[SW] 11685, 9585 & 9870 kHz - BBC World Service - Antarctic Midwinter Broadcast 2024, Jun 21 2024

Despite heavy cuts earlier this year, the BBC World Service has kept its long-lasting tradition of annual shortwave broadcasts to Antarctica going.
Sponsored by the British Antarctic Survey, the 2024 show sent messages and music requests to 46 people overwintering in British research bases in Antarctica, as well as a construction site somewhere over there. The programme was really full of greetings, so there weren't too many guests, but a message from BAS director Prof. Jane Francis was heard.
This year, technical difficulties on my end (I had to replace a crashed hard drive on my laptop) had forced me to try something different: I used my TEF6686 tuner, one referred to as a "desktop" one. Initially I thought I would just stick to one frequency that I considered best, just like I would do with an SDR recording (as at the same time I would record IQ & then look for interesting signals on the band that were received at the same time), but eventually I decided to switch the TEF to memory tuning mode and programmed all three frequencies used in the test. They were:
11685 kHz via Woofferton, UK
9585 kHz via Woofferton, UK
9870 kHz via Ascension Island, South Atlantic Ocean
I was happy to see good signals on all three frequencies, although the two Wooffertons clearly had an edge. What was a little unexpected was, if there was no local noise I sometimes see late evenings on 31m, 9585 kHz would've been better than 11685! However, 11685 kHz suffered from a breakdown in the middle of the transmission. Certainly, were I confined to just one frequency, I couldn't have reacted & switched to another frequency. Also, I was surprised not to hear much in terms of a 5kHz whistle on 9870 kHz, with adjacent 9875 kHz used by Voice of Korea in Chinese.
All was received on a 3-element Quad antenna designed for FM DX

[@swlistening]

Really good reception!

[@ArnieDXer]

Thank you! Will post a detailed answer under your previous comment :)