In the past it was possible to listen to public broadcasters from all over the world on shortwave. Most of the big and well-known ones are either gone completely or reduced to a hybrid presence online, but a few of the major ones are still with us and can be heard every day on the radio, like the BBC World Service, Vatican Radio, China Radio International, Radio Prague International, Polskie Radio and Radio Romania International. There are also many small and independent broadcasters, many of them religious in nature.
If you want to reach a large audience in any language you choose to broadcast in, anywhere in the world including places which have limited infrastructure and/or internet censorship, and you would like that audience to be able to hear you on simple equipment that doesn't cost a lot of money, then shortwave radio is the way to do it. It's exactly what state broadcasters have done for decades.
Until relatively recently you could listen to news from a wide range of sources (or propaganda, depending on the source and your perspective), documentary features, listeners' letters programmes, simple language learning series (the Deutsche Welle German language lessons are still around online, I think, and they are pretty decent), music concerts, programmes about the arts, science, football commentaries, or pretty much anything else you can imagine in an audio format. It's where I started with my lifelong interest in radio, and every day I would hear programmes from a number of countries on several continents, often when I should have been doing my school homework.
Called Radio Bucharest before the revolution of 1989, Radio Romania International still broadcasts daily on shortwave in Romanian, English, French, German, Spanish, Italian, Russian, Arabic and a number of other languages. They have a strong signal from powerful transmitters and they use directional antennas, so they are usually easy to receive even on simple shortwave portable sets. Here's a recording of the Radio Bucharest transmission reporting the overthrow of Nicolae Ceaușescu and his government:
Recording of Radio Bucharest, New Year's Eve 1989
The RRI English programme is made up of a number of sections and shows, totalling an hour a day. It is transmitted twice at different times, along with two shortened broadcasts of 30 minutes. Shows are on a weekly and monthly schedule, so there's some different content each day.
As I said, I'll come back to shortwave and how anyone can listen via web based receivers in a few weeks. For now, the easiest way to listen to RRI at any time is using the on demand page on the website, where you can access the daily 60 minute English programme, with an archive going back to April 2021:
Radio Romania International - on demand
Similar pages are available for the other languages, just use the language links at the top of the home page.
There are also archived examples of specific RRI shows available to stream via this page:
Finally, you can listen to the livestream via the website, where you'll hear whatever is being broadcast live on shortwave at the time:
If you don't listen to anything else, do check out an edition of the Listeners' Corner show. Broadcast every Saturday towards the end of the 60 minute programme, it features letters and reception reports from listeners around the world. Every shortwave station used to broadcast one of these shows and people would write in with reports of what they had heard, signal strength, interference levels and other information, and comments on the content. In return they would get a QSL [1] card, which is a postcard sized printed card which would confirm the reception report. These days RRI QSLs are electronic, like this:
Radio Romania International electronic QSL, July 2026
QSL collecting was a hobby within a hobby. In 1983 I had a cheap portable shortwave radio on which I heard Radio Free Grenada, broadcast from the Caribbean island of that name by the revolutionary government which had taken power there. I wrote to them to request a QSL card, which would have been quite something because confirming reception reports probably wasn't the first thing the revolutionaries had on their minds. Anyway, a few months later Ronald Reagan sent the US Marines to Grenada to bring the revolution to an end, and with it ended any small hope I had of getting a card.
Next time, listening on shortwave via internet-based software defined radios.
[1] QSL is the short code used in Morse code, standing for 'I am acknowledging receipt'
Email: kdan01 [at] posteo [dot] net