Listening to the shortwave commercial stations (along with CB radio) has been a key gateway activity for entry into amateur radio. That was back when commercial shortwave was vibrant and perhaps in its heyday. There is still a very active set of SWLs contributing to the popular SWLing.com website and the legacy work by the well-known Van Horn family to just name a couple. The Spectrum Monitor publishes information about shortwave listening, too. Of course, the Grand Daddy publication, the World Radio TV Handbook is still around. But do amateur operators still listen to the shortwave radio bands? In this article, I want to address the question I just raised with a clear answer: They still do in Canada!

The Radio Amateurs of Canada (RAC) fielded a national survey of Canadian hams in 2021. A total of 2,089 responses were received, of which 1,630 (78%) were from RAC members. Approximately one-third of all RAC members took the time to complete the survey. This is an example of “voluntary response sample” and is not a probability survey. The final report compared responses to known population characteristics which suggested that the realized sample data is generally representative of Province and license characteristics. I’ve just completed a full report from the data which is available on my FoxMikeHotel.com website. The results on shortwave listening are the focus of this article.

The results show that indeed Canadian amateurs listen to the shortwave frequencies outside of ham radio bands. Out of 38 specific operating activities, over a fourth (28.8%) of Canadian amateurs said they are involved in shortwave listening in a typical month. This was ranked 16th out of 38, ahead of QRP operations, Elmering, weather spotting, and other activities thought to be popular in amateur radio. This result may be surprising to the reader. But my further analysis shows a clearer picture of how traditional shortwave listing activity is integrated with other ham activities.

I have included in Figure 1 a map of all license-holders in Canada from the amateur radio regulator, ISED. The provided licensee address was georeferenced to the street-level for the vast majority and city-level for the remainder. There is also a bar chart showing how SWLing varies by Province.