Site of the Week 3/21/2025: VOA Remembered

Text and photos by SCOTT FYBUSH

We’re back! It’s been quite a while since we’ve been making regular Site of the Week posts, for a whole variety of reasons we won’t bore you with, but we’ve still been out visiting sites and getting pictures, and it’s time to get back to our every-Friday habit.

This week’s special installment is a tribute to something that’s very suddenly gone: within just the last two weeks, the Voice of America has been put out of business, silencing an important outlet for international journalism and a longtime element of America’s soft power around the world.

The end of the VOA as we knew it also meant the very abrupt closure of several of the most interesting transmitter sites in the country, and fortunately, we’ve been able to do at least some documentation of two of them.

If you bought our 2025 Tower Site Calendar (an important source of support for the work we do here), you’ll recognize the picture above as both the cover image and also the image for July 2025.

This four-tower array is – or rather, was – the most powerful medium-wave station on US soil, blasting 100,000 watts of Radio Marti southward from Marathon in the Florida Keys toward Cuba. When we stopped by on our first trip to the Keys in February 2024, we couldn’t possibly have imagined that this site would fall silent a year later – and so when we called the number on the gate and were told that impromptu tours weren’t allowed, but we might be able to arrange something in the future through Washington, we figured we’d get back in here someday.

But since we won’t, now:

The history of the 1180 frequency in the Keys to serve Cuba goes back to the Cold War and the end of 1962, when the VOA began broadcasting in Spanish with 50 kW from three towers at this site on Sombrero Isle.

It was one of several attempts to blast a signal 100 or so miles south to Cuba in that era, with a second transmitter on 1040 also aiming south at various times from the Dry Tortugas and from Sugarloaf Key, out almost to Key West. (There was also the black-ops Radio Swan, which ran on 1165 and 1160 kHz from south of Cuba on Honduran territory.)

The 1980s brought a revived push to target Cuba, with the launch of the dedicated Radio Marti service on 1180 from Marathon and on shortwave from Greenville, North Carolina. The 1180 signal moved from Marathon to Sugarloaf for a few years in the late 1980s while the Marathon site was upgraded to four towers and 100 kW, though the signal was always the target of attempted jamming from co-channel Cuban transmitters.

(And while the Marathon directional array aimed entirely south at Cuba to protect the Class A signal on the channel up north, Rochester’s WHAM, the retaliatory signals aiming north from Cuba made a mess of WHAM’s signal for decades as close as the New York-Pennsylvania line.)

It’s actually pretty hard to get a completely clear view of these four towers these days, since the Sombrero area around the tower site is largely surrounded by waterfront housing developments and we didn’t want to go poking around in anyone’s backyards. We did, however, talk some nice folks having a late-afternoon beer on the deck of their boat to let us borrow their dock for a few minutes to get the photos shown here – and now we’re very, very glad indeed we made that trip, since who knows how quickly these towers might come down?

Reports indicate that the VOA sites that were closed down had power turned off, and thus aren’t being air conditioned, which means whatever equipment was left behind isn’t likely to fare very well without climate control in coastal environments like the Keys.

And if the Marathon site probably wasn’t much to look at – a fairly nondescript block building, at least as seen in aerial views, apparently with a Harris DX100 transmitter inside – we saw a much, much more elaborate setup back in 2016 when we toured the VOA’s Greenville Site B in North Carolina, where the Radio Marti shortwave signal emanated.

Here’s what we wrote when we profiled it, originally on this site in 2017, and we’ll leave it in present tense for the sake of history:

Perhaps you’ve seen the videos that have been making their way around the ol’ series of tubes for the last few weeks – the dramatic felling of nearly 50 towers that once held up the antennas for the Voice of America near Greenville, North Carolina?

Here’s the good news: while that site (“Site A”) near Washington, N.C. is now in the history books, its mirror image is alive and well about 20 miles away. For the last couple of decades, Site B, south of Greenville, has been VOA’s only active site out of what was once a three-site complex. And as we discovered on a visit in early March, what a site it is!

The Edward R. Murrow Transmitting Station, as it’s now known, entered service in the early 1960s, at a point where the VOA was building the first domestic transmitter sites of its own to replace aging facilities it had taken over from commercial operators during World War II. The basic layout inside here has remained unchanged: a two-story glass-enclosed control room includes racks of audio processing and the links (now satellite, formerly microwave) that bring in programming from VOA’s Washington headquarters. Two long rows of transmitters flank the control room, and at its center is a raised console area, where we see the improvements and upgrades VOA has built here in recent years.

There’s a wide variety of transmitters to be seen here: on one side of the control room sit the GE transmitters that came here from the old GE site in Schenectady, N.Y. These units are constantly being tweaked and upgraded and now boast modern control and monitoring capability that the GE builders couldn’t have imagined back in the 1950s.

Some of the newest transmitters sit at the back on this side – modern Brown-Boveri units that came to this site as recently as the 1990s.

There’s mammoth power-handling capacity at the back of the building, including a recently upgraded service entrance and transformers for many of these transmitters. (The power bill here still tops $700,000 a year.)

On the other side of the control room, it’s all Continental, with a recent paint job that now has the control panels and the glassed-in transmitters sporting a festive bright blue color.

Each transmitter’s power amplifiers and transformers sit in the room behind the glass, looking out at the control consoles and the control room beyond. There’s a 50 kW transmitter at the end of this row, too, that’s been used for DRM experimentation in recent years.

(Compare this layout, by the way, to the very similar configuration Family Stations put in at what’s now WRMI in Florida; clearly the 1970s engineers at Family drew lots of inspiration from VOA.)

You can’t just call up BSW or Broadcasters General Store to get replacement parts for these huge beasts, and so this site has a massive stock of replacement parts and a climate-controlled room just for storing tubes, as well as a machine shop and a garage for maintaining the vehicles that work around this huge site.

Out back, antenna switching happens in a separate 75-by-150 foot building behind the main transmitter building. Waveguides from each transmitter feed into a massive overhead matrix where pneumatically-controlled switches send each signal out to the antenna array.

Pictures don’t do this array justice; it sweeps from the north side of the building around to the east and then the south, where curtain and rhombic antennas can aim anywhere from northern Europe around to Africa and South America.

There are more than 40 antennas available for use here, with towers up to 300 feet tall on more than 2700 acres of land. While this site is 30 or so miles inland from the coast, its signals have a clean line of takeoff to the Atlantic and beyond, though most of the service from this site now aims exclusively southward toward Cuba.

One of the best vantage points to see what’s happening here is up in the observation tower that crowns the main building, and we trudge up six flights of stairs to take in the view.

In the picture below at left, you can see some of the switching setup at the back of the building; below right, we see evidence of a bomb shelter that we forgot to ask about during our tour.

Speaking of tours, while the road leading into the site has some threatening “no trespassing” signs, in recent years the VOA and its government parent, the International Broadcasting Board, had encouraged visits here to spread the word about the work VOA still does over shortwave, another resource now shuttered.

Thanks to VOA’s Macon Dail for the tours!