Audio recording of the last Shipping Forecast to go out on BBC Radio 4 LW 198kHz on 26th June 2026 at 2348utc. It’s preceeded by “Sailing By” the iconic tune that’s long been played immediately before the late-night Shipping Forecast broadcast.
SDR Video of the BBC 4 Radio Continuity Announcers’ farewell to LW 198kHz.
Audio recording of the BBC Radio 4 198kHz LW Shutdown Message that was broadcast after service ceased, until the transmitters were shutdown on June 30th 2026.
Audio recording of the last 198kHz transmission from 2345utc to close, as captured by Onno PA2OHH from SE Spain. Thanks for sharing Onno!
I lost a friend last night. 0000utc on 27th June 2026 marked the end of a radio era, with the shutdown of BBC Radio 4 broadcasts on LW 198kHz, after almost 100 years on the air.
BBC Radio 4 on LW 198kHz has been a fixture my entire radio life, going back to about 1980. I first heard it when I was 8 or 9 years old, when I began fooling around with a BASF radio cassette player that our Dad had given to me and my brother. Around the same time that I found marine NDBs on LW and MW – they first sparked my interest in both radio and the sea – I also found 198kHz and became utterly captivated by the Shipping Forecast. It was a very big part of the reason I became a professional seafarer.
While I was deep sea in the early years, trying to pick up BBC Radio 4 on 198kHz became a daily challenge. It was a daily routine that was also a sort of anchor to life back home. Trying to pick up 198kHz on either the ship’s radio equipment or the receiver (and sometimes transceiver)I’d have with me, was also my first real foray into weak signal low frequency DXing. The enjoyment it gave me is the reason I still do so much lowband SWL DXing today, some thirty six years later. More often than not, I’d hear nothing as I was in the Southern Atlantic Ocean, the Eastern Pacific or somewhere just as distant, but when I did pick it up there was that DX thrill that I still get today. I regret only that I didn’t keep a log of my efforts to hear 198kHz when I was plying the World’s Oceans back then, it would be a lovely thing to have today.
When I later moved onto working coastal trades in the North Sea, the English Channel and the Irish Sea, tuning into LW 198kHz became a twice daily observance that would, indeed could never be missed. Tuning into the Shipping Forecast first thing in the morning and last thing at night was sacrosanct. It was a de-facto formal duty for the officer of the watch (OOW) on the bridge of all the ships I worked on back then. Woe betide any OOW who wasn’t able to respond to the Captain’s enquiry about the forecast when he’d arrive on the bridge first thing in the morning (and before he’d had his first coffee!), or last thing at night to do his night orders before turning in. If you couldn’t look him in the eye and recite verbatim the Shipping Forecast for the sea areas the ship was sailing through, you’d get that awful look every Captain reserves for only the very worst of transgressions!
Through those years at sea, BBC Radio 4 on LW 198kHz, was both company and a comfort blanket on many dark, often stormy and sometimes lonely nights. After I came ashore, the habit of tuning in was so deeply ingrained, that for many many years I would continue to to listen to the Shipping Forecast on 198kHz every day.
Inevitably, with the passage of time, family life, changes in work roles and otherwise because of the relentless march of time, I tuned in less and less often. I guess that was symptomatic of what happened to the 198kHz services’ listernership – people who had relied on it moved on, indeed passed on, new technologies came along and with them, habits changed and the service’s relevance in the eyes of more and more listeners, diminished.
For those of us for whom BBC Radio 4 on LW 198kHz was a lifeline, a daily source of important information or maybe just a constant heartbeat – always there no matter what else was going on in life – we will miss it. In my case, having rekindled my relationship with it in recent years as lowband SWL DXing has again become my primary radio interest, I will miss it a lot. It’s not overstating it to say, that I’ve lost a friend.
