[HCDX] Radio Damascus comments

[kris <kris251069@xxxxxxxxx>]

Dear Radio Friends

I will be visiting Syria once again in 2 weeks from now and will stay there one month. A visit to Syria is always combined with a visit to my very good friends at Radio Damascus.

Here is an excerpt of a letter a sent them today. 

"... something about the technical side of Radio Damascus. As enthusiast as I applause you and the whole team of Radio Damascus in bringing us every day this excellent mix of news and feature programs, unfortunately the technical problems do persist : 
a) The modulation of the signal on the shortwave transmitters has been reduced to almost zero, making it practically impossible to listen to Radio Damascus on shortwave. As I also asked in my former letter : "I really wonder if nothing can be done to repair the shortwave transmitters at Adra station as the modulation problem has been going on for years. I am sure you must be getting these same reports from listeners from other language sections from all parts of the world too. Is it a problem of financing, getting funds to buy spare parts for the transmitters (tubes...)? Is upper management aware of the problems at Adra? "

b) Although RTV Syria has now an English website, "Syria Online", at 
http://www.syriaonline.sy, there is NO link whatever to the audio recording of Radio Damascus' foreign language programs. 
There is even, after all this time, still no (English) link to these recording on the general Arabic RTV Syria site at http://www.rtv.gov.sy .

c) Besides the English and German program recordings the other language recordings (French, Spanish, Russian, Turkish, Hebrew are still not online. When will these recordings come online? 

d) For the last couple of days the RTV website and audio recordings have been extremely slow to download. The "Syria Online" website on the other hand is loading very fast. This makes me to conclude that the two websites, RTV Arabic and "Syria Online" in English is coming from two different servers.
Please ask the IT-department to speed up the RTV website server and please put a link in English on the RTV Syria AND "Syria Online" homepage pointing to the daily audio recordings from Radio Damascus.

e) It looks that the good people of the Spanish section of Radio Damascus got tired of waiting as they launched their own unofficial website with the daily audio recording  (in excellent quality!) of the Spanish program. You can find it here :

http://aquidamasco.podomatic.com .

Why doesn't the internet and IT department of RTV Syria make work of making a real professional Radio Damascus website with the audio recordings of all the different language sections? 

f) The good news on the technical front is that the satellite feeds are working well. It is a great pleasure to listen to Radio Damascus through the Hotbird satellite here in Belgium in digital audio quality. Please please, keep these satellite feeds on the air!"

greetings

Kris Janssen
Belgium


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