Chris’ 2016 Pirate Radio Year in Review

Many thanks to Chris Smolinski who has, once again, crunched the numbers to give us a look at HF pirate radio activity in 2016.

["]To gauge shortwave pirate radio activity in 2016, I analyzed the Shortwave Pirate loggings forum of the HF Underground (http://www.hfunderground.com). A computer script parsed the message thread titles, as well as the timestamps of the messages. This information was used to produce some statistics about the level of pirate radio activity. Of course, as Mark Twain has written: "There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics." Still, let's see what we can learn.

There were 13,860 messages posted to 2,398 unique threads, compared to 13,944 messages posted to 2,183 unique threads in 2015. Activity levels are essentially flat, but still at historically high levels. Back in the 1990s, it was not uncommon for an entire month to go by with only a handful of pirate stations logged. If you want to know when the "golden age" of shortwave pirate radio was, I would say it is right now.["]

Chris has posted his full analysis on RadioHobbyist.org.

As you can tell from Chris table at the top of this page, January is a very active month for HF pirates. If you've never chased pirate radio stations, check out our pirate radio primer. Pirate radio DXing is incredibly fun!