Thursday, November 5, 2020

AIR: interesting station with brillant music.

 

(writen Sept 18 )

Another  intersting shortwave  station with great music  :AIR /India 

Includes also some interesting influence  on Bollywood in Greece wand my personal story 

 

Important  : Please comment on the end here or  PM me  in Facebook . I spent  quite much time to make this research  available. thank you.

 

 


 

All India Radio as you know is one of the stations with strong presence in shortwaves first because of  their domestic services and abroad in many languages. 

I was and still  am a fan of their music many years ago ,at least since 70s. when I fist started listening to the shortwaves. You may add Pakistan an also  easy catch in Greece which has a nearly similar music previous times  and also Bangladesh and Sri Lanka  that has a minimal presence in shortwaves today just to add the counties with nearly similar music  . 

 

Frequencies are in all bands and for all times . From these I can remind myself into 15770 KHz with indo program (no times remembered )  9910 11620 towards  Europe in various languages  on local afternoons and nights that are still used  and more recently 7550. 10300  for Vivid  Bharati  an easy catch replaced 'recently'  by the more difficult 9865  .Add also 11560/70 for Pakistan older times till they stopped several years ago. Also to name for Bangla radio on 7255  and 15MHz during 2018 ad SLBC on 11905 in a more generic way    . Add also the more recent  freq 9380 for AIR and Vivid  Bharati heard first at  2017. 

Today (2018-9) 9910 and 11620 are now not so easy to listen due to propagation . 7550 KHz heard after  1745 is generally clear though for some time  there is a  interference  on 7545 a FSK service and 7556 a FDM  type service  . 9865 has  strong QRM  from both side bands and requires pass bands of lower then 4 kHz for the best reception . 9440 is also not so clear as CRI in 9445  is hear here with nearly same signal levels that  sometimes interfere into AIR' signal. However  9380 can be heard in the clear in most of the day, heard from 13Z00  to around 2200 in noise free places as Chalkidiki or mount Olympus. Local noise in the city  can deteriorate  reception  with a S5  level at least with   time of reception  after 1500  till 2100

Due to the  easiness of reception I have made very few recordings so far .The recently Identified song of Nayara Noor 'Rothe ho tum kaise ma non priya' is the best few songs recorded before 90s. Also two others found via satellite and cassettes are Silsila OST and Julie OST

Vivid Bharati was/is my favorite program  that airs old Bollywood songs of  70s and then heard mostly in 9380 which is my main window  for India  Today  

Surely India's most important export are their movies that are the most popular in  the world and gained the hearts of the people in most areas of the planet  include also Greece and African countries as far s I know since 91 my trip  in Nigeria 

However  in our country the case was possibly  more intense than any other country in the western  world. That started since mid 50s for around 10-15 years when Indian movies overflowed our country making Greek people name the movie "Mother India" as the most impressive movie of the time  which made them weeping and crying .As my father told me before, there were emote than 400 m of queues with people expecting to get cinema  ticket for a 3.5+ hr movie. The most known movie actors were Nargis Madhubala and Zinguala but the two latter were passed in the greek  songs of the time while nargis  was  he most famous ..Movies and music were the hit  the lower Greek class,  people immigrating back from  Western Europe  mostly poor workers after the country established  political and economic stability  .

Many  Greek composers were  influenced  from numerous songs of the movies played in cinemas. Many of them were adapted or even copied in full from their originals . A part of these Greek songs are still  eternal and  also younger sing them  . A researcher counted around 100  Indian songs with  their Greek 'equivalents' in any form full copies adaptations and remixes that yielded around 200. Around  8  Greek songs have been adapted or copied back .One of them  is  the world famous 'guys of Piraeus'  and little later (76) the song called bum Pam [pararam] entered India with the same title sung by Asha Bhosle. I heard that  [and recorded] while I was in Spore on 89.These are my  additions to the 3 referred in the book below 

Some of the most known songs with titles in English  with their  originals are:

-madhubala Kazanjidis /aajo tarapt hai amar Lata Mangeshkar
-my pity heart Dionisiou /dunia ye ham aye hai (mother India ) Lata with 3 Greek versions!
-the  sweetness of your lips  Angelopoulos /Unji2 dunia ke devenale H kumar/ Dunia Syurga in indonesia !

(info fron the greek  book 'Indolovers revelation ' ,As referred in te book most no westernized  counties were very much  influenced from Indian movies . the above listing is derived from  25 pages table )

The discussion about the Indian Greek  music counter-exchange is too long to be discussed here The book describes  with  much detail in a fat  120 page A4 format book written in Greek only, It is   a quite impressive research. I will not discuss it further as the story will go 'out of the rail' while  I will try to depict  my story with my poor Indian music interest  by time 

These   Hindu Greek songs of the older generation  effected also our generation though with lesser level. Hindi songs  could be easily found in some booths on 70s together with Greek songs in big baskets outside or inside the music stores of the time. On 80-90s there was a new Endeavour  in Indian music but the  interest was poor in Greek  population People  prefer to  listen   to the music of the time i.e. po rock and easy listening  Greek There was  new  try on 2005 by a Greek newspaper to provide free DVD movies from Bollywood but with small interest from the audience .

I have to once go backwards again with  personal info  .  A trip for my parents in UAE on early 80s , they returned back with several video cassettes and music tapes  with Pukar  being the hit movie  featuring the great  Amit.I did the same while  during my business leisure trips  in UK on eighties where I bought some audio cassettes from Indian sellers in very low prices .

Same time  during 80 I also liked to watch  from Doordarshan by satellite ,  in C band and watch their  Geetmala program  (music video clips from various movies) .The signal used  half transponder reception or  it would get filled with strong noise . Around 90+ when Ku band was  the norm  several Indian TV channels started with general Indian program  an also some radio stations that could be heard in free . Soon  the  TV channels  were scrambled to my disappointment  but not radio stations. I was absent from shortwaves that time. I made several satellite radio recordings that .included  the marvelous  song Julie. 

This collection together with the tapes and shortwave recs  later filled one less then half  DVD. 

 An Indian seller  from Athens was amused when I ordered a few  VHS tapes on start of this century! They were for renting although the prices  were exceptionally cheap for the Greek standards of that time . After discussions with some people in Indonesia (!) I bought original DVDs together with some Indonesian products. Add also to the list  14 movies offered by the  newspaper 8 years later in three  parts that yields around 40 movies,   8 of them  'duplicated'. That means separate DVD in Greek abd English Notice that since 1995 most newspapers used enclosures in their Sunday edition with books and CD/ DVDS something that still continues today. 

 Some of the most interesting  movies are 

-DVDs mixed with  separate  Greek and English subtitles   Hum Tum /Kal ho Na ho /Devdas new /Kabhi khushi kabhi gham and Kuch kuch hota he which is my wife's favorite movie.

-DVDs only in English: Devdas  old 60s version /Pinjar my favorite but I can also notice the fair Khaki /Pukar 83 with Amit and Pukar of 90s with Anil Kapur  . Khaki is very short movie around 90 minutes.

 As yo know today my interest favors Malay music I can occasionally listen to AIR or India Beat  .Many older Malay songs are copies or poor variations of Indian music. Dangdut music of Indonesia older times (80-2000) albeit called Malay has also Indian music roots .  India Beat a service of the Malay  Astro network has relatively recent Indian music mainly of this century which has not the 'magic' of older Bollywood of 80s or even   90s and sounds mostly as easy listening or lounge  There are however today hundreds of stations relayed via stream radio with good sound quality. 

If you are interested  there are many stations available via stream  with Xiia the best application for  your smartphone  You may  check one of the decades of frequencies of AIR in shortwaves . Just try  starting from the frequencies stated above!

Alternatively you can check via your browser with the site radio garden adn chack  forst via this page https://radio.garden/listen/2b-radio-gurbani/57vcMmXW which is radio gurbani . this site offers a geolocation  system that coaancts to thousands of stations via a google maps way on earth

 

Some interesting drawings :

this is the signal tace of Vid Bharati as shown in  the picture Normally a signal with nt very strong fades for the refered time




30 minute signal analysis of AIR on 7550 plus a smoothing level of 1 minute 



A close up of 7550 fading curves 



7380 OLder times - last  year the signal of AIRon 7380 was much better than today > This year OCt 19 even at times that the signal could be much better seems wo things: or the station stopped transmissions or  for the most possible using lower powers than before

The above signal levels are a bit higher than the local noise

and the fading closeup for the part of the recption time






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