Many thanks to SWLing Post contributor Dan Greenall, who shares the following guest post:
Hearing Alaska and Hawaii on shortwave
by Dan Greenall
Alaska
Since 1983, the New Life Station, KNLS, has been broadcasting from Anchor Point, Alaska. Beamed primarily to Asia, their signals were not received as well in parts of North America as they might have been otherwise. From my location in southern Ontario, Canada, I was able to make this recording of their interval signal (“Chariots of Fire”) on 7355 kHz in 1987 around 1300 UTC with announcements in a Chinese dialect.
The station is still on the air in 2025. I made this recording on October 23 around 1200 hours UTC, in which you can hear their current interval signal prior to sign on in English. Reception was made on 7355 kHz using a remote KiwiSDR in northern Japan.
You can check out other opportunities to log KNLS on websites such as Shortwave.Live
Hawaii
Back in the 1950s, the Voice of America had a transmitter in Honolulu, but that was long before my introduction to shortwave. In 1993, World Harvest Radio station KWHR began broadcasting from Naalehu, near the southern tip of the big island of Hawaii. This one was widely heard by DXer’s and I still have a recording made of their announcement from November 10, 1996 on 9930 kHz.
Unfortunately, the station went officially off the air in 2009, so now the only way to hear Hawaii on shortwave is the NIST station WWVH at Kekaha on the island of Kauai. You can hear them on 2.5, 5, 10, or 15 MHz whenever propagation conditions are favorable to your listening post, assuming other stations like WWV and BPM are not overpowering them.
Here is a link to a few WWVH recordings. The first, from 1971, was made in Ancaster, Ontario, Canada, when they were still called the National Bureau of Standards and were using the term “Greenwich Mean Time.”
The second one was made on December 1, 2024 using a remote SDR near Honolulu.
Finally, if you can copy CW (morse code) and listen carefully, there is a brief 8 second clip of WWVH sending their call letters twice. It is from pre-1971 when the station was located on the island of Maui. Aloha!
Way back when, WWVH was located in Kihei, Maui. During our family visits there in the late 1980s/early 1990s, the old sign was still visible and a large delta loop was located adjacent the old transmitter building. The property was used by the NOAA then, and the old WW II era building right on the ocean was used by the NOAA staff (Craig Barnes, SK if I recall correctly) for ionosode transmissions. In later years, the site was taken over by whale researchers. The antenna and signs are all long gone. The only remaining structure is the historic WW II building.