Take a tour of the Voice of America Museum with me. Will will be going through Control Room to Grounds History to Transmitter Room. Also we will hear the story of the WLW O station. If you like content like this, Let me know what other museums or places of interest I can check out so we can learn together. Part 1: Part 2:
Thanks It's always interesting to see a VOA site, I've been to a number of them over the years. Not too many left so it's great that they have this Museum. If you go to Dayton Hamvention this should be on your list. 73 from, The K0UO " Rhombic Antenna Farm" 2 miles of wire in the Air & On the AIR daily
Very cool. Thank you for sharing! We always tour the VOA Museum on our way home from Hamvention each year. They are one of the museums who I make an annual donation to.
Thanks for the video tour, pity these Short and Long Wave stations are now museums. Used to listen to VOA in the UK back in its day. We still have a Long Wave AM BBC station here on 198Khz but the plan is to close it down in the future. John G7OXK
They are not all dead by any means. BBC Wooferton (Shropshire) is still going strong and the BBC still operates several overseas HF sites. I had the pleasure of working at one site, as a young engineer, at the sharp end of HF broadcasting when at its peak, where we had a full 3 shift system operating 24/7/365 with manually tuned 100 and 250kW senders (not transmitters), plus 1x 30kW SSB which was a programme link to Ascension Island and Singapore. Good times. ABC (Australia), after closing down all its HF services is now planning to resume operation. After once being their flagship service, the BBC would dearly love to close their LF service (and the also the MF services). They keep regurgitating excuses like "obsolete equipment" and "transmitter valves being unavailable". They are NOT unavailable, just very expensive and are made to order. That's not the reason, they just want to save money but for some years, the LF service has carried a paid data service for rate switching of electricity meters and also a flood warning service for the Environment Agency. This is why the LF service still survives. But for how long? Frank
A few winters ago I jury-rigged a LF tuner to my 160m Beverage. I was surprised that the LF station in UK would come in here in Tennessee, at times entertainment quality. Likewise, stations in Germany, France, Luxembourg, Iceland and Moroco. Sometimes as early as 4 PM before the sun had even gone down. I think several of them have closed down since then. I read a story about the LW station in Sweden that ran something on the order of a megawatt, using an array of multiple 1000 ft vertical towers. They ran a survey and concluded that the total number of listeners had dwindled to less than 250, so it was closed down. Not worth the expense of running that much power, plus maintaining those towers just to reach a few hundred listeners.
