Station. I knew many of my buddies were still listening to and relying on the broadcasts.” Another volunteer at the station adds: “During that era there was much disinformation from the likes of Japan’s ‘Tokyo Rose,’ but VOA gave the troops the truth even when the truth wasn’t so great.” In an interview given to an Ohio newspaper, Clyde Haehnle, one of the original engineers at Bethany Station, recalled that during the Invasion of Normandy and the Battle of the Bulge “a lot of us worked straight through and took short naps. [We worked] three to five days at a stretch in order to keep broadcasts transmitting.”
American Ingenuity
u A Voice of America correspondent arrives in Korea in the early 1950s, continuing the station’s reporting on major world events after World War II.
Ronald Reagan gives his weekly radio
address at the Voice of America studio in Washington, DC, in November 1985.
The engineers of Bethany Station created entirely new technology and erected antennas capable of beaming radio signals over thousands of miles. After World War II the station engineers continued to accomplish some amazing feats. One such feat took place at the height of the Cold War, when the authorities in the Soviet Union became obsessed with
jamming American radio waves. The Russians employed every available tactic to prevent VOA from reaching the Russian people. During the late 1960s the jamming became more intense, and the engineers at Bethany Station were hard pressed to overcome the Soviets’ jams. When the Soviets succeeded in jamming the signal, it would often take the American engineers several minutes to change the frequency and “unjam” the signal. Once again, the engineers at Bethany Station found a way to continue transmissions. They developed an innovative method they termed “frequency hopping” that remodulated the jammed broadcast frequency in a matter of seconds. “It drove the Soviets nuts,” a tour guide at Bethany Station laughs. He also subtly sug- gests that the Soviet leadership had complained about this new technology to American leaders in Washington, DC. But thanks to the early pioneers at Bethany Station, VOA’s free broadcasts continued to be available around the globe.
(Continued on page 47)
T H E E L K S M A G A Z I N E
45
PHOTO: ASSOCIATED PRESS
PHOTO: VOICE OF AMERICA
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52 |
Page 53 |
Page 54 |
Page 55 |
Page 56 |
Page 57 |
Page 58 |
Page 59 |
Page 60 |
Page 61 |
Page 62 |
Page 63 |
Page 64 |
Page 65 |
Page 66 |
Page 67 |
Page 68 |
Page 69 |
Page 70 |
Page 71 |
Page 72 |
Page 73 |
Page 74 |
Page 75 |
Page 76 |
Page 77 |
Page 78 |
Page 79 |
Page 80