Meet the Finn who listens to America from above the Arctic Circle

In Lemmenjoki in the north of Finland, Hannu Niilekselä is staying in a Sámi farmhouse. It’s the middle of the day, but outside it’s dark and far below zero. Across the garden, a one-kilometer stretch of wire antenna has been strung across the trees above a reindeer enclosure. Inside, far from his life in Helsinki as an auditor, Niilekselä sits with a mug of coffee, a laptop, two chunky receivers and a small black box that can capture the whole AM band. He will spend hours, days, sometimes weeks, bent over the controls. Listening? “No, not listening,” he will correct you. His hobby even has its own verb. “When you go listening long distance for radio signals, you go DXing.”

From pop-starved teenager to ardent DXer

Niilekselä’s fascination with radio began in Helsinki in the 1960s, when the Finnish public broadcaster had little to offer teenage listeners.

“There was maybe two hours of pop on Saturday, with a couple of Beatles songs at the end, and that was it,” he recalls.

Like many of kids his age, he began tuning the family radio into the ‘Great 208’ – Radio Luxembourg, late in the evenings. He was 15 when he started listening to Radio Luxembourg. Swedish, German and other European stations started drifting in at night. Bringing, as he puts it, “a sense of a much larger world out there.”

His parents didn’t discourage him. “My father used to say pop music sounded like a gang of mourning cats,” Niilekselä laughs, “but they also saw my hobby as educational. It wasn’t just music-hunting he was getting language practice, especially English and exposure to international news from broadcasters like the BBC.

A classmate introduced him to the idea of sending reception reports, which were detailed forms describing what he heard, on what frequency and when. Niilekselä sent off his first reports, and when confirmations came back from abroad, the hobby took on a new seriousness. He joined Finland’s DXing club and subscribed to its newsletter, where listeners compared notes and shared tips. Niilikeselä’s passion for North American stations then grew from a high school exchange year in Iowa from 1968 to 69, where he became immersed in US radio culture.

4,000 verifications and counting

Niilekselä calls DXers collectors by nature. “Some people collect stamps; we collect radio stations.”

It’s not enough to just hear a signal; it has to be logged reported and verified. There are roughly 4,500 AM stations in the US and Niilekselä has heard more than half, with 2,400 US stations and 350 Canadian verified. But it’s not a matter of just turning the dial. On what he calls crowded graveyard channels, up to 170 local stations can share a single frequency. On one of these, Niikselä has logged more than 120. But finding each new one can take weeks.

“I feel bored most of the time,” he admits. “But when I find something new, it’s very exciting – like a kind of euphoria.”

Niilekselä now leads the pack among European DXers for the highest number of verified North American stations. “It’s pretty much understood that I have the most in Europe,” he says, “but it helps that I’ve been at it patiently for 58 years.” The Nordic geography also gives him an edge.

The perfect listening post

For Hannu and his DXing friends across Denmark, Sweden and Norway, who are into chasing faint signals across vast global distances, the far north offers close-to-perfect conditions. In winter, darkness lasts for weeks at a time, allowing medium-wave signals to travel far beyond their daytime limits. “In my listening place, the sun doesn’t rise at all between early December and early January,” Niilekselä says. “That helps.”

Getting away from the noise matters too. Lemmenjoki sits approximately 1,150 kilometers (715 miles) above Helsinki, far from Europe’s dense transmitters and electronic noise. There are no big cities, and wide-open spaces for the long wire antennas. If you add in the vast stores of patience from the practitioners who go there, the Arctic becomes an unlikely gateway to the rest of the world. Niilekselä has been traveling there since the 1980s, when one of his friends found the old reindeer house.

When the radio talks back

DXing has taken Niilekselä well beyond Finland. While travelling for work in Australia in the late 80s, he used his free days to visit stations he’d first heard from Lapland. “I wanted to see the places behind the voices,” he says.

Once, after hearing and sending a reception report to an Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) station in Longreach, Queensland, he received a call from them while driving down from Lemmenjoki. They agreed on a short chat which turned into a half-hour live interview on the ABC Overnight program, broadcast all over Australia. He talked to listeners about his DX hobby, about Lapland, winter darkness and of course Santa Claus.

More recently, a station in Clarksdale, Mississippi, WROX, mailed him a care package with T-shirts and memorabilia, and asked for a photo of him wearing the station’s merch in Finland.

From noise to silence

Over the years, what began as a teenage search for noisy music has become something quieter. In Lemmenjoki, Niilekselä admits that along with the search for new stations, he’s also chasing silence. His wife calls the Arctic farmhouse his mancave. At the height of his career, as managing director of KPMG Finland, his trips north offered rare escape.

Before cell phones, there was only one landline nearby, in the house of the Sámi woman, known as Lady Kristina, who rented the farmhouse to the DXers. “If a client call came in, she would walk up the road and say, “Mr. Niilekselä’s secretary is calling. She says it is urgent.”

Niilekselä and his fellow listeners have been guests on her family land for years and developed a long-time friendship with her sons. When Lady Kristina died, they attended the large Sámi funeral in her honor. Her sons told them of her final instruction: to take good care of the DXer boys. They still do.