Page - 46 - in Mobile Culture Studies - The Journal, Volume 3/2017

46 Mobile Culture Studies. The Journal 3 2o17 Patricia Jäggi | Cosmopolitan Noises Technical improvement of transmission and reception gear continued to be an important issue during the Cold War era, but by then the listener reactions in the thousands of letters they sent every year served primarily as a mirror for the editorial office and their programming. Two questions arise from considering these feedback communications. First, why did so many people write letters, become pen pals with the radio station, or even visit the Swiss international radio during their holidays in Switzerland? Second, the insistence on noise as an issue in the letters and other written documents of the Swiss Shortwave Service suggests that the everyday experience of shortwave listening has something to do with noise. As mentioned above, in the historical literature about Cold War broadcasting, jamming is a big issue, and jamming, the distortion of a signal, produces experiences of noise. The listener reactions that could be found in the archive reveal that ‘noise’ was an omnipresent phenomenon. While the archival sound documents were able to represent the good production quality of the signals, they contained no information on the reception quality or interactive practice with such a radio set. Growing up in the 1980s/90s I remember some noisy radio reception, especially when driving in the car with my parents, but besides that memory, the noise of the analogue epoch was mostly unknown to me. Following the advice of a media archaeologist, I bought a Grundig Satellit 2000, which is a very good consumer radio from the 1970s. My first experience with shortwave radio listening on my secondhand Weltempfänger (world receiver) was disappointing: I only received noises and was not able to receive any shortwave signals at all. I first tried in the early afternoon. As I had planned to record the sounds coming out of the loudspeakers I was located in a sound stu- dio with thick walls around it. Short- wave can only be well transmitted during darkness when the D-layer of the ionosphere, with its disturbing effects on signal reflection, disap- pears. Shortwaves are skywaves that need the ionosphere and, in a multi- hop transmission, also the ground as a reflector. Natural circumstances such as the changing intensity of the sun during a day, a year, or a decade, and the composition of the ground have an effect on the signal transmis- sion (Klawitter 2008, 16-19). Fur- thermore the electromagnetic waves of other technical apparatuses inter- fere with reception. Heavy metals used for the construction of the walls in a building are also interrupters. In my case, time and location were probably both not ideal. Image 4: Grundig Satellit 2000 was a modern short- wave receiver with a technical design from the 1970s (Credit: Grundig Satellit 2000: Operations instruc- tions, undated)