The United Nations (UN) has proclaimed every 13 February to be World Radio Day. The Thammasat University Library owns a number of books about different aspects of radio broadcasting worldwide.

As the UN website reminds us, radio has potential to promote dialogue, tolerance and peace:

Radio is the mass medium reaching the widest audience in the world. It is also recognized as a powerful communication tool and a low cost medium. Radio is specifically suited to reach remote communities and vulnerable people: the illiterate, the disabled, women, youth and the poor, while offering a platform to intervene in the public debate, irrespective of people’s educational level. Furthermore, radio has a strong and specific role in emergency communication and disaster relief. There is also a changing face to radio services, which in the present times of media convergence, are taking up new technological forms, such as broadband, mobiles and tablets. Radio is still the most dynamic, reactive and engaging medium there is, adapting to 21st century changes and offering new ways to interact and participate. Where social media and audience fragmentation can put us in media bubbles of like-minded people, radio is uniquely positioned to bring communities together and foster positive dialogue for change. By listening to its audiences and responding to their needs, radio provides the diversity of views and voices needed to address the challenges we all face.

The theme of last year’s commemorations was Dialogue, Tolerance and Peace:

Broadcasts that provide a platform for dialogue and democratic debate over issues, such as migration or violence against women, can help to raise awareness among listeners and inspire understanding for new perspectives in paving the way for positive action.

Radio programming can also build tolerance and surpass the differences separating groups by uniting them under common goals and causes, like ensuring education for one’s children or addressing local health concerns.

Here are some thoughts about radio from earlier years, expressing some sociological concerns:

• First radio, then television, have assaulted and overturned the privacy of the home, the real American privacy, which permitted the development of a higher and more independent life within democratic society.

Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind

• Radio has contributed to our ‘growing lack of attention.’… This sort of hopscotching existence makes it almost impossible for people, myself included, to sit down and get into a novel again. We have become a short story reading people, or, worse than that, a QUICK reading people

Ray Bradbury, 1951 letter to Richard Matheson.

• For many people in the future, radio will take the place of an inner life… Beware of the radio if you want to improve your mind.

Georges Duhamel, In Defense of Letters (1937)

• All this, I said, just as today was the case with the beginnings of wireless, would be of no more service to man than as an escape from himself and his true aims, and a means of surrounding himself with an ever closer mesh of distractions and useless activities.

Hermann Hesse, Steppenwolf.

Books by the authors Allan Bloom, Ray Bradbury, and Hermann Hesse are in the TU Library Collection. Works by the French writer Georges Duhamel may be obtained through the TU Library Interlibrary Loan (ILL) Service.

Thailand and radio

In the TU Library collection may also be found several books specifically about radio in the Kingdom.

As the website for the Radio Amateur Society of Thailand (RAST) explains,

The history of the Radio Amateur Society of Thailand under the Patronage of His Majesty the King (RAST) dates back more than 50 years and can be distilled into two distinct eras.

The first 23 years (1964 – 1987) were a struggle grounded in its members’ sincere belief in the merits of the hobby of amateur radio and in their determination to practice it as and when they could to demonstrate the benefits — and, of course, to enjoy the experimentation and the on-air operating aspects.

But in those days most of the efforts of RAST’s officers were conducted behind the scenes as they worked for the acceptance and the ultimate legalisation of the hobby.

This was achieved — with spectacular success — in late 1987 and the second phase began in January 1988 following the enactment of amateur radio regulations.

Suddenly, an activity that until then had arguably been pursued by only a privileged few — those who had been exposed to amateur radio abroad or those with high-level connections — became accessible to any Thai who was interested and who cared to study for and pass the technical exam.

Amateur radio activity then exploded in Thailand and so RAST went into “activity mode”.

But let’s look back further. International amateur radio activities in Thailand date back more than 85 years, as the 1927 International Radio Amateur Callbook illustrates by listing two amateur radio stations based in Thailand, when the country was called Siam.

These stations were HS1BK at the Royal Siamese Navy Experimental Station and HS1HH, assigned to the Radio Section of the Siamese Post Office and both had addresses in Bangkok… The number of Thai amateur radio operating licences increased dramatically during the 1990s and by 1994 over 200,000 Thais had passed the amateur radio novice examination with 92,000 of these hams having been issued with licences for VHF operations, while 53 individuals then had been issued with HF station licences.

A steady increase in numbers followed and just six years later a total of some 173,000 novice licences had been issued along with 729 intermediate class certificates while 144 intermediate (HF and VHF) station licences had been assigned by May 2000.

The number of licensed Thai radio amateurs continues to grow and RAST successfully conducted an intermediate class examination on May 19, 2012, the first to be staged in Thailand for almost eight years. As of mid-2012, a total of 246,959 VHF licences have been issued in Thailand while the number of intermediate class licences stand at 759, a number that includes the additional 42 amateurs who passed the intermediate class exam in 2012.

RAST’s activities are diverse and dynamic, ranging from advising the PTD and later its successors, the National Telecommunications Commission (NTC) followed by the National Broadcasting and Telecommunications Commission (NBTC) that took over from the NTC in October 2011, on new licence structures or band plans.

(All images courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)