I was tuning around the shortwave bands Saturday evening when, in the midst of the CW (Morse code) portion of the 40-meter ham radio band, I heard a weak signal in what sounded like Russian. It was not a ham radio operator; hams typically engage in conversation, identifying themselves with government-issued calll signs. This guy was not conversing; he was broadcasting, pausing every few minutes for ten or twenty seconds before resuming his broadcast. He was using single-sideband, a more efficient form of AM favored by hams, and his signal was weak, so he may have been using ham radio equipment. His broadcast was peppered with slogans such as “glory to the armed forces of Ukraine!” and “glory to the USA!”. I could catch enough of the rest to recognize that the language was indeed Russian, not Ukrainian, and that he had a serious bone to pick with Vladimir Putin. It was hard to make out much more, because some ham in West Virginia was calling CQ in Morse code on top of him — “CQ” is a general call to any station — and was soon answered by somebody in Ohio. I never heard the Russian-speaker identify himself or his station, but he could easily have been in Europe; the 40-meter band regularly opens to Europe in the evening here in New England. His frequency was 7055 KHz.
Shortwave is supposed to be largely obsolete; these days there are far more reliable ways to communicate internationally than bouncing radio waves off layers of charged particles in the ionosphere. During the Cold War — what I consider to have been the golden age of shortwave — there were lots of broadcasters on the bands and you never knew what you might hear, even “numbers stations”, which were used by intelligence agencies to send coded messages to agents in the field. But even today, it would seem, there are things worth tuning the bands for.