Just inside Burke Lake Park several tents sat in a field last Saturday, although it was not a designated camping area. The chugging drone of a generator filled the air. Beneath that, the monotone staccato of Morse code chattered away, and the hiss of radio static emanated from several of the tents, punctuated by pops and whistles and occasional distorted voices — some urgent and crackling, others warped until they sounded surreal, like Darth Vader underwater. Hardly a word was distinguishable. These could have been snippets of conversation overheard from the far reaches of space, from the realm of the dead. Wires ran from one tent to another, to various antennas, to other wires strung between trees.

#It would have been easy to assume that some long-estranged Soviet astronauts had returned from orbit around a time-bending black hole, made an emergency water landing in Burke Lake, and set up a spy operation, still unaware of the Cold War’s end.

#Certainly, it would have been easy to assume this, if one had not known that Saturday was the American Radio Relay League’s (ARRL) annual Field Day.

#The men and women hunched over laptops and radio receivers, watching and listening for messages from beyond, were not anachronous Communist spies but were, in fact, members of the Vienna Wireless Society, a group of over 100 ham radio hobbyists.

http://www.connectionnewspapers.com/news/2006/jun/27/wireles...

This little beauty model PZ60 has 10 bands plus gram input. Although, it's not so little! It has 6 valves plus magic eye, and an 8" speaker. It really pulls in the shortwave stations, by the dozen, if not hundreds! Even in daylight it does well, which is not so easy these days, with all the sources of interference now around. It also has pretty good sound. The on/off/tone and volume are on the left side and tuning and band selector are on the right side.

http://www.radio-restoration.com/Pye.html

I seem to recall my first real experience of listening to the radio would have been around 85 - 86 (about 8 years old) and recall listening to Radio 1 on a (transistor?) portable radio and the AM sound was quite good. Skip forward a few years to 1988 (11 years old) and the quality was quite poor and faded a lot. I remember hearing about them going FM stereo in London while listening to it fade in and out with another station on top.

I just wondered what radio was like to live with during the LW, MW and SW years as a medium. Did it always suffer from lots of interference or was the quality as good as the US AM stations I've heard on line?

https://forums.digitalspy.com/discussion/2214388/what-was-am...

I also remember people calling a radio, a 'wireless'!

I disagree with interference, which would mean a signal from another radio station crossing over so you would hear the two broadcasts overlapping). The word descargas translates to discharges (as well as the more modern download).

It's talking about electrical discharges / arcs in old radio receivers, which you hear as a kind of crackling sound. You can hear it hear mixed with the fuzz of the static noise; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TIAhLeMPvNo

The writer is not talking about accidentally picking up another station, he's trying to invoke the sound quality of an old fashioned radio broadcast.

So I would go with something like: "...making the voices coming over the crackling radios tremble as they talked about..."