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Tuning controls on one of the 500 kW Continental Electronics transmitters at the Edward R. Murrow Transmitting Site. Click to enlarge.
Many thanks to SWLing Post contributor Dan Greenall, who shares the following recordings and writes:
Hi Thomas
As a result of recent actions by the Trump administration, a number of shortwave stations have recently gone silent. Whether or not this will change is anybody’s guess, but the situation is currently looking grim.
I am providing links to some recordings that I have recently uploaded to the Internet Archive of a few of the affected stations. These recordings were made through the use of remote SDR’s in order to provide optimal quality. I used to particularly enjoy the programs of Radyo Pilipinas and Radio Thailand world service. Have a listen here to potential radio history.
Edward R. Murrow Transmitting Station in North Carolina
A Note to Our Readers: On the USAGM Shutdowns and Keeping the Conversation Respectful
At the SWLing Post, we’ve always strived to keep this space a safe haven — free from the divisive politics that so often cloud the media landscape. Our focus remains on sharing the joy of radio, supporting international broadcasting, and fostering a welcoming community for all.
That said, some stories, like the abrupt shutdown of U.S. Agency for Global Media (USAGM) broadcasters, inevitably carry political weight. While we may wish otherwise, it’s impossible to separate the politics from the reality of this significant event. As one of the few remaining government-supported shortwave broadcasters, the sudden silencing of Voice of America, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, Radio Free Asia, Radio Martí, and others deserves our attention.
I’ve personally confirmed with multiple trusted sources that the transmitters at the Edward R. Murrow Transmitting Station were shut down on Sunday, March 16, 2025, marking a stark and sudden end to these broadcasts from US soil.
We recognize this news may stir strong opinions — and that’s okay. However, we kindly ask that all comments remain respectful and constructive. Share your thoughts, but please avoid name-calling, trolling, or inflammatory language. Our moderators will step in without hesitation to ensure the discussion remains civil.
In the past, we’ve occasionally disabled comments on similarly charged topics. This time, though, given the importance of the event, we’ll keep the conversation open — provided it stays respectful.
Below, you’ll find a collection of reports shared by our readerships from various sources that offer different perspectives on this unprecedented moment in international broadcasting.
Thank you for being part of this community and for helping us keep the SWLing Post a place for thoughtful dialogue and mutual respect.
For many in the world of radio, the move by the Trump administration this weekend to shut down U.S. international broadcasting was shocking. Jeff White used the term “rather brash.”
White is general manager of WRMI Radio Miami International as well as secretary-treasurer of the National Association of Shortwave Broadcasters (NASB) and a 40 years-plus veteran of shortwave radio.
He has a lot of experience in this area, so Radio World reached out to him on Monday for his thoughts about the effective silencing of the Voice of America, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL), Radio Martí, Radio Free Asia and other broadcasting entities operated by the U.S. Agency for Global Media. That all is based on an executive order to reduce “elements of the federal bureaucracy that the president has determined are unnecessary.”
Radio World: When you heard the news of VOA and its sister services shutting down transmissions worldwide, what was your reaction to it?
Jeff White: Holy cow!
In a way some of this had been expected, but when it happened all of a sudden like that on Saturday morning it was pretty shocking.
I started getting emails early Saturday morning from people at the VOA who said, “Hey, everybody’s been laid off and everything’s shut down.” And they said that they had talked to some of the people at the overseas relay stations, and the managers had gotten word about the shutdown, but the employees had not.
Now those employees are hired by the local embassies, and so they kept these relay stations operating, and if they didn’t get programming coming from Washington, they filled with music. [Continue reading interview…]
by Ted Lipien, Opinion Contributor – 03/17/25 10:00 AM ET
President Trump’s decision to shut down the Voice of America, Radio Free Europe-Radio Liberty, Radio Free Asia, Radio y Televisión Martí in Cuba and other U.S. government-funded media entities overseen by the U.S. Agency for Global Media, was sudden, harmful and deeply unfair. It places journalists in foreign language services who have devoted years of their lives to their jobs and have done nothing wrong in an impossible position.
To be sure, these agencies have suffered from terrible management decisions in recent years. But to break things by stopping all programming does not make these agencies better. Rather, it weakens their usefulness to U.S. national security.
Members of Congress from both parties must pressure the White House to allow these broadcasters to resume their work as soon as possible, even while supporting the administration’s efforts to restructure, downsize and reform the agency’s bloated and dysfunctional bureaucracy. [Continue reading…]
For the better part of a century, Voice of America has broadcast into countries whose governments censored free information. The Trump administration has dismantled VOA’s parent organization, put all of its employees on leave and ended funding for independent media agencies. Nick Schifrin discussed the move with Mike Abramovitz, the president of Voice of America since last year.
Global Times hails US president’s order to strip back government funding to news organisations he deems ‘radical’
Chinese state media has reacted gleefully to the Trump administration’s decision to slash government funding to media organisations such as Radio Free Asia (RFA) and Voice of America (VOA).
The Global Times, a daily English-language tabloid and Chinese Communist party mouthpiece, celebrated the cuts to the US Agency for Global Media (USAGM), which oversees broadcasters such as VOA and RFA.
“When it comes to China-related reporting, VOA has an appalling track record,” the Global Times said in an editorial on Monday.
“From smearing human rights in China’s Xinjiang … to hyping up disputes in the South China Sea … from fabricating the so-called China virus narrative to promoting the claim of China’s ‘overcapacity’, almost every malicious falsehood about China has VOA’s fingerprints all over it,” the editorial said.
The Beijing Daily, a newspaper run by the Chinese Communist party (CCP), also published a column commending the cuts. [Continue reading…]
President Donald J. Trump’s executive order on Friday will ensure that taxpayers are no longer on the hook for radical propaganda.
Dan Robinson, a 34-year veteran of Voice of America and its former White House correspondent, wrote last year: “I have monitored the agency’s bureaucracy along with many of its reporters and concluded that it has essentially become a hubris-filled rogue operation often reflecting a leftist bias aligned with partisan national media. It has sought to avoid accountability for violations of journalistic standards and mismanagement.”
Voice of America’s management told staff not to call Hamas and its members terrorists, “except when quoting statements.”
Daily Caller: “Multiple Voice Of America Reporters Have Posted Anti-Trump Content On Social Media”
“Multiple Voice of America (VOA) reporters have repeatedly posted anti-Trump comments on their professional Twitter accounts, despite a social media policy requiring employee impartiality on social media platforms.”
Rep. Scott Perry wrote in a 2022 letter that Voice of America has “grown exceedingly partisan over the past several years.”
A 2016 report from Office of Personnel Management cited by Rep. Perry revealed that Voice of America Persian employees said that outlet tolerated “coercion for partisan political purposes.”
The Washington Free Beacon: “VOA Misallocates Funds and Suppresses Negative Stories About Iran. This Lawmaker Wants To Investigate.”
Voice of America: “What Is ‘White Privilege’ and Whom Does It Help?”
“Today, the phrase is used passionately and widely in the context of racial profiling — police treatment of people as criminal suspects based on their race.”
A 2022 lawsuit claimed Voice of America has “been infiltrated by anti-American, pro-Islamic state interests, and that the message of VOA had been compromised in a manner that was biased toward the Islamic state factions in Iran.”
In October 2020, Voice of America wrote that the “allegations that Russia played a role in perpetuating the scandal to benefit Trump could undermine the emails’ credibility” downplaying the validity of the Hunter Biden laptop story.
In July 2020, Voice of America faced criticism for “sharing a story and video appearing too favorable to presumptive Democratic nominee Joe Biden.”
In September 2019, the Daily Caller reported that Voice of America employed a Russian anti-U.S. propagandist.
In May 2019, Voice of America fired reporters for their roles in canceling a broadcast midstream after pressure from the Chinese government.
In March 2019, Voice of America ran a segment about transgender migrants seeking asylum in the United States.
The Czech Republic is pushing for EU support to keep Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL) running after the Trump administration cut funding for the global broadcaster.
Foreign Minister Jan Lipavsky said RFE/RL, based in Prague, “is one of the few credible sources in dictatorships like Iran, Belarus, and Afghanistan”.
In Eastern Europe, the US government-funded outlet reached millions of listeners during the Cold War, helping to spread democratic values while communist authorities tightly controlled local media. [Continue reading…]
The US government is halting financial support for Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL), whose headquarters is based in Prague. The organization has 21 bureaus and broadcasts in 27 languages to 23 countries, promoting independent journalism. Czech Foreign Minister Jan Lipavský is discussing whether the EU can take over and continue broadcasting at the Council of Europe meeting in Brussels on Monday. [Continue reading…]
‘A silencing of VOA will be celebrated by communists, autocrats and ayatollahs whose lies we shed light on,’ VOA Pentagon correspondent Carla Babb tweeted over the weekend
In what is being described as “Bloody Saturday,” over 1,300 employees at Voice of America were placed on indefinite suspension this weekend after President Donald Trump issued a Friday night edict ordering the U.S. Agency for Global Media, the network’s parent agency, to eliminate its workforce and activities not required by law.
With the state-funded broadcaster — which has been seen as a vital part of America’s soft diplomacy — going largely silent after more than 80 years on the air, VOA journalists and executives are sounding off over what they see as a “betrayal of the ideals” that drove the organization, adding that it will only be “celebrated” by America’s adversaries.
Two days after Trump bristled at a VOA reporter for asking the Irish prime minister about the president’s proposal to displace all Palestinians from Gaza, the White House released an executive order on Friday night that outright gutted the USAGM, which also oversees Radio Free Europe and Radio Free Asia, as well as other non-profit international media outlets. [Continue reading…]
Last week, President Donald Trump signed an executive order that effectively eliminates the U.S. Agency for Global Media, which oversees outlets such as Voice of America, Radio Free Europe, Radio Free Asia, Radio Liberty and the Office of Cuba Broadcasting.
It’s a move seen by many as Trump’s effort to silence prodemocracy media around the world.
“Hundreds of millions of people are affected,” said Steve Herman, chief national correspondent at Voice of America, who agreed to speak with WTOP in a personal capacity, not as a representative of VOA.
He is currently on administrative leave, along with about 1,300 other VOA employees.
He said the firings could have a chilling effect on prodemocracy media, saying people who live in censored countries where the government controls the news will be at a disadvantage. [Continue reading…]
If you’re interested in how shortwave services are being affected by the budget, you can do a simple search for the word “shortwave.”
One change of note to the Greenville, NC, transmitting station (page 37):
In FY 2023, USAGM is proposing a realignment of the ERM transmitting station in Greenville, North Carolina under the USAGM’s Office of Technology, Services, and Innovation (TSI), which currently is responsible for other of USAGM’s transmitting stations. The realignment of shortwave resources will effectively
enhance the overall USAGM broadcast mission capabilities by aligning all content
distribution platforms as managed by TSI. This action will decrease OCB’s general
operating expenses by approximately $2.1 million annually
This is a 197 page document and traditional over-the-air services are mentioned frequently.
If you notice relevant points to shortwave services feel free to point them out in the comments and note the page number! Thank you!
Washington maintains a waterfront radio tower in the Florida Keys to broadcast programming aimed at encouraging democracy and press freedom in Cuba, and on Sunday that area in Marathon was the landing spot for a group of migrants fleeing the island. A boat of 25 migrants arrived on the shores of Sister Creek, home to a Radio Martí transmission station on Sunday morning, said Adam Hoffner, assistant chief patrol agent for U.S. Customs and Border Protection’s Miami operations. The landing was one of two known migrant arrivals in the Keys on Sunday, with another 28 Cubans arriving on private property in Key Largo. While the government-run broadcasting agency targets Cuban listeners with Spanish programming, Radio Martí reports typically discourage the kind of voyage that reportedly landed some Cubans on or near Martí property, said Tomás Regalado, the former Miami mayor who also recently ran the agency that oversees Radio and TV Martí. “Historically, the migrant situation was something that was treated as news,” Regalado said. “But with the caveat that it’s a very dangerous trip and not recommended.” [Read more here…]
A nonprofit organization based in the U.S. is supplying Ukrainian forces with advanced electronic warfare gear assembled from simple off-the-shelf components. The secret is a new technology known as Software Defined Radio (SDR) which can locate Russian radio emitters, from command centers to drone operators. Previously this sort of capability required expensive, high-grade military equipment.
Serge Sklyarenko says his organization, American Ukrainian Aid Foundation, based in New York, is supplying Ukrainian intelligence with a number of the versatile SDR radio kits.
“The beauty of them is they are software defined, meaning they can be reprogrammed in the field to suit a multitude of use cases,” Sklyarenko told me.
In a traditional radio set, the signal from an antenna is processed by dedicated hardware – amplifiers, filters, modulator/demodulators and other components. This means that each radio set is dedicated to one particular type of radio signal, whether it is a 5G cellphone, AM radio, digital television or WiFi. In Software Defined Radio, the only dedicated hardware is the antenna. All the signal processing is carried out digitally with a computer. Simply by changing the programming, an SDR can extract the signal for cellphone, radio, Bluetooth, or any other defined waveform. One device can do everything. [Continue reading…]
On January 10, 1991, the U.S. Army Intelligence School Devens (USAISD) introduced the Basic Morse Mission Trainer to the 98H Morse intercept operator and 98D emitter identifier/locator advanced individual training courses. This system revolutionized the training of Morse code copying skills for both students and instructors, reducing course attrition, and turning out better trained operators faster. Continue reading →
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.
Radio Waves: Stories Making Waves in the World of Radio
Because I keep my ear to the waves, as well as receive many tips from others who do the same, I find myself privy to radio-related stories that might interest SWLing Post readers. To that end: Welcome to the SWLing Post’sRadio Waves, a collection of links to interesting stories making waves in the world of radio. Enjoy!
Many thanks to SWLing Post contributors Alan Hughes, Michael Bird, Zack Schindler, and Dennis Dura for the following tips:
Radio Marti began Digital Radio Mondiale (DRM) shortwave transmissions on Feb. 4. Part of the U.S. Agency for Global Media (USAGM), Radio Marti broadcasts news and other programs to Cuba. The DRM shortwave transmissions are from USAGM’s Greenville, North Carolina, site.
USAGM has transmitted in DRM before. There were some transmissions from Briech, Morocco, in the early 2000s. Greenville tested DRM in 2009 in partnership with what was then known as HCJB Global Technology. So why are they back now after an absence of over a decade?
“We want to experiment a bit with different modes and services available on DRM. We also want to help push the development of low-cost receivers and the best way to do that is to put some transmissions on the air, explains Gerhard Straub, director of USAGM’s Broadcast Technologies Division.[…]
Amateur radio enthusiasts are pushing for the former site of Radio Australia in Shepparton North to be upgraded and retained as a national museum of radio broadcast history.
Members of the Shepparton and District Amateur Radio Club and The Vintage Radio Club of North East Victoria are due to present a 25-page proposal to an anonymous consortium of buyers said to be interested in acquiring a 258ha block of land along Verney Rd.
The block includes two buildings and several large broadcast towers on the former site of Radio Australia. The site is currently owned by BAI Communications.
The Shepparton club’s assistant secretary, Geoff Angus, said the proposal would be presented to Greater Shepparton City Council for forwarding to the consortium.[…]
APRS usage seen on the History Channel “Secret of Skinwalker Ranch”
Zack Schindler writes:
I have been watching a show about paranormal activity on the History Channel called The Secret of Skinwalker Ranch. In the episode this week they hired a professor to do a balloon launch with some RF sensors. In this episode they also showed the APRS.FI webpage and I was able to read his callsign from an APRS tracker, KM4MRH.
The professor used an APRS tracking device. On the right side of the page link below you can click on Other SSID’s to see other balloon launches he has done. Normally when there is a balloon launch you can see the data from it going up and down. This page shows the Skinwalker balloon launch data transposed over a map. https://aprs.fi/#!call=a%2FKM4MRH-3&timerange=3600&tail=3600
Sadly they are using these for measuring RF fields rather than these.
Terrestrial music stations have a major cultural opportunity right now, but employees say a muddied strategy is standing in the way
Radio personality Kevin Ryder was “baffled” by KROQ’s “cold, heartless attitude” when he and his morning-show team were fired at the end of March. The station has long been an alternative/rock staple in Los Angeles, the second-largest market in the country, and Ryder had been on the air for more than 30 years.
“The new people in charge now weren’t here for the building of the world-famous KROQ,” Ryder, one-half of the popular Kevin & Bean Show, said on air when the station let him go, live one final time. “I don’t think it means anything to them. It’s a numbers business, and there’s no family aspect to it anymore. It’s only numbers, but this place was built without numbers. It was musicians, artists, and the special relationship between music, the station, and our fans.”
AM/FM radio provides localized, round-the-clock information and entertainment via friendly neighborhood voices — so in theory, it’s the perfect platform in a global crisis that forces hundreds of millions of people to stay home. But Ryder is one of many in the radio community — including on-air hosts, music directors, program directors — who have been shocked by sudden job losses in recent weeks as COVID-19 has spread across the U.S., and news out of the industry has been one bad thing after another. Why is terrestrial radio missing the opportunity here — and how should it be fighting to get back on top?[…]
Many thanks to Edward R. Murrow Transmitting Station Chief Engineer, Macon Dail, who shareds the following announcement regarding their Radio Marti broadcasts:
We just powered up our 50 kW transmitter using DRM.
We are on a frequency of 7345 kHz and will be on daily from 1700-0200 UTC. We would love hearing from anyone that is able to copy and decode our transmissions.
The broadcast contain two audio programs.
Post Readers: If you successfully receive and decode a Radio Marti DRM broadcast, please send your detailed listener report to: gstraub@usagm.gov This is certainly a unique opportunity to log a North American DRM broadcast!
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