Clemens Stubbe Østergaard
The Scholar at the Receiver
The R-390A community has always attracted serious people — engineers, technicians, former military operators, and dedicated amateurs who approach the receiver with the same rigour they bring to their professional lives. Clemens Stubbe Østergaard fits that description precisely, and then some. He is an emeritus associate professor of political science at Aarhus University in Denmark, a specialist in Chinese foreign policy and China-Europe relations with over four decades of academic publication, and a longtime contributor to both the R-390/R-390A mailing list and the Eddystone radio collecting world. The combination is unusual. The depth in each domain is not.
The Academic
Clemens Stubbe Østergaard was born on 4 July 1946 in Slagelse, Denmark. He studied at the University of Aarhus, completing his doctorate in political science in 1978. He joined the Institute of Political Science at Aarhus as an assistant professor in 1979, became an associate professor in 1983, and has remained associated with the department ever since — eventually serving as Head of the Department of International Politics from 2002 onward. He served as Director of Studies for the East Asia Area Study Programme from 1990 to 2005, and as Chairman of the Nordic Institute of Asian Studies in Copenhagen from 1999 to 2001 — one of the most significant positions in Scandinavian Asian studies.
His research centres on Chinese politics and foreign policy, with particular attention to China’s international relations, its engagement with the West and with Europe, nationalism, and governance. He has served on the editorial board of the Asia-Europe Journal, edited Politica journal and its associated publications series at Aarhus, and co-chaired the Social Science Research Council. His edited volumes include Remaking Peasant China: Problems of Rural Development and Institutions at the Start of the 1990s (Aarhus University Press, 1990), and he contributed to the peer-reviewed journal China Information as early as 1989 on the student demonstrations and the limits of Chinese political accommodation. In 2008 he published China’s Experiments — Reforms and Great-Power Status in Danish (Columbus Publishers), and he continues to update his contributions to volumes that appear in new editions — evidence of an academic who has not stopped engaging with his field long after formal retirement.
His radio interests have intersected with his scholarship in an unexpected direction: because he had researched Scandinavian HF radio production — a subject with deep roots in the region’s shipping and shipbuilding industries, and in the practical necessity of maintaining communications with Greenland — he became a contributor to Fred Osterman’s authoritative Shortwave Receivers Past & Present, whose latest edition (2014) runs to some 800 pages. It is a reference that sits on the shelves of serious collectors worldwide, and his Scandinavian chapters represent a contribution to radio history that extends well beyond the mailing list.
The Collector’s Philosophy
Clemens Østergaard began listening as a schoolboy in the 1950s, during one of the great DX eras — a time when even the family Philips Operette, with its modest bandspread dial, could pull in exotic stations from all over the world: their languages, their music, their unmistakable character. That early experience shaped a lifelong orientation toward the HF spectrum as something genuinely inhabited, full of distant and distinctive presences. He still pursues DX in the present sunspot cycle with the same disposition, and misses those days when the bands were full to the brim with stations that are now long gone.
As a collector, he developed a clear and demanding philosophy: pursue the finest receiver that each country produced — the pinnacle of what its engineering culture could achieve, with no expense spared on mechanics or electronics. This led him not to a single national tradition but across the whole landscape of postwar communications receiver design: German, Swiss, Danish, Swedish, Japanese, Canadian, British, South African, and American instruments all earned their place by meeting that standard. Among the American sets he has owned are the Hammarlund HQ-180, the Hallicrafters SX-42, and various Drakes — alongside twelve Collins receivers, which speaks for itself. And of course the R-390A, operated with the Sherwood SE-3 outboard product detector that he values as much today as when he first acquired it.
The Eddystone Years
The Eddystone connection has a specific and personal origin: Clemens spent his teenage years in Britain, where the Eddystone instruments — made in Birmingham, celebrated for their mechanical refinement and genuine receiver performance — were visible and desirable but, for a young enthusiast, financially out of reach. That early longing never entirely faded. In time he acquired fourteen Eddystone receivers, including examples of the flagship 880 series, building a collection that represented the British tradition at its most serious. He eventually sold the collection to buyers in the United Kingdom, Sweden, and Finland, having learned firsthand that Eddystone sets are genuinely demanding to work on — the radio equivalent of a Citroën: brilliantly conceived, ergonomically distinctive, and not forgiving of anyone who opens them up without patience and preparation. The contrast with the Collins heavies, which reward systematic maintenance with almost military predictability, could hardly be sharper.
In 2003 he wrote for Lighthouse, the bulletin of the Eddystone User Group (Issue 82), on collecting and auctioning Eddystone radios — drawing on experience that was far from theoretical. Writing authoritatively for that community signals that he moves comfortably across receiver traditions, with the contextual understanding to situate the Eddystone design philosophy within the broader history of international HF receiver development. A collector who can do that — who can place any individual receiver within the wider story of what each country’s engineering culture was trying to achieve — is a rare thing in any collecting world.
The Mailing List
His name appears consistently in the R-390/R-390A mailing list archives, where he contributes as an experienced owner and operator. His posts engage with IF deck behaviour, the practical use of the SE-3 product detector, and the technical nuances of maintaining these sets. He remains an active subscriber: when the list ran a connectivity test in 2024, he was among those who replied — alongside long-standing community members who have been part of the conversation for decades. Longevity on a mailing list of this kind is not passive; it means continuing to read, to engage, and to make the community available to newer owners who find the list and need to know it is still alive.
The Intersection
There is something worth reflecting on in the image of a Danish political scientist — someone who has spent a career analysing the behaviour of states, the dynamics of Chinese foreign policy, and the politics of international institutions — spending his other hours with the mechanical precision of a Collins receiver, the warm glow of its dial lamps, and the long arc of HF propagation reaching across the same distances that once defined the Cold War monitoring operations these radios were built to perform. These pursuits are not as far apart as they might seem. Both reward patient, systematic attention. Both involve working with complex systems whose behaviour depends on understanding many interacting variables. And both began, in his case, with a schoolboy in the 1950s turning a dial on a Philips Operette and hearing the world come in.
Clemens Stubbe Østergaard has contributed to the R-390A community with exactly the qualities he brought to academic life: sustained engagement, genuine depth, and the willingness to keep showing up over many years. The community is richer for both.
Mike Peace VK6ADA / r390a.net Administrator