Counting other people's receivers

The map loads as dots on a world and I spent an hour counting them the way other people count birds, which tells you what August in a flat with half closed shutters does to a person. Public shortwave receivers, each one somebody's antenna and somebody's electricity bill. Eight hundred and forty seven were live that evening. I filtered for 4625 kHz and almost none of them dropped out of the list.

Twenty three sit in Finland and Poland. I had to look at that twice, because a receiver near the Baltic is close enough to hear a transmitter near Saint Petersburg without waiting for the ionosphere to be generous. Central Asia has none. Not one in Kyrgyzstan, and none in Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan or Turkmenistan. I have listened to that buzzer for years from a balcony in this city, and every clean recording I have ever kept arrived through a machine standing in somebody else's country.

The book is out and the habit did not stop, which surprises nobody who lives near me. The call sign has been NZhTI since December 2020 and the traffic is the same short dictated stuff. What I keep noticing now is the borrowed part: I do not hear it, I am lent the hearing. Someone in Kotka is my ears.