Does armed forces radio have its own band or is it in shortwave?? I bought a shortwave radio for emergency purposes but all I seem to find on it is church stuff and tons of people speaking Spanish.

I doubt you will hear anything military related. If you were close to an airport you might occasionaly hear air traffic control for takeoff and landing but that's all. Everything else is highly encrypted.

AFN is just regular radio frequencies. 50 years ago it was AM. Its for military personal in foreign countries

i can't speak to Military much , a friend was a military's radio operator he said even 30+ years ago they had stuff that could jump all over in FRQ and send bits and pieces of a message

that is different than their hand held and UHF stuff which was often just plan old motorola stuff back then for things like base security.

Police are moving or moved to Digital trunked radio in most cities. basically the radios are small computer driven data radios they communicate with the network and where ever they get on the network the communication depending on channel and codes used is rebrodcast to all the nodes

basically if you had a cell phone and called into a conference bridge with all the other people in the department on it and you un-mute to talk by pressing your push to talk mic all the actual stuff heard on the FRQ is actually data packets basically they are VoIP radios now.

rather than having a tall tower and trying to push big power to pernitrate buildings , there are lots of smaller node antennas that the radios (small computers) talk with

then when you get some kid who figures out the FRQ and how to program an unlocked radio to that FRQ he doesn't make a racket on it all the time disturbing offical comms

each radio has a unique electronic ID and those IDs can be blocked from the network very much like your computer can be filtered based on mac address

you not only need the FRQ but the log in and the encryption to broadcast

modern police radios have a lot more in common with the Nextel push to talk of the early 2000s than they do the FM and AM handheld radios like marine band

AFN is just radio for entertainment. Music weather news, in English for military personnel overseas. I don't know about now but it even had a few old radio shows like the shadow time to time.

Robin Williams was in a movie called good morning Vietnam where he was an AFN DJ in Saigon.

Thanks gang… I always thought it was always a specific band.

I wasn't thinking about the entertainment side of things in my origional reply. A quick google search brought up a pretty extensive list of frequencies on Wikipedia. Maybe you will be able to hear some of them.

As some of the comments suggest the days of a single frequency radio are gone (it aint Vietnam), it a very very complicated comm world out there. So read the ads from Harris a major MFG of mil spec radio and understand if you were not in the mil school or a PHD from MIT, UR out of the loop


https://www.l3harris.com/all-capabilities/tactical-multiband-radios

AFRVN was FM in the 'Nam. Only game incountry!

I can't believe some of y'all are thinking he's talking about encrypted military comms. He's asking about armed forces radio and made that clear in his first post.

and on re-reading I see than , I put a difficulty level 10 on that question from reading the tittle and it wasn't .

We had a Voice of America site in Eastern NC. Think they took down the towers and antenna a few years ago. Is Voice of America still operating? Was it short wave or AM?