The Voice of America; expended goodwill edition.
Radio Liberty and Radio Free Europe were The main sources of Western information behind the Iron Curtain during the Cold War. While the VOA, RFE, and RL used HF, there were also FM relays in the mix. If you wanted to know what the US Government’s position was on any topic, VOA, RFE, and RL were the information sources.
I wrote several articles about this in the past:
So what happened? Why has the current administration shuttered those services?
There are several good reasons why many government broadcasters have reduced or eliminated shortwave:
- Fewer people care about the US Government’s position
- Changes in geopolitics
- Reduced listenership to HF Shortwave Broadcasts due to technical difficulty
- Large double-sideband AM transmitters are expensive to operate and maintain and therefore are a target for reducing expenses
- HF transmitter sites require a lot of land and physical infrastructure, which is also expensive to maintain
- New distribution technology is easier for the end user and less expensive to operate
Many people, particularly young people, do not know the difference between an over-the-air broadcast and an internet stream. Buying a special receiver, putting up some indoor or outdoor antenna, then tuning around several different frequency bands to find something worth listening to, seems like a lot of work. These days, there are few shortwave broadcasts worth listening to, especially in the English language.
The BBC greatly reduced HF distribution of The World Service starting in 2005, favoring more internet-based distribution. Radio Canada International completely went off the air in 2012, scrapping its extensive transmitter site in Sackville NB in 2014. Radio Australia signed off in 2017. Deutsche Welle mostly left the HF band in 2011 while reducing its FM in 2016. The Voice of Russia ended HF broadcasts in 2014.
The only state-owned shortwave broadcaster that has expanded is Radio China International.
VOA Greenville B has some very old transmitters. The newest units date from the late 1980s or early 1990s. The oldest are the two original Continental 420As, dating from 1960, and are original to the building. When I visited there in 2017, two transmitters were on the air, the BBC and the AEG broadcasting at half power to Cuba and Africa respectively. The rest were shut down. The Continentals were difficult to change frequencies on because of the Doherty modulation. The GEs were long in the tooth, but at least serviceable due to the stock of spare parts from site A. I think the overseas sites in the Philippines and Sao Tome are similar.
Many have pointed out, and rightly so, the Internet censorship issue. Terrestrial radio broadcasting is often the best or only way to circumvent the suppression of information. Kim Elliot pointed this out in his Radio World article “Why we need Shortwave 2.0” All of those points are valid.
What can be done? Implementing DRM30 as a worldwide HF broadcasting standard would be a step in the right direction. DRM30 can send ancillary data, including Radiogram type news bulletins. DRM30 is much more energy efficient than DSB AM because there is no carrier, which wastes half or more of the transmitted power on a carrier that contains no information. Instead of a giant transmitter site, with curtain arrays, a more distributed transmission system with several frequencies on the air at the same time uses lower-powered transmitters, simpler antenna systems such as Rotating Log Period Arrays (RLPA), or non-directional vertical towers. This would require some changes to the FCC rules, but now is the time for that.
TV’s ATSC 1 has something called a “Transport Stream ID,” (TSID) which is a unique number assigned to each broadcaster. Wide-band SDRs are capable of scanning across many HF bands. Implementing something similar for DRM30 HF broadcasts would not be that difficult. Shortwave Listeners just program the HF TSID to lock onto the digital broadcast of their choice, if it is available. This would make HF Broadcasting available to most non-technical people looking for information. Most of this can be done with existing technology. However, DRM still (almost 2 decades later) lacks receivers. There is a development on that front as well: RF2Digital support module. The point is that there are many good ways to improve the technology, keep HF broadcasting relevant, and bypass attempts at internet censorship.
What will be done?
