Control room at the Edward R. Murrow Transmitting Station near Greenville, NC.
Many thanks to SWLing Post contributor, Dave Porter, who shares the following news item from Glenn Hauser’s World of Radio:
Radio Marti has cancelled all programming via Greenville between 0400 and 1000 UTC effective from 2 May. During this period the only transmission left from Greenville is 0600-0630 VOA French on 9885. This may be the beginning of the end for Greenville. (Glenn Hauser WOR)
Thanks for sharing this, Dave. Sad news, indeed. The Greenville site has stared shutdowns in the face a number of times in the past and survived. This year, in particular, could be a challenge with Covid-19 affecting broadcasting budgets across the globe and with the current US administration not showing much love for the VOA.
We’ll follow this closely and post updates when available.
If you’d like to check out photo tours of the Greenville site, click here to read a 2012 article I originally published in The Monitoring Times magazine, and click here for a photo tour published last year.
The Office of Cuba Broadcasting has been doing some pretty goofy things with technology, sometimes successful, other times questionable. They’ve added Sirius/XM to their mix along with some sort of digital net hybrid at 65W on Eutelsat. (One must ask if they’re distributing hacked Sirius receivers in Cuba?)
They also apparently leased a channel on DirecTV (Miami spotbeam or DirecTV LATAM). At the same time they dropped Hispasat, cut back shortwave and still depend on heavily jammed AM 1180 in the Florida Keys.
I suspect a lot of Cubans still have those old Eastern Bloc radios around or can get a Chinese portable radio with HF.. Diehard activists would prefer late night listening, something that the OCB has now killed off. Shortwave is a completely simple , low-cost, low-risk solution from the listeners’ perspective.For Cubans no government-controlled Internet is needed as well.
Looks to me like that may be a way of cutting back employee hours during that time, cutting back/eliminating an overnight shift, since that would be midnight to 6 AM local time in Greenville.
I am truly sorry this happened. This is my favorite station that I could receive with my Shortwave radio only on its built in whip telescopic antenna since I don’t have a external antenna. I listen from Clermont, Florida, USA. Hope in the future they will put back programming that was canceled. ?
Mine to I can catch their signals here in Dusseldorf, Germany with an S4. I love cuban music and people,because I speak the spanish language.
Losing viable VOA programming on shortwave would be concerning to me. It is a known USA presence in many parts of the world; particularly for various developing nations.
Losing Radio Marti programming altogether is…. well, no big loss IMO. It is an absolute waste of effort, money, and resources in the modern era. When its various broadcast mediums are not outright being blocked on the island due to Cuban government interference, I seriously doubt it has any truly discernable audience there anymore; assuming it ever did. Take the television broadcast for example:
“Viewership on the island is estimated to be a third of one percent…..”
Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radio_y_Televisi%C3%B3n_Mart%C3%AD#Controversy_and_legality
Likewise, the above linked Wikipedia section on “Controversy and legality” provides multiple reasons why Radio Marti serves little to no legitimate purpose these days; unless taking kickbacks, violating domestic propaganda laws for government-owned broadcasts, and spreading political conspiracy theories count as desirable activities.
Naturally I would hope the already trained and experienced staff could be reassigned to other more viable operations, such as maybe Spanish-language VOA news programming or similar.
Something doesn’t make sense. https://www.radioworld.com/news-and-business/radio-marti-begins-shortwave-drm-transmissions are current transmissions
“Radio Marti has cancelled all programming via Greenville between 0400 and 1000 UTC effective from 2 May. During this period the only transmission left from Greenville is 0600-0630 VOA French on 9885. This may be the beginning of the end for Greenville. ”
I went to the Radio Marti website but couldn’t find any program guide or how to listen. https://www.radiotelevisionmarti.com/
Broadcast schedule:
https://www.radiotelevisionmarti.com/radio/schedule/4
Frequency schedule:
https://docs.radiotelevisionmarti.com/es-CU/2018/10/31/be4580ef-905f-4d34-ba60-5e9f48c82891.pdf
6030 might as well be a nearby local station at my QTH in FL. Often like S9+40 or more.
128kbps MP3 stream:
https://n09.radiojar.com/3ds9yqpgq3quv.mp3
I found a frequency schedule under Radio. It’s a PDF data. I saw that they still transmit on 6030 kHz from 00.00-04.00 UTC and I could catch it here in Germany when I’m going to start with my night DX’ing during local down.