We are saddened by the news of the death of Wolf Harranth, OE1WHC, the founder of the DokuFunk archive. Wolf passed away on 3 August after a short, serious illness.

Many will still know Wolf Harranth from his work at Radio Österreich International — from “Kurzwellenpanorama”, “the programme for shortwave listeners”. Later it was called “Medienpanorama” (Media Panorama), finally “Intermedia” — all of them a must for shortwave listeners and radio amateurs, because the programmes not only gave a good overview of shortwave events and were always up to date, but because Wolf also offered a lot of thoughtful material — in his own critical but pleasantly communicative way.

Wolf was also the founder of the non-profit Viennese documentation archive for research into the history of radio and electronic media — Internationales Kuratorium QSL Collection — abbreviated Dokufunk-Archiv. What started as a QSL card collection is now a considerable archive on the history of radio and the amateur radio service, with many contemporary historical documents. According to Wikipedia, the archive now holds about six million items, including 1500 bequests, making it “the world’s largest institution with archival records and collections of any kind on the history of radio, with a focus on broadcasting and amateur radio.” The holdings are accessible free of charge and are constantly being added to.

It is probably less well known that in Austria Wolf was regarded as one of the country’s legendary literary translators. He was awarded the Austrian State Prize for Literary Translation and the international Astrid Lindgren Translation Prize, among others, for this work. He translated classics such as the “Jungle Book” or the “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn”.

He was also a recipient of the Roy Stevens, G2BVN memorial award in 2017, the IARU Region 1’s highest recognition for excellence in amateur radio, for his decades of effort and work on the DokuFunk archive. 

With Wolf, OE1WHC, not only the DX scene has lost one of its greats. Wolf passed away shortly before his 80^th birthday.

Photo: Wikipedia/Harranth

Tom Kamp DF5JL
IARU Region 1 HF Manager

The Union of Radio Amateurs of Kyrgyz Republic (ARUKR) announced that on 4^th June 2021, the Kyrgyzstan Telecommunications Regulator made the new WRC-15 Amateur Secondary Allocation of 5351.5 – 5366.5 kHz available to Kyrgyz hams at a maximum power of 100 W.

Other Secondary allocations made available at the same time were 472 – 479 kHz (1 W), 122.25 – 123 GHz and 134 – 141 GHz (both at 100 W).