The Radio Spectrum Archive: A New Approach to Radio History and Preservation

Abstract

While traditional radio recordings are limited to individual broadcasts transmitted over a single channel, spectrum recordings capture all signals received by an antenna simultaneously, using software that allows users to navigate and play back captured channels. The Radio Spectrum Archive (RSA) has acquired and preserved recordings from the 1980s to present, which are now publicly available through an arrangement with the Internet Archive. Using the RSA as its case study, this paper provides a brief history of spectrum recording, delineates key differences between spectrum recordings and traditional radio recordings, and identifies technical, administrative, and procedural challenges impacting future preservation and access.

Keywords:

• Radio spectrum recording
• radio spectrum archive
• software-defined radio
• digital longevity

Acknowledgments

Thanks to Chris Smolinski and Simon Brown at SDR Console for their assistance with illustrations, to Mark Connelly and Pieter-Tjerk de Boer for their help in reconstructing the history of VCR DXing, and to RSA team members Brett Saylor and Guy Atkins for their input on the history of SDR usage.

Notes

1 Stephen Cass, “Building a Time Machine for Radio: The Radio Spectrum Archive Will Let You Listen to Old Broadcasts as if They Were Live,” IEEE Spectrum, October 26, 2018, https://spectrum.ieee.org/geek-life/profiles/building-a-time-machine-for-radio (accessed February 1, 2020).

2 Wiebe E. Bijker, Thomas P. Hughes, and Trevor Pinch, “The Social Construction of Facts and Artifacts,” in Bijker, Hughes, and Pinch, eds., The Social Construction of Technological Systems: New Directions in the Sociology and History of Technology, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, MA: MIT, 2012).

3 For history of SETI, see Douglas A. Vakoch, ed., Archaeology, Anthropology, and Interstellar Communication (Washington, DC: NASA, 2014). For directional beacons and spectrum monitoring, Rajendra V. Babar, M. S. Gaikwad, and R. V. Kshirsagar, “Design and Analysis of Beacon Based SDR System,” 2017 International Conference on Algorithms, Methodology, Models, and Applications in Emerging Technologies, February 2017, and Sumit Kumar, Florian Kaltenberger, Alejandro Ramirez, and Bernard Kloiber, “An SDR Implementation of WiFi Receiver for Mitigating Multiple Co-Channel ZigBee Interferers,” EURASIP Journal on Wireless Communications and Networking 2019: 224.

4 For hackers, see Balint Seeber, Hacking the Wireless World with Software-Defined Radio (video presentation, 2016), https://archive.org/details/Hacking_The_Wireless_World (accessed February 8, 2020); for beacon-hunting, see Peter Jennings, NCDXF/IARU International Beacon Project Web Receivers, http://www.ncdxf.org (accessed February 8, 2020). For history of DXing, see Susan J. Douglas, Listening In: Radio and the American Imagination (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004).

5 “Technical Digest,” Electronics Magazine, Business Ed., March 10, 1951, p. 21. The magazine recorded an experiment by an unspecified individual using an “antenna hooked up to [an] Ampex video recorder,” which “caught every local broadcast station on the air, plus a few short-wave stations.” With a standard tuner used during playback, the magazine noted that the “desired station can be sorted out and heard later.”

6 Craig Healy, “Predection Recording: The DX Time Machine,” Monitoring Times, August 1986, p. 54.

7 The recording was made on May 1, 1986 in Providence, Rhode Island; see Thomas Witherspoon, “Deep History: The Relevance of Radio Spectrum Recordings,” The Radio Spectrum Archive, https://spectrumarchive.org (accessed February 8, 2020).

8 Doug Smith, “Recording Your DX,” Monitoring Times, November 1995, p. 82. Orig. emphasis.

9 Guy Atkins, “Are Your DX Recordings DXceptional? Simple Steps to Archiving What You Hear,” Monitoring Times, February 2005, p. 11.

10 Microtelecom’s Perseus: The Next Generation of Software-Defined Radio,” Popular Communications, November 2008, pp. 25-29, and “High-Tech Radio on the Road with RFSpace,” Popular Communications, July 2008, pp. 29-31.

11 Alberto di Bene, “High Definition Software Defined Radio,” HDSR, http://www.hdsdr.de/; “Project Description,” High Performance Software Defined Radio: An Open Source Design, http://openhpsdr.org/; Pieter-Tjerk de Boer, “Wide-band WebSDR,” University of Twente, http://websdr.ewi.utwente.nl:8901/ (accessed February 8, 2020).

12 For 2011 origins, see interview by Eric Klein, “A Time Machine for All the Radio Plus Shortwave,” Radio Survivor, Podcast #168, November 20, 2018, http://www.radiosurvivor.com/tag/radio-spectrum-archive/ (accessed February 8, 2020). For personnel, see “Who We Are,” The Radio Spectrum Archive, https://spectrumarchive.org/about/ (accessed February 8, 2020).

13 “Recordings,” The Radio Spectrum Archive, https://spectrumarchive.org/recordings/ (accessed February 8, 2020).

14 For Radio Preservation Task Force mission, see United States Library of Congress, “Radio Preservation Task Force,” Programs: National Recording Preservation Plan, https://www.loc.gov/programs/national-recording-preservation-plan/about-this-program/radio-preservation-task-force/ (accessed February 8, 2020). For video of Witherspoon’s talk, see Library of Congress, Radio Preservation Task: From Archive to Classroom, https://youtu.be/3mWcPF6qa9M, November 3, 2018 (accessed February 8, 2020).

15 Klein, “A Time Machine for All the Radio.”

16 For timeline, see Thomas Witherspoon, personal communication with authors, February 2, 2020. Internet Archive recordings are accessible by searching “Radio Spectrum Archive” on Internet Archive, https://archive.org (accessed February 10, 2020).

17 Thomas Witherspoon, personal communication with authors, April 6, 2020. Witherspoon adds that the fact these recordings cannot be directly played back as audio files without the use of intermediary SDR software raises a slew of legal questions about what kind of copyrightable information is being inscribed or “fixed” in an SDR WAV file, and the RSA ultimately feels that any legal prosecution would be hard-pressed to make a case for economic harm or competition caused by recordings in RSA custody. To date, neither the RSA nor Internet Archive have received takedown notices for any of their radio spectrum recordings.

18 Clayton M. Christensen, The Innovator’s Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail (Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 1997), xv.

19 Rick Altman, “The Material Heterogeneity of Recorded Sound,” in Altman, ed., Sound Theory, Sound Practice (New York: AFI, 1992), 16.

20 American Radio Relay League, “Distance Records,” http://www.arrl.org/distance-records, December 2019 (accessed February 8, 2020).

21 Douglas, Listening In, 73. Bob Grove, “WiNRaADiO Excalibur G31DDC SDR Receiver,” Monitoring Times, November 2010, 68-70.

22 For games, see Mark Guttenbrunner, Christoph Becker, and Andreas Rauber, “Keeping the Game Alive: Evaluating Strategies for Preservation of Console Video Games,” International Journal of Digital Curation 1.5 (2011): 64-90. For digital art, see Jon Ippolito, “Generation Emulation,” in Richard Rinehart and Jon Ippolito, eds., Re-Collection: Art, New Media, and Social Memory (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2014).

23 Sarah Baker and Jez Collins, “Popular Music Heritage, Community Archives and the Challenge of Sustainability,” International Journal of Cultural Studies 20.5 (2017): 476-491.

24 Michael Nevradakis, “Disembodied Voices and Dislocated Signals: The World of Modern-Day DXing,” Journal of Radio and Audio Media 20.1 (2013): 68-86.

25 Thomas Witherspoon, personal communication with authors, February 2, 2020.

26 Anne J. Gilliland, ''Archival Appraisal: Practising on Shifting Sands," in Caroline Brown, ed., Archives and Recordkeeping: Theory into Practice (London: Facet, 2014), 54.

27 Anthony Cocciolo, Moving Image and Sound Collections for Archivists (Chicago: Society of American Archivists, 2017), 12-13.

28 The two “stereo” channels of a spectrum recording represent not left and right, but two components ("in-phase" and "quadrature") of an electromagnetic wave. The highest available radio frequency equals the file's sample rate, which is proportional to file size. The standard sample rate for archival audio preservation is 96 kHz (96,000 Hz), but the target frequency band for a typical spectrum recording might rise above 2000 kHz (2,000,000 Hz), an order of magnitude higher.

29 "Our Mission," Radio Spectrum Archive, https://spectrumarchive.org/our-mission/ (accessed February 8, 2020). As this essay goes to print, the Italian company ELAD is releasing a new SDR model specifically designed to accommodate full-band FM spectrum recording; however, at a price point of over $1,000, it is unlikely that this initial iteration of the technology will achieve widespread adoption. “FDM-S3,” ELAD, http://ecom.eladit.com/FDM-S3 (accessed February 20, 2020).

30 RSA, "Our Mission.".

31 Ibid.

32 “Recordings,” Radio Spectrum Archive, https://spectrumarchive.org/recordings/ (accessed February 8, 2020).

33 Radio Spectrum Archive, “11.129 MHz” Spectrum recording, Internet Archive, https://archive.org/details/11.129MHz (accessed February 20, 2020).

34 For an example of an effort automate analysis of aspects of voice communication beyond speech content, see Tanya Clement’s discussion of her High Performance Sound Technologies for Access and Scholarship in the Digital Humanities project, in Tanya Clement, “The Ear and the Shunting Yard: Meaning Making as Resonance in Early Information Theory,” Information & Culture: A Journal of History 49.4 (2014): 401-426. For documentation of spectral phenomenon beyond broadcast content, vocabulary and cataloging methods used by broadcast engineers or organizations such as SETI might prove more appropriate than traditional systems of LIS documentation.

35 RSA, "Our Mission."

36 Howard Besser, “Digital Longevity,” in Maxine K. Sitts, ed., Handbook for Digital Projects: A Management Tool for Preservation and Access (Andover, MA: Northeast Document Conservation Center, 2000), https://www.nedcc.org/assets/media/documents/dman.pdf (accessed February 2, 2020).

37 RSA, "Our Mission."

38 While current SDR apps do not currently accommodate extraction of non-audio information encoded in FM broadcasts using the Radio Data System protocol, such as time, weather, and music metadata, this information is also preserved in spectrum recordings and could be harnessed for display during playback via future software or browser plugins, and might also serve as an aid in efforts to develop methods for automated content description.

39 Besser, “Digital Longevity,” n.p.

40 National Recording Preservation Board, The State of Recorded Sound Preservation in the United States: A National Legacy at Risk in the Digital Age (Washington, DC: CLIR, 2010), 2.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Patrick Feaster

Patrick Feaster is Media Preservation Specialist for the Media Digitization and Preservation Initiative at Indiana University Bloomington. He is the author of Pictures of Sound: One Thousand Years of Educed Audio, 980-1980, as well as numerous album notes and articles on media history and theory which have appeared in ARSC Journal, Technology and Culture, Journal of Popular Music Studies, Velvet Light Trap, and elsewhere. A co-founder of the First Sounds Initiative and former President of the Association for Recorded Sound Collections, he is a three-time Grammy nominee and has played a central role in identifying, playing back, and contextualizing many of the world’s oldest surviving sound recordings.

Shawn VanCour

Shawn VanCour is assistant professor of media archival studies in UCLA’s Department of Information Studies and author of Making Radio: Early Radio Production and the Rise of Modern Sound Culture (Oxford University Press, 2018). His publications on the history and preservation of US radio and television have appeared in the IEEE Proceedings, Media, Culture & Society, Critical Studies in Media Communication, Modernist Cultures, Journal of Material Culture, Journal of Radio & Audio Media, American Music, and other venues. He is assistant director of the Radio Preservation Task Force for the United States Library of Congress’s National Recording Preservation Board, working with archives throughout the country to facilitate preservation of and access to historical and contemporary radio recordings.

Thomas Witherspoon

Thomas Witherspoon is founder and curator of the Radio Spectrum Archive and its predecessor organization, the Shortwave Radio Audio Archive. He authors a news blog at the SWLing Post on international broadcasting and other radio-related matters and is a regular contributor to communications and radio-amateur publications such as The Spectrum Monitor, Radcom, World Radio and TV Handbook, and DX Magazine. He has presented his work at the IEEE’s Global Humanitarian Technology Conference, H.O.P.E., Winter SWL Fest, and the United States Library of Congress, and been featured in IEEE Spectrum Magazine, The Wire, the Wall Street Journal, NPR, and BBC Radio. He also founded and directed the nonprofit organization Ears to Our World, which for over a decade distributed self-powered radios and related technologies to countries in recovery from Haiti to South Sudan.