I hope you keep up with the various amateur radio podcasts. They can be extremely informative on topics of the day and even spark a few memories of the old days. That’s what happened to me this evening as I listened to Neil Rapp’s Ham Talk Live and his interview with Lee Hite from the National Voice of America Museum of Broadcasting.
The show primarily addressed the little known chapter in VOA history when a ship was set up to broadcast off Rhodes Greece with VOA transmissions into Russia. It then went into a broader discussion of the museum in Bethany, Ohio.
I have to report that I’m a big fan of the Voice of America. I started listening to them back in the 1960’s in my SWL years. That listening continued into the 1970’s when I earned the North American Shortwave Association’s All Voice of America DX’er award for hearing and collecting QSL cards from every VOA relay station. At the time that included four stations in the USA (Bethany, Delano, Dixon, and Greenville) as well as Ascension Island; Bangkok, Thailand; Colombo, Sri Lanka; Kavala and Rhodes, Greece; Monrovia, Liberia; Munich, Germany; Poro and Tinang, Philippines; Tangier, Morocco; and Wooferton, England. I still have the QSL cards and you can see the certificate nearby. You can read more about this at my blog post titled Voice of America.
You can imagine what a treat it was to tour the VOA Museum at the Bethany, Ohio transmitter facilities. That tour happened in 2013 just before the Dayton Hamvention. Icom America held their annual dealer dinner there with a tour prior to the dinner. It was fabulous to see the facilities and to be briefed on the operation in the actual control room for all the transmitters and antennas. I’ll note that early in my career I shared a similar role as a television transmitter engineer at a couple of the transmitter locations for Nebraska Educational Television Network. Even so, I can’t imagine what it was like to work with that equipment.
I’ve also been able to tour the VOA studios in Washington, D.C. That was in 2010 or so. I’m sure it wasn’t like the old cold war days but they were pretty impressive none the less.
Finally, I’ve done a bit of stamp collecting, primarily first day covers of amateur radio stamps but also Scouting and the Voice of America. You can read more about that at my blog post titled Stamp Collecting.
As I started this post, I hope you’re able to engage with one or more amateur radio podcasts. I particularly like Ham Talk Live. Neil seems to cover many of the topics of interest to me in my ham radio adventures.
