Shortwave from America: U.S. International Broadcast Stations, Past and Present

Almost every country with a shortwave voice runs it through a state broadcaster — Britain's BBC, the old Radio Moscow, and the like. The United States is one of the very few that also hands out licenses to private shortwave stations aimed at the rest of the world. That quirk has produced a small, strange, and constantly changing fleet of broadcasters: religious networks, a commercial rock station or two, brokered-airtime operators, and a handful of true originals. This page is a working list of these private stations — the ones still lighting up the high frequencies tonight, and the ones that have gone silent — assembled after a reader question about KGEI, the old Far East Broadcasting station that boomed out of Belmont, California, for half a century. It's a companion to the AM Broadcast Band trivia page, carried one band higher.

Noncommercial hobby compilation, gathered from public sources. Corrections welcome — chris@n6jet.com.

What counts as a U.S. shortwave station ↑ Contents

Under FCC rules an international broadcast station operates between roughly 5,950 and 26,100 kHz and is meant to be heard directly by the public in other countries — not to serve a hometown audience the way an AM or FM station does. These stations may sell commercial or sponsored airtime, may relay an AM station's programming, and must meet minimum-power and directional-antenna rules so the signal is genuinely thrown overseas. In practice that means big iron: U.S. private shortwave transmitters run from about 50,000 watts up to 500,000 watts, feeding curtain arrays and rhombics aimed at distant continents.

The economics are unusual too. There are no ratings for a listenership scattered across the planet, so airtime is brokered — sold cheaply in blocks to anyone with a message and a budget. That model is why most (not all) of these stations are religious: churches and ministries are the buyers willing to pay to be heard in places where they cannot build their own transmitters. A few stations have always stood apart — the rock-and-roll outlaws of the 1980s, and Allan Weiner's deliberately eccentric WBCQ.

For most of broadcasting history the club was tiny. Before 1982 the FCC had licensed only four private shortwave stations: WYFR, KGEI, WINB, and KTWR. When WRNO in New Orleans broke the drought in 1982, the door opened; by the end of that decade there were sixteen, and the roster has been turning over ever since.

Aiming the signal — the antennas ↑ Contents

Every station on this page faces the same physics problem: how to throw a signal a third of the way around the planet. The answer is the ionosphere — launch a horizontally polarized beam at a low angle toward the horizon and it refracts back to Earth thousands of miles away. Do it well and you also need directivity: concentrating the legal power into a narrow beam aimed at one target region, instead of wasting it in all directions. That is why a U.S. international station is not a single tall stick like an AM tower, but a sprawling farm of big directional wire arrays, each one pointed at a different part of the world.

Curtain arrays — the workhorse

The dominant HF broadcast antenna is the curtain array: rows and columns of horizontal dipoles hung like a curtain in front of a wire reflector screen, slung between two tall towers. Engineers describe one with a shorthand like HRS 4/4/0.5 — four dipoles wide, four high, with the lowest row half a wavelength above ground and a reflector behind. Feeding the dipoles through adjustable phase shifters lets the beam be slewed in azimuth up to about ±30° without rebuilding anything, and choosing which rows are driven steers it in elevation. The pattern is clean, the gain is high, and because reception is best on different bands at different hours, a big site will often hang separate low-, mid-, and high-band curtains to cover the whole 6–26 MHz range.

Rhombics and V-beams — the old guard

Before the curtain took over, the king of long-distance HF was the rhombic — a giant diamond of long wires (designed in 1931 by Bruce and Friis), terminated at the far end with a resistor so it fires in one direction, broadband and simple. A V-beam is its smaller relative: two long wires splayed into a V from a single feed — essentially half a rhombic. Both are cheap and handle enormous power, but they are inefficient (a rhombic wastes roughly half its power in ground and termination losses) and throw messier patterns than a curtain, so after World War II they were gradually replaced for broadcasting. Two rhombics combined make a higher-gain double rhombic, and plenty are still in daily service.

Log-periodics — one antenna, every band

The log-periodic (a 1950s design) is a tapered row of dipoles of graduated lengths, arranged so that whatever the frequency, the elements near resonance do the radiating. That makes a single antenna inherently broadband — one log-periodic can cover the entire 6–26 MHz broadcast range with directional gain close to a rhombic's but far wider coverage, at powers up to 500 kW. It is the antenna that finally retired most rhombics from broadcast work.

You can see all three side by side at WRMI's Okeechobee farm, the largest private shortwave site in the country: 23 antennas strung between 68 towers, aimed at eleven directions around the globe — a mix of log-periodics, double rhombics, and curtains, with cattle grazing underneath the wires to keep the grass down. (Hurricane Irma snapped one tower clean in half in 2017, including a 44° double rhombic aimed at Europe.)

On the air today ↑ Contents

The privately owned U.S. shortwave broadcast stations currently licensed by the FCC. The contiguous-U.S. stations are listed first, then the Alaska and Pacific outlets. Call signs link nowhere on purpose — tune them on a real radio.

Contiguous United States

Alaska, Hawaii & the Pacific

Silent now ↑ Contents

Private U.S. shortwave broadcasters that have left the air. A few live on through their old transmitter sites — KGEI's contemporaries became the foundations of stations still broadcasting today.

Where it started — the manufacturers and the war years ↑ Contents

America's shortwave broadcasting did not start with religion or rock — it started with the big radio-manufacturing companies. Through the 1930s, General Electric, Crosley, Westinghouse, CBS, and NBC each ran experimental and commercial shortwave outlets to show the flag abroad and sell receivers at home, joined by Walter Lemmon's educational WRUL in Boston and GE's KGEI in California. NBC, for example, broadcast internationally from Bound Brook, New Jersey.

When the United States entered World War II, the government leased these scattered private signals for the war effort. KGEI carried MacArthur's return to the Philippines; WRUL's wartime broadcasts helped keep a Norwegian merchant fleet out of German hands. After the war the stations returned to private owners — KGEI to commercial and then missionary use, and the WRUL plant down the long road that eventually made it WYFR and then WRMI.

See also the companion page: Time Stations: Standard-Frequency and Time-Signal Radio, Past and Present — WWV, WWVH, WWVB and the world's other time-and-frequency stations, which live on the same bands but broadcast ticks and codes rather than programs.

Sources: FCC High Frequency Stations, the National Association of Shortwave Broadcasters, Wikipedia, The Christian Science Monitor archives, The SWLing Post, Fybush.com, the Bay Area Radio Museum & Hall of Fame, The Radio Historian, HFUnderground, and Radio World. Compiled by N6JET as a noncommercial hobby reference. Questions or corrections? Email chris@n6jet.com.

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