Kari Lake previews her plans for Voice of America in the next Administration.

[ted chittenden]

I haven't had chance to listen yet, but Season 2 of WNYC's The Divided Dial is all about international and U.S. domestic shortwave:

S2 THE DIVIDED DIAL EPISODE 1: Fishing In The Night | On the Media | WNYC Studios

Season Two of On the Media’s Peabody-winning series The Divided Dial is the untold story of shortwave radio: the way-less-listened to but way-farther-reaching cousin of AM and FM radi...

www.wnycstudios.org

I heard the first part of this series this past Saturday. It dealt mainly with how governments used shortwave from the 1940s through the 1980s. The only real complaint I had was that it shortchanged how and why shortwave works. For example, the narrator does not say that the higher shortwave bands can be heard in the daytime while the lower shortwave bands can be heard at night. This is important to know if you're looking at why different shortwave stations used different frequencies at different times of the day.

Part two of the series will explore the relationship between shortwave during the 90s and today's far right (political) movement in the U.S. The final show will focus on Wall Street's attempts to commercialize the shortwave bands. Given some of the signal issues surrounding shortwave broadcasts, let alone David Eduardo's comments about poor ratings for shortwave listening altogether, I really don't see shortwave as a commercially viable medium unless there is no longer stations in other media in one's own listening area.

 

[ted chittenden]

VOA isn't the only station getting cut back - there are reports that the BBC World Service is about to have yet another round of hack'n'slash budgets due to the awful state of the UK government finances - a lot of its money comes from the international aid budget, which has been slashed:

Ministers demand BBC World Service plan for cuts as aid budget slashed

Exclusive: David Lammy asks BBC bosses to draw up tightened budget amid criticism move could harm UK’s global influence

www.theguardian.com

Note the differences in how the U.S. and the UK are going about this. In the U.S., the approach is a top-down approach with absolutely no input from VOA employees or listeners. The UK, on the other hand, is seeking input from BBC employees on how to best accomplish the cutting goals due to the budget shortfall. What the UK is doing is really what the U.S. should be doing in this area, in my view.

 

[Mediafrog+]

VOA isn't the only station getting cut back - there are reports that the BBC World Service is about to have yet another round of hack'n'slash budgets due to the awful state of the UK government finances - a lot of its money comes from the international aid budget, which has been slashed:

Wouldn’t surprise me if there are more cuts to what’s left of the BBCWS shortwave output in the next few months, even before we get to the B-25 season on October 26. I could see the South and Southeast Asia beams dropped.

I am also beginning to suspect that operations at the Ascension Island transmitter facility are being wound down as a few beams have been moved to other sites. Has to be expensive to run due to the remote location, and its overall use has been greatly reduced in recent years.

Any word on the BBC Radio 4 198 kHz transmitters in the UK? The budget squeeze might finally force a closure that has been talked about for at least 15 years.

 

[kevtronics]

Any word on the BBC Radio 4 198 kHz transmitters in the UK? The budget squeeze might finally force a closure that has been talked about for at least 15 years.

The current plan is to keep it going until at least December 2025, because the longwave signal still has at least a million listeners.

They just happen to be in the form of electricity meters which use the embedded time signal to automatically switch rates, rather than human beings...

Long wave radio fans mourn fading frequencies

Now disappearing, long wave radio broadcasts once gave a taste of far flung countries and cultures.

www.bbc.com

 

[davideduardo]

The only real complaint I had was that it shortchanged how and why shortwave works. For example, the narrator does not say that the higher shortwave bands can be heard in the daytime while the lower shortwave bands can be heard at night. This is important to know if you're looking at why different shortwave stations used different frequencies at different times of the day.

And then there are the so-called "Tropical Bands" in the 3 mHz and high 4 mHz ranges. They were known as "tropical" mostly because the majority of the stations were in underdeveloped third world countries in the tropical zone. They had pretty much the same day and night coverage in their primary zone which was just a few hundred km around the transmitter site.

 

[KeithE4]

And then there are the so-called "Tropical Bands" in the 3 mHz and high 4 mHz ranges. They were known as "tropical" mostly because the majority of the stations were in underdeveloped third world countries in the tropical zone. They had pretty much the same day and night coverage in their primary zone which was just a few hundred km around the transmitter site.

They also weren't authorized for broadcasting use north of the Tropic of Cancer, including the US and Canada (I think Mexico may have had a few at one time). Technically, they still aren't, although the FCC has ignored that fact for decades, authorizing religious stations on 60 and 90 meters.

 

[davideduardo]

They also weren't authorized for broadcasting use north of the Tropic of Cancer, including the US and Canada (I think Mexico may have had a few at one time). Technically, they still aren't, although the FCC has ignored that fact for decades, authorizing religious stations on 60 and 90 meters.

Of course, many countries did not follow the international telecom decisions, using frequency bands for other purposes than the "recommended".

Example: one of the reasons why the U.S. did not open the same digital radio options as in much of the rest of the world was that we were using part of the band for other government purposes. Of course, the main reason we did not get DAB is that there was no broadcaster interest and little listener enthusiasm.

Canada, with a mostly private use of radio, tried but it failed. Most people who analyzed that felt that "nobody" wanted to buy a new radio to hear the same thing and... important... most people outside of techies did not really distinguish a difference between "digital" and the quality they expected from FM. The same happened with digital radio mondiale, which attracted no interest except places like India where the government has absolute control.

If you look at all the rest of the Western Hemisphere you see that DRM and DAB did not achieve any level of interest. The most we have seen is Brazil expanding the FM band to what used to part of the lower VHF channel spectrum. Even that, requiring new radios, has not been a "rip roaring" success. Mexico, rather than expanding to a new band or wider FM band changed the adjacent channel separations to allow for about 80% of its AMs to move to FM.

Sidebar: one fact that is usually ignored in evaluating band usage in Latin America is the cost of consumer purchases of new radios, most of which is money that goes to China, Korea, Japan and other Asian nations.

Venezuela held back the commercial use of FM...which began in the U.S.A. in the late 1940's... until the 1980's, over 40 years later. The reason was to prevent a foreign exchange imbalance.

 

[boombox4]

There is a difference between languages a person "understands" and languages they prefer and like to use. I understand French and Italian, but I don't speak it well and would not enjoy watching TV shows in either language for long.

Have you been in Bolivia? Try going to El Alto, the working class suburb which is now bigger than La Paz itself. Signs are in Aymara, and that is the language most heard on the street. Even the designs of buildings and signs are based on the indigenous culture.

Quechua is spoken around Potosí, Sucre and Santa Cruz.

Together, those are the preferred languages of over 3 million people. And there are two dialects of Quechua spoken there. I was moderately good at Quechua when I lived in Quito, but the language of the Sucre area of Bolivia where I consulted a station was not understandable by me. It's much greater in difference than Portuguese and Brazilian Portuguese.

No, but you are not going to reach much of the population easily using a lingua franca instead of the one they speak at home.

The suburban city of over 100K where I live in has a school district where in the 2000's and 2010's 83 languages were spoken by the students. it doesn't mean they didn't learn English, or that their parents didn't learn enough English to carry out business or commerce. There are thousands of Ethiopians and Somalis in the metro, but no radio services in those languages. They learn enough English to carry out business and commerce.

English is the dominant commercial and social language here, which is why all three main TV stations, along with nearly every commercial FM station and AM station in the metro broadcast in English. Every country or region with numerous languages has a lingua franca, or commercial language. Because people have to eat. This metro of 4.5 million has a handful of radio stations that are non-English or are brokered with non-English programming. The rest is all English language, despite there being over 400K people in the region whose primary home language is not English.

Of course, the US is not Bolivia. I understand that much. Just as the US is not the Congo, South Africa, or Burkina Faso. But Bolivia's national TV stations broadcast primarily in Spanish, which is the point. Most broadcasting, if it's on a regional level at least, is in majority languages. And if you're reaching out to audiences on other continents, you don't have to use every single indigenous language in those regions. Not even AIR India broadcasts in every single language in India. India has 780 languages. AIR's national and regional services don't broadcast in 780 languages.

It's the same with China. China has over 300 languages, but CNR broadcasts in maybe 8 of them (Mandarin, Cantonese, Amoy, Hakka, Korean, Mongol, Uighur, Tibetan, and a few others on their regional networks).

We're talking about broadcasting, after all.

All that said, BigA might be right, we're overthinking it, because the reality is that VOA is still off the air and it may remain off the airwaves for a long time, if not permanently.

 

[ted chittenden]

And then there are the so-called "Tropical Bands" in the 3 mHz and high 4 mHz ranges. They were known as "tropical" mostly because the majority of the stations were in underdeveloped third world countries in the tropical zone. They had pretty much the same day and night coverage in their primary zone which was just a few hundred km around the transmitter site.

This was why, while I was able to receive signals in both the 60- and 75-meter bands at night using my Panasonic RF-2600 receiver (I thought it was the RF-2800 until I read a description of that receiver and its 3 shortwave bands; mine has 5 which matches the RF-2600 count), I never received any strong signals in either band and why there were a lot more commercial Spanish operations in those bands. Thanks for the lesson.

 

[davideduardo]

This was why, while I was able to receive signals in both the 60- and 75-meter bands at night using my Panasonic RF-2600 receiver (I thought it was the RF-2800 until I read a description of that receiver and its 3 shortwave bands; mine has 5 which matches the RF-2600 count), I never received any strong signals in either band and why there were a lot more commercial Spanish operations in those bands. Thanks for the lesson.

I owned, briefly, a station in the 3.3 mHz band. It had a sister AM at 595 kHz on Medium Wave. I bought the two, which were licensed a half-day drive outside of Quito, Ecuador, to move the 595 station to "the city" and change it to 590 kHz. Both were about 400 watts, using locally built transmitters that would have violated about a dozen OSHA and fire code regulations.

Both the AM and SW stations used longwire antennas. The AM was an inverted L, and the SW was a dipole. Both were strung between two pairs of Eucalyptus trunks about 25 or 30 meters high. The ground consisted of buried automobile radiators.

The SW station had a pretty good signal for about 200 km around the station. At night, it could be interfered with by another station in Bolivia. But my market and sales opportunities were in the Quito metro area, not in San Juan de Amaguaña. So I turned in the SW license to save the U$S 5 a month license fee and threw away the transmitter.

As more and more cities in Ecuador got AM stations... and later FMs... the need for SW was diminished. The main use all along was to send paid messages to rural areas that had no telephones, and many of the SW stations in the Andean zone did not sell much commercial advertising and made their money selling "radio telegrams" and paid greetings. Some were immensely profitable.

The AM, once I moved it to Quito, had great coverage in the whole province and parts of several others. We formatted Ecuadorian national music, and even had a show at 4 AM in Quechua. Each morning we'd put a desk on the sidewalk along with a lock-box and big pads of paper printed to register the time to be broadcast, the sender name and the message. People would line up to buy messages. On the "big" saint's days, like San Pedro and San Pablo, there would be long lines of people buying messages to family members with those names. The station was very profitable.

 

[Miss Tuned]

Wouldn’t surprise me if there are more cuts to what’s left of the BBCWS shortwave output in the next few months, even before we get to the B-25 season on October 26. I could see the South and Southeast Asia beams dropped.

I am also beginning to suspect that operations at the Ascension Island transmitter facility are being wound down as a few beams have been moved to other sites. Has to be expensive to run due to the remote location, and its overall use has been greatly reduced in recent years.

Any word on the BBC Radio 4 198 kHz transmitters in the UK? The budget squeeze might finally force a closure that has been talked about for at least 15 years.

I don't know much about the long wave transmitter situation - it's not something I've listened to (neither long wave nor Radio 4 itself) for many years.

One of the issues is that BBC World Service programming isn't what it was. It got a modest but respectable domestic UK audience on DAB over the past 15 years or so for its good and wide-ranging worldwide news coverage and varied magazine programming (I particularly liked its world business coverage), but when COVID hit, it became nothing but COVID news, then nothing but Ukraine war news, then nothing but Middle East war news. It's a very one-note, monotonous radio station these days, and audiences are dropping worldwide because as sad as the situation is, listeners don't want all war, all the time.

 

[Mediafrog+]

One of the issues is that BBC World Service programming isn't what it was. It got a modest but respectable domestic UK audience on DAB over the past 15 years or so for its good and wide-ranging worldwide news coverage and varied magazine programming (I particularly liked its world business coverage), but when COVID hit, it became nothing but COVID news, then nothing but Ukraine war news, then nothing but Middle East war news. It's a very one-note, monotonous radio station these days, and audiences are dropping worldwide because as sad as the situation is, listeners don't want all war, all the time.

The BBCWS is a daily listen for me, and I don’t sense the same thing. They can go heavy on one subject when there are major events, but there is a good mix of stories. If I have a complaint, it is that sometimes fluff pieces run too high in their 30 minute or one hour news programs, such as The Newsroom, Newsday, or Newshour.

Being outside the UK I hadn’t considered the BBCWS DAB coverage. The World Service did run nationwide on 647/648 kHz for many decades, and Radio 4 still uses it as overnight fill between 1am and 5:30am in Britain.

 

[boombox4]

I don't know much about the long wave transmitter situation - it's not something I've listened to (neither long wave nor Radio 4 itself) for many years.

One of the issues is that BBC World Service programming isn't what it was. It got a modest but respectable domestic UK audience on DAB over the past 15 years or so for its good and wide-ranging worldwide news coverage and varied magazine programming (I particularly liked its world business coverage), but when COVID hit, it became nothing but COVID news, then nothing but Ukraine war news, then nothing but Middle East war news. It's a very one-note, monotonous radio station these days, and audiences are dropping worldwide because as sad as the situation is, listeners don't want all war, all the time.

I hear the BBC W.S., primarily on Oregon Public Radio at night, and from what I've heard, it's anything but non-stop Ukraine war news. They have plenty of variety. From features on women's health in rural Guatemala to the problem of sand mining in the Mekong River, which is destroying fishing habitats. There's a lot more on the World Service than Ukraine or Gaza. And one can't fault them for reporting on two of the most damaging wars in current times. One could lead to WW3, the other one conceivably could lead to a greater Mideast war.

Does the World Service have much of an audience in the UK?

 

[Y2kTheNewOldies]

Trump administration will provide programming from conservative network OAN for Voice of America

The Trump administration has sought to dismantle government-run news outlets like the Voice of America, in part because it believes the services that provide news to other countries operate with a liberal bias.

apnews.com

This is a not so shocking one in this administration to have the VOA affiliate with OAN. But what happens when it's a Democratic administration. In their case they need congress to remove the OAN affiliation deal with VOA. Yes I want to see congress and courts respond to this one.

 

[Y2kTheNewOldies]

USAGM fires more than 500 Voice of America contractors

May 15, 2025

thedesk.net

This time "Independent Contractors" are being hit with cuts at the VOA.

The U.S. Agency for Global Media (USAGM) has laid off hundreds of independent contractors who worked in various editorial, production and administrative roles as the Voice of America (VOA), The Desk has learned.

The mass layoffs were issued nearly two weeks after an appeals court partially reversed a lower court ruling that reinstated the positions of more than 1,000 workers and hundreds of contractors as part of a legal challenge brought against the USAGM and two of its advisors, Kari Lake and Victor Morales.

Following the reversal, officials at the USAGM made the decision on Thursday to notify hundreds of personal service contractors (PSCs) that their work was no longer needed.

The agency has not made a public statement about the matter, and an official count concerning the number of PSCs affected has not been released. A source familiar with the layoffs said more than 500 PSCs received termination notices, with positions that ranged from on-air broadcasters like field reporters and news anchors, to behind-the-scenes workers like news photographers, technicians, editors and writers.

 

[Mediafrog+]

This time "Independent Contractors" are being hit with cuts at the VOA.

It appears those cuts also include engineering and operations staff at the Greenville transmitter site, and perhaps the overseas transmission facilities as well. Looking more likely that any return of revamped USAGM services will be without shortwave distribution.

 

[boombox4]

It appears those cuts also include engineering and operations staff at the Greenville transmitter site, and perhaps the overseas transmission facilities as well. Looking more likely that any return of revamped USAGM services will be without shortwave distribution.

If that's the case, VOA will go the same way Radio Canada International went when it switched to online only -- lost in the vast internet static..... just one of millions of internet audio entertainment and information options. The same place many local newspapers go, where their importance is diminished because online there is just so much competition for one's screen time.

 

[cc333]

More and more I'm realizing that going Internet-only nowadays is almost akin to being lost in the middle of the ocean. There's little hope of being found because the ocean is so vast.

The internet has become so full of noise that it's increasingly impossible for anyone to sort out. This, I think, has in part given rise to rampant misinformation and hate speech, because for better or worse, it has been able to cut through that noise (indeed, i think it's a major contributor to that noise, by intentionally being so loud that it drowns out almost everything else).

VOA, for it's imperfections, had a chance of being something unique if the right people got in to reform it fairly and justly (which ultimately would've had a similar end result most likely, but probably without the massive loss in confidence due to extreme levels of chaos and confusion).

Alas, there's nothing fair or just about what's happening, and it's going to likely become yet another online noisemaker.

That said, I don't trust Starlink based on how easily censored it is (for example, how Musk temporarily blacked it out in Ukraine a couple of years ago, knowing full well that their military relied on it for all their critical communication needs, and that blocking those communications could've had potentially life-threatening consequences for them), and most terrestrial forms of Internet infrastructure are too limited to provide access everywhere it's needed and too vulnerable during disasters, so older, simpler technologies such as shortwave still have a place, I feel, as an emergency backup for everything else.

Nobody needs to maintain a daily schedule or anything like that, just keep the stations on standby in case they are needed. Yes, they are costly to maintain, but isn't it worth it if it provides the extra peace of mind? They can be off air most of the time, and that should save on the power bills somewhat, shouldn't it?

Maybe those SW backups will never will be needed, and maybe some new Internet-based technology will come along that has all of the advantages of SW and other current technologies without the disadvantages, or something else I can't think of at the moment. But how can we know all that?

c

 

[TheBigA]

More and more I'm realizing that going Internet-only nowadays is almost akin to being lost in the middle of the ocean. There's little hope of being found because the ocean is so vast.

The question is: Do you want to be in the ocean where everyone travels? Or be on a platform that no one uses?

That soon will be the question AM owners will have to ask.

 

[ted chittenden]

The question is: Do you want to be in the ocean where everyone travels? Or be on a platform that no one uses?

That soon will be the question AM owners will have to ask.

Maybe. But the Internet will most likely 1) increase the move away from broadcasting towards narrowcasting; and 2) decrease the amount of money by at least half, if not more, most outfits will be able to make using the platform.