In 1942, Robert Bauer gives one of the first German-language wartime broadcasts for Voice of America.
Pearl Harbor. While the first broad- casts were transmitted from stations in New York and San Francisco, the US Foreign Information Service (USFIS), which controlled VOA, quickly decided that these coastal transmitting locations were vulner- able to enemy attack from submarines or airplanes, so a plan was formed to look for a location further inland. West Chester, Ohio, was chosen for several reasons: enemy planes would have to fly over a lot of land and through a lot of firepower to reach the new facility; West Chester is a flat area, sitting high above sea level, and so it facili- tated stronger broadcasting signals; and WLW-AM, a radio station with some of the most powerful transmit- ters in the United States, was in the same area. In fact, the new VOA Bethany Relay Station was built by engineers who worked for Powell Crosley, the owner of WLW-AM. When Crosley was approached by
T H E E L K S M A G A Z I N E
the USFIS to build the station, he and his engineers gladly accepted the challenge. This was an era when radios still had vacuum tubes and only featured an AM band of stations, so Crosley’s engineers had to design new radio tubes that could carry higher frequencies, figure out a method to keep them cool, and determine how many tubes it would take to broadcast into Germany and beyond. They were attempting something that had never been done before, and they had to do it as quickly as possible to help the war effort. The Crosley engineers designed and built a shortwave broadcast facility that was capable of operating six 200,000-watt transmitters that at full power and modulated at 100 percent radiated 1.8 million watts of power. They accomplished it all in just under eighteen months.
The station’s twenty-four rhombic antennas were to direct radio signals primarily at Europe, but also toward
north, central, and South Africa and eastern and western Central and South America. The engineers were able to develop antennas that could send VOA’s radio signal up through the atmosphere to the ionosphere, where it would be reflected down to pinpointed target areas thousands of miles away from the United States, but the antennas had to be frequently adjusted to maintain a given fre- quency to compensate for changes in the transmission condition of the ionosphere. Switching the tuning of the antennas was not an easy feat. In fact, during the early years at Bethany Station, a work crew was dedicated exclusively to antenna switching. Jim Hawkins, writing about
Bethany Station, explained the process: “A technician had to go outside to switch the matrix. It took operating crews of three people as long as seven to eight minutes to change the frequencies.” The antennas had
43
PHOTO: VOICE OF AMERICA
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