contains more than 1,300 items related to student radio’s past and present. Materials in the collection include ‘zines, radio station program guides, flyers, playlists, correspondence, books, academic theses, magazines, and more.
Publication highlights include KDViationS, the ‘zine/program guide produced by student radio station KDVS at UC Davis; RiFLe from University of Kentucky’s college radio station WRFL; and program guides from WHRB (Harvard), KUCI (UC Irvine), and WMBR (MIT).
Additionally, we’ve created a handful of radio station collections for KFJC (Foothill College), WKNC (North Carolina State University), WTUL (Tulane University) and WSUA/WCDB (University at Albany). Take a trip back in time to find 1970s “music surveys,” punk flyers from the 1980s, radio station handbooks, brochures, and other ephemera.
College radio’s storied history stretches back to the early days of radio, with the first student stations launching in the 1920s. One of the initial goals of DLARC’s college radio collection is to locate items from not only the early days of college radio, but also from long-standing college radio trade organizations like The Intercollegiate Broadcasting System (IBS). Established in 1940, IBS began as a trade organization for campus-only AM carrier-current radio stations. It has been producing newsletters, publications, educational manuals, and conferences since its inception.
Despite IBS’ long history, it does not maintain its own archive; so it’s significant that we have built an Intercollegiate Broadcasting System collection within DLARC’s college radio collection. Now at over 200 items, the IBS materials include conference guides, promotional pieces, IBS newsletters from the 1950s, 1960s-era correspondence with radio stations, and nearly 80 issues of College Radio/The Journal of College Radio from 1966 to 1982. Full of station profiles, FCC updates, music industry reports, engineering tips, and more; College Radio/The Journal of College Radio was produced from 1965 to the early 1990s. We are still filling in gaps in the collection and are searching for more issues of this publication, as well as IBS’ earlier publications from the 1940s and 1950s (IBS Bulletin and IBS Newsletter).
These materials give scholars and college radio enthusiasts a richer picture of the history of college radio and the ways that student radio practitioners have intersected with both the broader radio community and music culture. If you have college radio materials that you’d like to donate to DLARC, please reach out!
The Digital Library of Amateur Radio & Communications is funded by a grant from Amateur Radio Digital Communications (ARDC) to create a free digital library for the radio community, researchers, educators, and students. DLARC invites radio clubs, radio stations, archives and individuals to submit material in any format. To contribute or ask questions about the project, contact: Kay Savetz at kay@archive.org.
In my newsletter Zero Retries, I write about interesting developments in Ham Radio to folks like me whose primary interest in Ham Radio is experimenting with the more advanced technological possibilities of Ham Radio. Such developments include communicating with data modes locally and worldwide (Packet Radio), using Ham Radio satellites and communicating with Ham Radio astronauts on the International Space Station, and developing M17, a new two way radio technology based entirely on open source (to mention just a few).
One of my favorite ways to use the DLARC (nearly 120,000 items now, and still growing) is to re-explore ideas that were proposed or attempted in Ham Radio, but for various reasons, didn’t quite become mainstream. Typically, the technology of earlier eras simply wasn’t up to some proposed ideas. But, with the technology of the 2020s such as cheap, powerful computers and software defined radio technology, many old ideas can be reexamined with perhaps succeed in becoming mainstream now. The problem has been that much of the source material for such “reimagining” has been languishing in file cabinets or bookcases of Ham Radio Operators like me, with nowhere to go. With the grant, IA could hire a dedicated archivist and began receiving, scanning, hosting, and aggregating electronic versions of old Ham Radio material.
One of my favorite examples of maybe we should try this again? is a one page flyer for a radio unit designed for data – the NW Digital Radio UDRX-440. That radio was a leading-edge idea in 2013, but didn’t become a product. One reason for that fate was that it required a small but powerful computer that NW Digital Radio was forced to develop itself, which was expensive. More than a decade later, the computer that NW Digital Radio required, with a quad-core, 1.8 GHZ processor and 1 GB of RAM is available off-the-shelf – for $35. Perhaps it’s time for an innovative Ham Radio manufacturer to try creating something like the UDRX-440 again. Being able to provide a link to illustrate such a concept, and prove that one manufacturer got as far as the design stage, can be inspirational.
Another example maybe we should try this again? is the PACSAT system, a data-communications protocol and hardware specification for Ham Radio satellites that combined multiple receivers with a single high speed transmitter for more efficient throughput of data. In the 1990s, PACSAT was proposed and several satellites were actually built and put into orbit. But then, PACSAT required dedicated, expensive, specialized hardware suitable only for a satellite. In the 2020s, a PACSAT system could replace a Ham Radio repeater with a software defined receiver (can now listen to multiple frequencies) and a few other off-the-shelf parts. The difference that DLARC makes is that all the original reference material for PACSAT can easily be found in DLARC. If some graduate student were to email me looking for a project, I can suggest that they create a “PACSAT 2025” – and point them to all of the PACSAT material in DLARC.
Many new Ham Radio Operators live in “restricted” living arrangements such as apartments, condominiums, or communities that don’t allow external antennas. Thus, to operate on the Ham Radio “High Frequency – HF” bands (shortwave) bands, some “creativity” is required – a stealthy antenna. One of my favorite collections within DLARC is 73 Magazine which was published monthly for 43 years, with many, many antenna construction articles such as the “compressed W3EDP” HF antenna that would fit into an attic. Unlike current Ham Radio magazines, all 516 issues of 73 Magazine can be browsed, and downloaded, and because Internet Archive does optical character recognition (OCR), every word of every issue is keyword searchable.That, is powerful and ample “food for the imagination” of Ham Radio Operators looking to the past for some interesting projects to tackle.
Those are just a few examples of the utility of DLARC from my perspective. Ham Radio has existed for more than a century, but prior to DLARC, there was no comprehensive online archive of Ham Radio material. There were some personal archives, some Ham Radio clubs and organizations had their newsletters online, but there was no comprehensive online archive of Ham Radio material. DLARC is now the archive that Ham Radio has been missing. Most significantly, unlike some Ham Radio organizations, material in DLARC is free for public access (though some material is subject to Controlled Digital Lending). DLARC includes club newsletters (from all over the world), Ham Radio books and magazines (some from very early in the 20th century), audio recordings, video recordings, conference proceedings… literally a treasure trove of knowledge and ideas and inspiration.
Thank you Internet Archive and Archivist Kay Savetz K6KJN for all the hard work in creating and growing Digital Library of Amateur Radio & Communications – we really appreciate it (and I use it nearly every day).
Steve Stroh Amateur Radio Operator N8GNJ Bellingham, Washington, USA
Ham Radio & More was the first radio show devoted to ham radio on the commercial radio band. It began as a one-hour show on KFNN 1510 AM in Phoenix, Arizona, then expanded to a two-hour format and national syndication. The program’s host, Len Winkler, invited guests to discuss the issues of the day and educate listeners about various aspects of the radio hobby. Today the episodes, some more than 30 years old, provide an invaluable time capsule of the ham radio hobby.
just some of the HR&M cassette tapes
Len Winkler said, “I’m so happy that the Digital Library of Amateur Radio & Communications took all my old shows and made them eternally available for everyone to hear and enjoy. I had the absolute pleasure, along with a few super knowledgeable co-hosts, to interview many of the people that made ham radio great in the past and now everyone can go back and listen to what they had to say. From the early beginnings of SETI (search for extraterrestrial intelligence) to Senator Barry Goldwater to the daughter of Marconi. So much thanks to the Digital Library of Amateur Radio & Communications for doing this amazing service.”
Other interviewees included magazine publisher Wayne Green, Sheriff Joe Arpaio, Bob Heil, Bill Pasternak, Fred Maia, and other names well known to the amateur radio community. Discussion topics spanned the technical, such as signal propagation, to community issues, including the debate over the Morse code knowledge requirement for ham radio operators—a requirement eventually dropped, to the benefit of the community.
The radio programs were recorded on cassette tapes when they originally aired. Winkler digitized 149 episodes of the show himself in 2015 and 2016. The digitizing project paused for years. In January 2024 he sent the remaining cassettes to DLARC. Using two audio digitizing workstations, we digitized another 165 episodes in about three weeks. The combined collection is now available online: a total of 464 hours of programming, most of which have not been heard since their original air date. The collection represents nearly every episode of the show: only a few tapes went missing over the years or were unrepairable.
The Digital Library of Amateur Radio & Communications is funded by a grant from Amateur Radio Digital Communications (ARDC) to create a free digital library for the radio community, researchers, educators, and students. DLARC invites radio clubs and individuals to submit material in any format. To contribute or ask questions about the project, contact: Kay Savetz at kay@archive.org or on Mastodon at dlarc@mastodon.radio.
Internet Archive’s Digital Library of Amateur Radio & Communications has grown to more than 90,000 resources related to amateur radio, shortwave listening, amateur television, and related topics. The newest additions to the free online library include ham radio magazines and newsletters from around the world, podcasts, and discussion forums.
Additions to the newsletter category include The Capitol Hill Monitor, a newsletter for and by scanner radio enthusiasts in the Washington, D.C. region — a complete run from 1992 through today. DLARC has also added more than 300 issues of Florida Skip and its follow-on magazine, SKIP CyberHam, donated by the family of the publisher. Both Capitol Hill Monitor and Florida Skip are online for the first time, scanned from the original paper.
The Cal Poly Amateur Radio Club donated hundreds of radio manuals, catalogs, and magazines — literally emptying file cabinets of material. DLARC has scanned them all and made the trove available online.
Digital Library of Amateur Radio & Communications is funded by a grant from Amateur Radio Digital Communications (ARDC) to create a free digital library for the radio community, researchers, educators, and students. DLARC invites radio clubs and individuals to submit material in any format. If have questions about the project or material to contribute, contact:
