VOICE OF AMERICA: The Long Reach of Shortwave
In 1943, the government built some of the largest radio stations ever made, to broadcast federally-produced programs to targeted nations around the world—programming that became known as Voice of America. This broadcasting continued after the war, and expanded through the Cold War, growing to a network of five powerful shortwave transmitting plants in the USA, boosted by more than a dozen transmission and relay stations overseas.
Today Voice of America is still broadcast around the world by shortwave radio from Greenville, North Carolina, along with other federally-produced programs aimed, especially, at Cuba. The facility called VOA Site B, also known as the Edward R. Murrow Transmitting Station, has been operating since 1963. It is the last of the old Voice of America radio transmission plants in the USA. The others were, essentially, abandoned in place, left as monuments to the power of radio.
2019 CLUI Research Project