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"Wavescan" is a weekly program for long distance radio hobbyists produced by Dr. Adrian M. Peterson, Coordinator of International Relations for Adventist World Radio. AWR carries the program over many of its stations (including shortwave). Adrian Peterson is a highly regarded DXer and radio historian, and often includes features on radio history in his program. We are reproducing those features below, with Dr. Peterson's permission and assistance.


Wavescan N541, July 7, 2019

The Radio Scene on India's 100,000 Islands

The Lakshadweep Islands are located in the Arabian Sea one hundred and two hundred miles off the west coast of India. Their name in the ancient Sanskrit language, "Lakshadweep", means "A Hundred Thousand Islands", though this seems to be a slight exaggeration.

In the Lakshadweep Archipelago there are just 39 islands, not a hundred thousand, and only ten of them are inhabited. There are eleven uninhabited named reefs, banks and islets in the Lakshadweep Archipelago. The total land area of all of these tropical coral islands is just 12 square miles, and the total population stands at around 65,000.

The Lakshadweep Islands with their reefs and lagoons as shown on the map are actually the tops of an underwater range of mountains, and they almost seem to be arranged approximately in three parallel curved rows. Most of these islands are elongated northeast and southwest, and they are in reality the northern section of the same lengthy cluster of islands that make up the equally tropical Maldive Islands and Diego Garcia.

On each side of the Indian sub-continent, there is a long chain of underwater mountains that have become individually separated islands and atolls above the level of the ocean. On the east side of India in the Bay of Bengal, the Irrawaddy Islands of Burma (Myanmar) and the Andaman & Nicobar Islands of India form a geographic unit 700 miles long. On the west side of India, the Lakshadweep and Maldive Islands, together with Diego Garcia, form another geographic unit 1,000 miles long.

For our purposes, let us invent a new geographic word, Aquamontia. This compound name is made up of three segments, taken to a certain extent from the ancient Latin language: Aqua = water, Mont = mountain and ia = country. Thus, Aquamontia = a geographic entity made up of underwater mountains. The lengthy island cluster in the Bay of Bengal thus becomes East Aquamontia, and the lengthy island cluster in the Arabian Sea becomes West Aquamontia.

In today's radio topic, we return now to West Aquamontia, and in particular to the Lakshadweep islands. The common language on all of these islands is a dialect of the same Malayalam language, with a few variations, as spoken on the nearby Malabar Coast in mainland India. The one exception, though, is the southernmost island in the Lakshadweep Islands, Minicoy, where the main language is Divehi, the language of the Maldive Islands.

There is no tree forest on any of these Lakshadweep Islands, though there are many coconut palms; and there are 82 species of seaweed, 400 species of flowering plants, and 101 different varieties of bird life. For those who are interested in underwater ventures, there are 78 species of coral.

Archaeological evidence indicates that these islands were inhabited as far back as 1500 BC. In earlier times they were somewhat independent, though in more recent times they have been administered by regional kings who ruled along the southeast coast of the Indian subcontinent. The original religion was early Buddhism; and Islam came in 661 AD with the arrival of Arab missionaries.

The famous Portuguese explorer Vasco da Gama visited Lakshadweep in 1498; the pirate Captain Kidd arrived 200 years later and pillaged and destroyed at least one of the islands; and the British took over soon after they entered southern Asia in the 1700s.

In the pre-colonial era there was a certain amount of communication by boat between the inhabitants of the Lakshadweep Islands on the western side of the Indian subcontinent and the Andaman Islands on the eastern side. Cannibalism was introduced from one island cluster to the other.

Let's look now at the radio scene in these islands, and we will examine five of them in alphabetic order.

1. Agatti Island is the main tourist island, with a land area of around one square mile and a population of around 8,000. The only airport in Lakshadweep is upon this island, it provides a tourist hotel, there is a lighthouse on the northern end, and the roadways are made of cement. Jose Jacob, VU2JOS, has participated in three amateur DXpeditions on Agatti, on one occasion under the callsign VU7SJ. He states that the airport control tower operates on 8275 kHz, the Airport Beacon operates with 60 watts on 260 kHz, and there are two solar powered over-the-air TV channels in the Malayalam language, Channels 8 and 10, with 10 watts each.

2. Aminidivi Island, with its total area of one square mile and a population of 7,340, is noteworthy in that it holds the Indian record for the most rainfall in a 24 hour period; almost four feet of rain on May 6, 2004. Over-the-air TV is available.

3. Androth Island, with an area of 1.9 square miles, is the largest island in Lakshadweep, and it also has the largest population, 10,720 people. It is even larger, with more people, than the main island of Kavaratti. Over-the-air TV is also available on this island.

4. Bangaram Island is an international tourist island, with an area of only .89 of a square mile, and it has the smallest population, with only 61 residents. The National Institute of Amateur Radio in Hyderabad has supported two DXpeditions to Bangaram Island, and over-the-air TV is available here too.

5. Bitra Island, with an area of only .038 of a square mile, is the smallest island in Lakshadweep, though it does have a population of 271 people. In 2016 there was no solar powered over-the-air TV station on this island.

More about the radio scene on the Lakshadweep Islands in West Aquamontia here in Wavescan next time.