Coastal Radio Telegraph Stations :

For almost 100 years, the morse key was a reliable connection between land and sea. The first signals came up in the beginning of the 20th century, and after the 'Titanic' disaster in 1912, the importance of wireless telegraphy was recognized by everybody dealing with safety of life at sea. The first stations operated on longwave, but again, shortwave proved to be the best for wide range communications. Unfortunately, due to the ever-changing needs for communication improvements, morse code transmissions have almost completely faded out, only few stations still work on telegraphy now.

In this 'special page' listing, you will find all coastal radio telegraph stations, for which there is more than just a pure listing of frequencies and callsign on this website, may it be a sound clip, or a photo, or a copy of a QSL-reception confirmation. For example, Albania lists as many as 4 coastal stations, all of them had a radiotelegraph service, but only one, Durres Radio ZAD, has 'multimedia' content on the station's page related to the telegraph service. That is why only this station is listed here; if you are looking for all the other stations, check the individual country using this list. This 'special' page will also include military coastal stations, as long as they were working in the common radiotelegraph bands on mediumwave (around 500 kHz), and shortwave on 2, 4, 6, 8, 12, 16, and 22 MHz bands.

As many of these stations also operated a radiotelephone service, you may find those information here, too, but that is not the real intention - there will be a special page for coastal radio telephone stations coming up soon.

Due to the large amount of stations listed, please accept that this page is divided in geographical regions:

 92 stations from Europe  
 41 stations from Africa  
 87 stations from Asia  
 26 stations from North America  
 19 stations from Central America / Caribbean  
 18 stations from South America  
 22 stations from Australia / Pacific  

Please note, that a few of these stations are listed twice, with (sometimes) different multimedia content. That is due to political changes, for example a station of the former Soviet Union is listed with its 'URS-' registration, and may appear again with the new 'LVA-', 'RUS-' or whatsoever registration, when from both periods recordings or pictures are available. Other stations will be added, whenever there is more than only the 'naked' technical details of the station page. So again: please help filling up the shelves of this museum... !

when talking about coastal radio telegraphy,
you should not miss this website,
as well as that website
or this website ;-)

 

rb, september 2010