Radio Saudi International, transmitting from Riyadh, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, was logged on 29 October 2015. An Indonesian language broadcast of Arabic music, news (Berita) and Islamic programming was observed from 10.12 till 11.05 UTC. Reception on 21.670 kHz was (SINPO) 45534 -- good signal strength and audio quality, despite an occasional and long fade.
Reception report was emailed and submitted online to Radio Saudi International, although I am extremely doubtful a verification, let alone a reply, will result. Firstly, Broadcasting Services of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, now Saudi Broadcasting Corporation (SBC), stopped QSLing years ago. Secondly, I have mailed registered letters only to have them returned and sent countless emails to no avail. Lastly, the only replies from SBC in recent years have come from the Urdu and Bengali sections, but short of a verification from SBC.
On that note, I will give SBC credit where credit is due. Their programming is ideally suited for Sunni Muslims. The news, Quran recitation and Islamic programming is superb. But it stops there. Whether one is a Muslim or non-Muslim, the public relation skills of SBC fall short of being effective and professional. They stubbornly refuse to acknowledge practically everyone. It's a pity too, really. They might win more listeners, possibly converts, if they were as accommodating as the Christian broadcasters who seem to dominate the shortwave bands presently.
My humble advice to SBC -- if anyone from the Saudi Ministry of Culture & Information is reading this blog entry -- would be to re-evaluate your mission. Surely you have the financial resources and personnel to at least acknowledge your listeners. In doing so, you would do Saudi Arabia and Islam a great service. Should your broadcast engineers/department heads not have the time to do so, I would more than welcome the opportunity to be SBC's monitor and veri-signer. Seriously, I am willing to assist SBC in this respect, in sha Allah. I am not only a long-time radio enthusiast, I worked in the advertising/public relations industry for many years. Interested? Contact me.
One might try contacting their various social media sites for a response. Otherwise they will not QSL, nor will they entertain one in most queries. They are NOT listener-friendly. They're PR is non-existent. So, don't expect any response from this broadcaster.
ReplyDeleteAbsolutely. I did get a reply from their Urdu section using FB Messenger, but no QSL was issued, only an acknowledgement that I listened to their broadcast.
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