Radio Monitoring as a Witness to History

With the recent events in Ukraine, radio hobbyists (like myself) are often reminded about the role of radio monitoring in witnessing historic events.

Many of us were monitoring our shortwave radios as Communism fell in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union disintegrated. Shortwave radio played a role in sending news of important events in the 20th Century to a worldwide audience, such as the D-Day Invasion on June 6, 1944 and the events following the assassination of President Kennedy in November 1963. One event I recorded (from the Cuban perspective) was the announcement of normalization of relations between the United States and Cuba in 2014.

Another historic event in 2014 took place just a few short miles from my shack: the riots in Ferguson, MO following a fatal shooting involving local police. For several days in August and November of 2014, I was monitoring the radio traffic coming out of the riot area; I recorded quite a bit of this traffic. The raw audio of the police and radio traffic was recorded as events progressed. So many of us were watching the events unfold on our TV screens.

Regardless of whether we listen on a shortwave receiver or a VHF-UHF public service scanner, radio monitoring allows us to hear and witness history as it's happening.