THAT SPECIAL RING ABOUT LATIN AMERICAN BROADCASTING

We believe that there are certain aspects of Latin American broadcasting that seem special to DX-ers. Music is obviously one element, but there is also something special about the way speakers, locutores, go about their business. DXers may hate or love what they are hearing. Rarely, they are left indifferent.

In an environment of noise and interference Spanish is perhaps easier to understand than Portuguese. The traditional craftsmanship of each country also plays an important role.

In certain countries, putting a person behind a microphone will not change his general speech patterns. In others it does. In Venezuela and in Colombia, a programme presenter, locutor, is required to pass pronunciation and voice tests as well as tests of grammar and general knowledge. Some programme hosts will make it a point to mention their license numbers when signing on or signing off.

Again, in Venezuela and in Colombia, a programme host tends to be more emphatic than the man in the street. (1) To raise your voice is seen as important when it comes to a sales pitch.

Stuttering commentators, especially on TV, will be beset by mockery and ridicule from listeners and spectators.

Good enunciation pays off. Gustavo Niño Mendoza, a newsreader on Caracol network, was designated the Number One newsreader in Colombia in 1987. Subsequently, he was given the honour of recording all of the Caracol network station identifications.

In Venezuela, the Meridiano newspaper paid special tribute to the Radio Rumbos newsreader Gilberto García in an article for the 39^thanniversary of the station in 1988.

While Europeans pay attention to written compositions, in Latin America rhetoric is by no means frowned upon. This is perhaps why Scandinavian DXers get impressed by Latin American speakers even without understanding what is being said. Others may feel a bit uncomfortable with the fast speech delivery of certain sports narrators, especially when “cantando un gol”, singing a goal.

Whereas Colombians and Venezuelans seem to prefer emphatic speech in broadcasting, this appears not to be the case in Bolivia, where up-tempo speech patterns are rare in the broadcasting community. The catch is that messages may miss the target, which was shown in a study by Javier Albó in the 1970’s. His investigation concluded that 65% of commercials and other announcements in radio went unnoticed by listeners.

In the 1970’s jingles may have been scarce in Bolivian broadcasting. Singing the ads could have given a different result. Modern techniques in attracting listeners´ attention in Brazil, Peru, Ecuador and Colombia do include jingles, but also a heavy dependency on echo chambers and reverb, not only for advertisements, cuñas, but also for station identification.

Another way of keeping listeners glued to the loudspeakers is the system used in Argentina and Uruguay where male and female voices alternate in reading the commercial spots (frases), sometimes mixed with occasional pre-recorded stuff. We believe that this “dual” system of adstrings (tandas publicitarias) is dynamic and that it enhances listening.

In certain countries, alternating male and female voices may also appear on devoted news channels such as Radio Reloj, in Cuba, and Radioprogramas del Perú. No doubt the flow of news items tapped from news wires will then become less monotonous, more vivid.

(1) Newsreader Cristóbal Américo Rivera is a medical doctor but he has been reading the news in his particular way ever since the end of the 1960´s on at least four different radio stations in Bogotá. This recording is from Radio Reloj.

2. Decline of ShortWave Broadcasting in Latin America

In the early days of broadcasting, communication by road and air was difficult or even non-existent. Shortwave broadcasting became a useful means to bridge that gap. As telephone, cable and mail services improved, shortwave has become less important as a means of keeping people in the countryside in touch with the world.

The number of shortwave stations in Latin America has shrunk during the past few decades. This is shown by Graph 1, which covers the principal Andean countries of South America.

In the early days of broadcasting, communication by road and air was difficult or even non-existent. Shortwave broadcasting became a useful means to bridge that gap. As telephone, cable and mail services improved, shortwave has become less important as a means of keeping people in the countryside in touch with the world.

The number of shortwave stations in Latin America has shrunk during the past few decades. This is shown by Graph 1, which covers the principal Andean countries of South America.

A peak ocurred in the 70’s, but since then the number of used frequencies has been gradually dropping, except in Peru, where there has been a continuous and uncontrolled growth of stations, some of which have been operating without legal permits. (1)

Graph 2 shows the continuous rise of medium wave operations in the same countries. The number of FM transmitters has of course risen even more steeply during the same period. (2)

In southern South America, including Brazil, there is a similar downward turn for shortwave.

The trend appears to be irreversible, and it is believed that the number of shortwave outlets will dwindle even further as TV, postal and telephone services improve.

The shortwave operations in Latin America in 1989 were, in general, geared for areas where other communications media were in an underdeveloped state, mediumwave and FM transmissions missing.

This was one of the reasons for the upsurge of shortwave in the Peruvian countryside in the 80’s. In Peru, and in Ecuador, at that time, instant communication with distant and small places in the countryside was best handled by means of shortwave.

DXers miss “the good old days” when there were many small Latin American broadcasters on shortwave. Now that they are gone, we may want to share the joy of those Latin Americans who probably feel that they are now better served than before from a communications viewpoint.

3. Broadcasting in Rural Areas

4. Broadcasters and Postal Services

In certain countries in Latin America, house-to-house delivery of letters by a postman has been the privilege of those who were living on the main avenues of the principal towns. Decades ago, many people would pay for a Casilla or an Apartado at the Post Office instead of having to queue in front of the Lista de correos desk to ask for any letters.

For people with unknown addresses, letters could sometimes be sent in care of someone with a well-known address, for instance a radio station.

Radio Zaracay, in Ecuador, Radio Estrella Polar, in Peru, La Voz de Samaniego, and La Voz de Anserma, in Colombia, are stations which in the past used to mention names of people having letters to collect at the station.

There are countries possessing fast and reliable mail services, but, as a rule, people may prefer to send important mail some other way, preferably with a friend or a relative who is about to travel to the same place. In several countries, local bus companies will carry mail.

In Bolivia, people may choose to send their postal items via Flota Copacabana coach. This bus company dumps the mail, not only parcels but also plain letters, at each bus terminal along their routes.

In Colombia, where airmail was introduced in 1919, a private company, Avianca, was in charge of all airmail, while surface mail was handled by the state-owned Adpostal. Only stamps marked “Aéreo” was accepted by Avianca. In 1966, coinciding with the introduction of jetliners for national airmail, Avianca offered an unusual special delivery service.

Letters posted in Bogotá in the morning would be delivered to the addressee in any of 20 major towns the same afternoon. This service worked for some time but is history now. The Colombian postal services has been unified and the service is now more like “snail-mail”.

In Peru, at the turn of the 19^th and 20^th century, a letter from the jungle town of Iquitos to Lima would travel by boat down the Amazon river to the Atlantic port of Belém, in Brazil, and thence to Liverpool in the UK from where it was sent back to Lima via the Straits of Magellan (the southernmost tip of South America)!

In general, it seems that letters from Europe to Latin America are handled faster than those that have been mailed from a neighbouring country. In 1966, letters from Sweden or Germany to Colombia would arrive in 3 days, while letters from the UK and USA needed 5. A letter from Colombia to Ecuador would also take up to 5 days.

Mail sent from Latin America to Europe is slower. In the heydays of Avianca, letters from Colombia to Sweden would arrive in 5 days. If registered and sent by special delivery – via Paris – a letter would make it in just 2 days!

Postage rates in 2010 are considerably higher from Latin America to Europe than vice-versa. Broadcasting companies and other major companies in Latin America have become heavily dependent on mail and package delivery companies such as DHL, Fedex, UPS or their local counterparts. The cost of renting a Casilla or an Apartado has risen steeply in Latin America. In the 1960’s and 1970’s an Apartado Aéreo was commonplace in Colombia, a Casilla in Argentina. Today’s electronic messaging services are about to convert P.O. Boxes into relics of the past.

5. Old and New Identification Patterns

CALL LETTERS

Pioneering broadcasters in Latin America were Radio Argentina (1920), Radio Chilena (1922) and Radio México (1923). Available records do not show that they were using call letters, which was a common practice among stations in North America and Australia at that time.

As broadcasting stations proliferated international conventions were agreed upon for allocation of frequencies and call letters . By the end of the 20’s, call letters had been assigned to each country.

In Latin America, call letters became compulsory.

Shortwave listeners in the 30’s needed frequency tables with the corresponding list of call letters in order to identify the station and country they were receiving. The January 1934 issue of RADEX, The All-Wave Radio Magazine, published at Mount Norris, Illinois, contained a list of “the best” shortwave stations from various countries.

With the proviso that radio telephone services perhaps are included in this list, the 1934 survey of Latin America contained the following number of entries:

Call letters, country and frequency were given for each station. given.

Many of these call letters (siglas or indicativo) are familiar with us even today, CP5, HI1A, HC2RL, HCJB, TGW and OAX4D.

In some countries, Colombia, Costa Rica and Venezuela, call signs were similar to those assigned to today’s ham operators. This was, by the way, also the case in many other countries, viz. USA, Canada, Australia, Portugal and Spain.

First on shortwave from Venezuela was YV1BC, in Caracas. From the list one cannot tell if the company name, Broadcasting Caracas,, was used independently or in together with the call sign.

Nowadays, in Europe, none of the regular broadcasters are using call signs. Spain was one of the last countries to abandon the use of their EAJ, EAK, EFE and EFJ call letters well-known to European DXers in the 1960’s and 1970’s.

In Latin America, there are still a good many stations that display their call signs in logos, and use them as part of their regular station identification.

Newbies, however, seem to care less about call letters than the actual frequency on the AM or FM band.

Recently, with the upsurge of national networks, the “legal” identification procedure will not always include a call sign, at least not at night or during weekends. In Mexico, which is part of North America, it still does. In Brazil it is also fairly common that the station, on top of the hour, says, “Let’s pause for prefixos”, which is what the call sign is being called in Portuguese.

PRONUNCIATION OF CALL SIGNS

The letters in the Spanish alphabet are not pronounced along identical patterns in all countries. The letter Y, i griega in Spain, is often ye in Latin America. In Portuguese it is rendered as ípsilõ).

Historically, B and V are pronounced the same way, either roughly as a B in English or as an approach to a B, where the upper and lower lips fail to meet.

The uve for V in Spain, is nowhere to be heard in Latin America. The labiodental V (which is the normal way of pronouncing it in English) is a strange sound to native speakers of Spanish. People in Argentina and Uruguay may use the labiodental V, supposedly due to influence from Italian speech patterns.

(In the recorded ID for La Voz de Carabobo it is impossible to distinguish between the V and the B in the call sign YVLB. The Y is pronounced as ye).

W is seen as a foreign letter in Spanish. To some people it is doblebé (or doblevé, which will be pronounced in the same way), others prefer dobleú.

(You may see the letter rendered in one word or in two). The international La W network is referred to as la dobleú in all member countries excepting Chile, where it is mentioned as la doblevé.

W is also extraneous to speakers of Brazilian Portuguese, who will use the English pronunciation of the letter.

For figures is is convenient to remember that Brazilians often render the figure 6 as méia (from meia dúzia, half a dozen).

Mentioning call letters as station identification is mandatory in North America, which includes Mexico. In Central and South America this rule appears to have been softened during the past few decades, one of the reasons probably being the existence of nationwide networks in many countries. Networks will break for station identification and local advertisements only during the day, and not during weekends.

In old DX bulletins shortwave and medium wave information would refer to the call letters and location only. QSLs were (and still are) reported much the same way. Nowadays, the station name or slogan is common. In a listing of frequencies, however, a station without call letters will create an uncomfortable hiatus, and so bulletin editors tend to supply at least the country identifier in order to fill the empty space, for instance “HO---“ for Panama.

In the Swedish DX magazine Nattugglan (No. 10, vol. 4, 1949) a listener writes: “On approx. 49.0 metres I have been getting a station from Bogotá announcing ‘Cadena Radio Colombiana’. Reception is quite good, despite severe interferences at times. Which is their call sign?”

To be sure, he did not ask for the company name, just for the call sign.

In some countries, such as Colombia, the call sign is affixed to a frequency, in others to a company.

In Ecuador, changing ownership would also imply a change of call letters. The new call sign, shown on the company stationery, would sometimes sport the initials of the owner’s name, or those of his wife etc.

At Radio Guaranda, in Ecuador, we asked the owner, Sr. Jorge Carvajal, which were the station call letters. The station was a newcomer, and in their transmissions they did not mention any call sign at all. “Well”, he said, “I don’t know but as we are in the 6^thregion, so our callsign should of course be HC6JC”.

Thus he suggested J for Jorge and C for Carvajal.

The call letter issue, which still is very important to many DXers, does not play any major role in Ecuador. not even with the licensing body, IETEL (in 1987).

In an official list, published in the mid-80’s by the Ecuadorian government agency IETEL, there were three different frequencies in the town of Guayaquil identified as HCDE2.

STATION NAMES, MONIKERS, SLOGANS

By the mid 50’s, judging from the same magazine, the Swedish Nattugglan, the compulsory listing of call letters was gradually being expanded to include a station name and/or a slogan. This reflected a reality. Call letters were less often heard on the air than the slogan.

Latins are prone to call their friends by nicknames, handles, and so the habit of adding a moniker or a slogan to a call sign or to a corporate name is quite normal. The idea is of course to create a profile and an identity that listeners might feel comfortable with.

For AM and FM stations, which people would listen to in their cars, an alpha-numerical identification pattern is very useful. Typically, this pattern would indicate a frequency and an easily remembered catch-word, Valencia 12-20, on 1220 kHz, Canal 115 – Radio Variedades, on 1150 kHz, Radio Trece, on 1290 kHz, or Mara Ritmo 900 AM.

Stations emphasizing a particular format will eventually have to change their slogan – and jingle, if they have one - as they switch to another format.

In Mexico the old-timers on mediumwave, XEX, XEW, XEQ are known as “"la X", "la W" and “la Q”. The latter had a tropical format in the mid-80’s and the station was then called la Tropi-Q, a paraphrase of “trópico” (for “música tropical”).

Right now, in Lima, Perú, the letter Q, is a reference to the Colombian “cumbia”, at least for listeners to a station on 1360 kHz, frequently heard in Europe, and on107.1 FM, La Nueva Q FM, donde manda nuestra cumbia.

Slogans are often ambiguous. The la ke buena type of slogans common in Mexico (and the USA) carry the implicit idea that the station is a woman.

The whistle heard in connexion with the Mexican Radio Mil identification refers to a woman, in this case to ‘a whistling approval’ of a very beautiful woman in Mexico, Claudia Isla.

Half a century ago, in Latin American towns you would awake in the wee hours of the morning by roving street vendors crying out the name of the newspaper they were selling. With such an experience on your mind you will easily accept the shouted presentation of news slots such as "El Reportero Caracol" with its slogan"el primero con las últimas" (first with the latest news).

Now that roving news vendors are scarce and news is available anywhere, any time, this would seem as an old-fashioned way of opening a newscast.

Still the opening curtain for a programme is important, and considerable thought is given to this detail.

The World Radio TV Handbook will give us access to call letters and station names and only to a lesser degree to slogans and catchwords. These are however worth keeping in mind as the identifier, if correctly quoted in a reception report, provides good evidence of actual reception.

Some slogans are elusive and changing, even with the season of the year. In Colombia, this will happen as of November each year, when many stations are gearing up for Christmas festivities, "En Radio Santafé la música es de diciembre", or "Radio Santafé",  "la emisora de diciembre" or "su emisora de todos los diciembres.

Some stations will excel in slogans between music selections.

During a nighttime broadcast in 1971, Radio Colosal, in Neiva, Colombia, on 4945 kHz, offered different slogans between the musical selections, Esta es la jacarandosa alegría Colosal, “colosal”, enormous, refers to the station itself and is also a qualifier of “la alegría”, the joy, which is “jacarandoso”, boisterous. This is a slogan where the station name is used in an ambiguous way.

Some of the announcements are read by a DJ who is relatively tired as it is at 3 a.m. The carted slogans are emphatic, trying to convey emotion.

Colosal, colosal, por ahí es la cosa, Colossal, enormous, that’s the word for it. Radio Colosal, la llave grande para el progreso del sur de Colombia, key to progress of southern Colombia.

Radio Colosal, imagen del Huila ante el mundo, Huila in southern Colombia is the province, departamento, where the station is located, and so Radio Colosal is conveying an image of Huila to the world.

Radio Colosal, profesional is the common Todelar network ploy “somos profesionales”, we are no amateurs, we are pros.

Radio Colosal, la emisora que sirve en el Huila (“sirve” means that the station is a service institution that does its job well) Va más lejos y siempre está en el corazón de los huilenses, the station reaches afar and yet it stays in the hearts of the people in Huila.

Radio Colosal, calidad y capacidad certificadas por millares de oyentes, thousands of listeners testify to the quality and professionalism of the station.

Radio Colosal distingue a quien la escucha, Radio Colosal is for truly discerning listeners or if you are not, the stations programming will turn you into one.

Excepcional, colosal, por ahí es la cosa, Exceptional, colossal, that’s the Word for it.

STATION NAMES

When naming a radio station, the idea is to find a name which the intended recognize as theirs. The name of a river or a mountain or some historic person will serve as a catalyst for the targeted audience.

Without pretending to present an all-embracing list, we shall try to give some station names sorted out by concepts.

When publishing my book in 1989 there was no such thing as Google or Wikipedia. Now there is. It can be of wonderful help to us, now that also pictures can be retrieved when googling a concept.

In the following list you will find “Catatumbo”, “chasqui”, “Chinchaycocha”, “Ingapirca” or “Tawantinsuyo”. Looking up any of these words from your Google toolbar you will find not only more words but also pictures to explain their meaning.

1. Present-day geographical names

2. Names of historic interest