This is true Arctic wilderness.
You can walk around for days without seeing anybody.
This is absolutely the best place for AM DXing in the entire world.
AM DXing means listening to AM on medium wave, radio stations...
thousands of kilometres from their intended coverage area.
Mika set up antennas in the wilderness to hear them.
We are 400km north of the Arctic Circle.
Now we are a few hundred metres from our cabin.
These wires are three to four metres above the ground.
This is reindeer herding territory and they are a priority here.
That's why we keep the antennas high up
so no reindeer gets stuck in the wires.
The wires come to one of these two boxes.
From these boxes they go into a coax cable
which is like a protected shielded cable.
It goes underneath to the ground
and then to our cabin.
This one is directed at 290 degrees.
East Coast USA, Caribbean, Colombia, Venezuela.
We have 14 such antennas
to pick up stations from all around the world.
They are more or less one kilometre in length.
[radio announcement] This is the BBC World Service, the world's radio station.
The BBC relay [station] in Oman.
[radio announcer] Hello and welcome to the History Hour with me, Max Pearson.
I don't speak Thai language but I still recognise the ID.
This is Radio Thailand.
This is from South Korea.
Mika started capturing distant radio stations at the age of 15.
DXing was a window to the world.
Before the age of internet and before satellite TV
shortwave radio was the thing.
That's how we learned languages
that's how we heard the kind of music that we enjoyed.
Mika's passion hasn't faded over the years.
You never know exactly what you're gonna hear.
There can be a really narrow opening to some particular direction
and you can hear even dozens of stations that you've never heard before.
I just love the challenge of being able to identify what I'm hearing
using all these clues about the frequency
program content and language.
This is STV in the northern island of Hokkaido in Japan.
If we scan the dial upwards
it doesn't have a clear signal.
I would guess that
this would probably be from Minnesota, KSUM.
The radio scene continues to be
surprising and challenging and full of possible discoveries.
We try to pick up all the furthest stations
the weakest signals.
Why is the Arctic the best location for picking up distant radio signals?
There's hardly anybody living here.
There's a lot of space for antennas and there's no interference by television sets and electrical appliances.
Another advantage in Lapland is that
during the winter days are really short.
It's 14:30 on 20 November and you can see the Sun has already gone down.
Darkness is very good because AM signals travel far in darkness.
Capturing distant radio signals requires regular maintenance.
I come to Lapland normally twice a year.
Every time that I'm here I'm trying to go through all the 14 antennas.
Depending on how much snow there is
it's actually quite tough to walk around here
and clear the antennas of snow and ice.
It's probably really healthy to get out of the cabin
and just enjoy the beauty of this wilderness.
The Russian border is exactly 40km from here.
In between it's just wilderness. There are no roads, no villages.
Even if my dial is full of exotic radio stations
I would come up here and relax
and just enjoy the quietness and the stillness of nature here.
Sometimes I don't hear much on the radio and the reason can be
high solar activity which causes the Northern Lights.
Then I just come out here and enjoy the spectacle instead.