Saturday, January 04, 2020

QSL: Voice of Maldives / Dhivehiraajjeyge adu, Thilafushi 1449

This station was not quite uncommon in the beginning of the century. I heard it a few times at their sign-on which I believe was at 00:25Z. The past couple of years however, they haven't had a MW service for their total area of 90,000 km². Thanks to funding from Japan, a 25-kW transmitter was recently put in service from the island of Thilafushi.

I noted the news about the new transmitter, so I decided to try to catch it. Last night at 01:00 with the 80-degrees beverage I didn't need more than one try. Although interference from BBC and Saudi Arabia, the National Anthem  came out very well, together with a rather weak announcement. The distance is 8031 km.

A Facebook message with a recording of the station ended up with a long chat with one of the producers at the station. Part of the antenna mast is seen below. Thilafushi, 7 km from Male is an artificial island built on coral reefs to dump municipal waste.  Thilafushi is rapidly developing as an industrial island and a new location for warehouses.




















(Sources: MediumWave.Info, Sarath Weerakoon, Raazy Ali)

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

Very interesting. Thanks. I look forward to more items.

Sarath Weerakoon said...

Excellent ! I am pretty sure, the station would have been delighted to hear from you , all the way from Norway. Voice of Maldives is still conducting teat transmissions. What I gathered from the station is that reception monitoring teams are evaluating reception, particualarly in the northern and southern atolls before the official commissioning of the new Nautel 25 kw transmitter.

vince999 said...

Nice one..

I think I heard them on Saturday evening here in South Africa. Am busy compiling a reception report. Who did you email Bjarne?
Signal was quite good into Cape Town, at 20h00 UTC with some interference from Saudi Arabia. (MW loop helped in nulling them though)

I have some nice audio clips but obviously the language barrier makes it a tad difficult identifying them.

73
Vince Stevens

Bjarne Mjelde said...

Vince, I used their Facebook page to post a message.

Bill Harms said...

That is truly awesome. I listened to the channel several times and hear a station just under Saudi Arabia but no luck getting a positive ID.