Radio Prague, which makes its final shortwave transmissions on 31 January, will continue to produce its 30-minute programmes in six languages. However the Head of Radio Prague, Miroslav Krupicka, has told the station’s English programme Mailbox that “We wanted to make the programme cheap and we’ll play music – Czech music on Sundays.”
A listener from the US enquired about the possibility of utilizing the longwave transmitter at Topolna [on 270 kHz] covering a large part of Europe for Radio Prague’s foreign language programmes for part of the day. However, Mr Krupicka said that was not an option: “It’s quite tough because currently, the longwave is allocated to domestic broadcasts. But overall, longwave is being considered for closure as well, for budgetary reasons, for financial reasons, because to maintain longwave and well as shortwave is quite expensive and Czech Radio cannot afford that. So probably the days of longwave broadcasting are numbered within Czech Radio as well. So there is no long term prospect for Radio Prague being on longwave.”
The complete transcript and audio of the programme is available on Radio Prague’s website.
on Jan 24th, 2011 at 17:32
“We wanted to make the programme cheap” is something you don’t hear often from international broadcasters. If RP had any PR people I think they would have made sure the word “cheap” was not used.
on Jan 24th, 2011 at 18:22
Why waste time or money on program production? Once they are off shortwave, they will lose much of their audience anyway, and they probably know it.
on Jan 25th, 2011 at 02:44
I think the question should be who was listening. In 10 years in South East Asia and having traveled often to the Pacific I never once picked them up, even on trips to Africa never could receive them.
on Jan 25th, 2011 at 17:58
With only 100 KW, Prague wasn\’t much of a powerhouse but I imagine in Europe it had a reasonable signal. Reception here in the eastern USA for Prague was fair to good normally (in the spring and summer), less so in the winter. But my point is that much of their audience, even with fairly weak transmitters, is (was) listening via shortwave, not internet or WRN.