When the internet fails, everyone remembers shortwave
2026-06-09 · EA5IYR
When Russian forces began attacking Ukrainian communications infrastructure in 2022, the BBC World Service did something that looked like a museum exhibit coming to life: it switched shortwave transmitters back on, broadcasting four hours a day in English into Kyiv and parts of Russia.
The technology it reached for was the same one the BBC used in the Second World War, and the reasoning had not changed either. The arithmetic of jamming
The interesting question is why a state that can block websites nationwide finds shortwave so much harder.
To deny a numbers station, you only have to deny it at one receiver — the agent's. Put a jammer near enough to them, or blanket a modest area, and you are done. That is precisely what happened to V32 on 7910 kHz within a week of it appearing.
To deny a broadcast, you have to deny it at every receiver in the country. That means high-power transmitters distributed nationwide, on every frequency the broadcaster uses, for every hour they are on air. If the broadcaster changes frequency, you follow. It is labour-intensive, it takes experienced operators, and it is expensive to sustain — which is why, at the time, the BBC reported that its shortwave transmissions had not been interfered with.
Blocking a website costs a config change. Blocking a band costs a budget line. What the receiver gives away
There is a second property that matters more in an authoritarian setting than any technical one.
A shortwave receiver is passive. Listening leaves no record: no request in a log, no subscription, no device identifier, no traffic pattern for anyone to analyse later. A VPN is evidence of intent that lives on your phone. A radio is a radio.
That is why receivers were smuggled into occupied Europe in the 1940s, and why the model still works. Not only the BBC
A transmitter farm in central Florida — one of the largest shortwave operations in the world — has been broadcasting news about the war toward Belarus, Ukraine and Russia. Cold War hardware, doing Cold War work.
Meanwhile the same physics serves the other side of the ledger: the ionosphere does not care what the transmission is for. Broadcasters, numbers stations and over-the-horizon radars all share the band, and all of them are audible to anyone with a receiver. The pattern
Every few years shortwave gets written off, transmitter sites get sold, and hours get cut. Then infrastructure fails somewhere — a war, a cable cut, a nationwide blackout — and the same conclusion gets rediscovered.
It is not that shortwave is better. It is that it fails differently, and that its failure modes do not overlap with the internet's. In a crisis, that is the only property that matters.
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Sources: Seattle Times / NYT, The Conversation, Texas Public Radio, CBS News.