Voice of Korea - AbsoluteAstronomy.com

Voice of Korea is the international broadcasting

International broadcasting

International broadcasting is broadcasting that is deliberately aimed at a foreign, rather than a domestic, audience. It usually is broadcast by means of longwave, mediumwave, or shortwave radio, but in recent years has also used direct satellite broadcasting and the Internet as means of reaching...

service of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea. It broadcasts primarily information

Information

Information in its most restricted technical sense is a message or collection of messages that consists of an ordered sequence of symbols, or it is the meaning that can be interpreted from such a message or collection of messages. Information can be recorded or transmitted. It can be recorded as...

in Korean

Korean language

Korean is the official language of the country Korea, in both South and North. It is also one of the two official languages in the Yanbian Korean Autonomous Prefecture in People's Republic of China. There are about 78 million Korean speakers worldwide. In the 15th century, a national writing...

, Chinese

Chinese language

The Chinese language is a language or language family consisting of varieties which are mutually intelligible to varying degrees. Originally the indigenous languages spoken by the Han Chinese in China, it forms one of the branches of Sino-Tibetan family of languages...

, Spanish

Spanish language

Spanish , also known as Castilian , is a Romance language in the Ibero-Romance group that evolved from several languages and dialects in central-northern Iberia around the 9th century and gradually spread with the expansion of the Kingdom of Castile into central and southern Iberia during the...

, German

German language

German is a West Germanic language, related to and classified alongside English and Dutch. With an estimated 90 – 98 million native speakers, German is one of the world's major languages and is the most widely-spoken first language in the European Union....

, English

English language

English is a West Germanic language that arose in the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of England and spread into what was to become south-east Scotland under the influence of the Anglian medieval kingdom of Northumbria...

, French

French language

French is a Romance language spoken as a first language in France, the Romandy region in Switzerland, Wallonia and Brussels in Belgium, Monaco, the regions of Quebec and Acadia in Canada, and by various communities elsewhere. Second-language speakers of French are distributed throughout many parts...

, Russian

Russian language

Russian is a Slavic language used primarily in Russia, Belarus, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan. It is an unofficial but widely spoken language in Ukraine, Moldova, Latvia, Turkmenistan and Estonia and, to a lesser extent, the other countries that were once constituent republics...

, Japanese

Japanese language

is a language spoken by over 130 million people in Japan and in Japanese emigrant communities. It is a member of the Japonic language family, which has a number of proposed relationships with other languages, none of which has gained wide acceptance among historical linguists .Japanese is an...

, and Arabic

Arabic language

Arabic is a name applied to the descendants of the Classical Arabic language of the 6th century AD, used most prominently in the Quran, the Islamic Holy Book...

. Until 2002 it was known as Radio
Radio
Radio is the transmission of signals through free space by modulation of electromagnetic waves with frequencies below those of visible light. Electromagnetic radiation travels by means of oscillating electromagnetic fields that pass through the air and the vacuum of space...

Pyongyang
Pyongyang
Pyongyang is the capital of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea, commonly known as North Korea, and the largest city in the country. Pyongyang is located on the Taedong River and, according to preliminary results from the 2008 population census, has a population of 3,255,388. The city was...

.

Voice of Korea broadcasts on HF or shortwave radio frequencies, as well as on medium wave for broadcasts aimed at neighboring countries. Some frequencies broadcast are well out of the ITU

Itu

Itu is an old and historic municipality in the state of São Paulo in Brazil. The population in 2009 was 157,384 and the area is 641.68 km². The elevation is 583 m. This place name comes from the Tupi language, meaning big waterfall. Itu is linked with the highway numbered the SP-75 and are flowed...

allocated shortwave broadcast bands, making them less susceptible to interference but less likely to be listenable on older receivers.

Unlike most international broadcasters, "Voice of Korea" does not broadcast an interval signal in the minutes leading up to the start of the transmission. It instead starts broadcasting the interval signal (the first few notes of the "Song to General Kim Il Sung") on the hour. This is interspersed by the station identification and is followed by the North Korean national anthem. On or around important state anniversaries (birth anniversaries of Kim Il Sung or Kim Jong Il, or the anniversary of the founding of the DPRK), this is often followed by the "Song of General Kim Il Sung" and the "Song of General Kim Jong Il

Song to General Kim Jong-il

"The Song of General Kim Jong-il" is a marching song from North Korea. The song praises its current leader, Kim Jong-il, as a part of his cult of personality. During the presidency of Kim Il-sung, Kim Jong-il helped to run his father's own personality cult, composing songs and writing books. One...

".

A news bulletin is then broadcast, with all items from the Korean Central News Agency

Korean Central News Agency

The Korean Central News Agency is the state news agency of North Korea and has existed since December 5, 1946. KCNA is headquartered in the capital city of Pyongyang...

. If there are stories related in any way to Kim Il Sung or Kim Jong Il, these will always top the bulletin. Apart from this, VOK broadcasts generally consist of stories about the lives and achievements of Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il, praise for the Kims and the DPRK from foreigners, programmes about Korean culture, history, music, etc.

In 2006 VOK started broadcasting on the same frequency as the Lincolnshire Poacher

Lincolnshire Poacher (numbers station)

"The Lincolnshire Poacher" was the nickname of a mysterious, powerful shortwave numbers station that used two bars from the English folk song "The Lincolnshire Poacher" as an interval signal. The radio station was believed to be operated by the British Secret Intelligence Service and emanated from...

numbers station

Numbers station

A numbers station is a shortwave radio station of uncertain origin. In the 1950s, Time magazine reported that the numbers stations first appeared shortly after World War II and were using a format that had been used to send weather data during that war.Numbers stations generally broadcast...

, possibly in an attempt to cover up the Poacher's broadcast into North Korea or to irritate its operators.

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