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Special thanks to Ray Robinson and Jeff White for sharing Part 1 and 2 in the history of AWR
Jeff: Two weeks ago we brought you the history of the Adventist radio program “The Voice of Prophecy”, which in one form or another has been on the air since 1929, and indeed is still on the air to this day. But it was on Friday evening, October 1, 1971, that the first shortwave broadcast from the newly formed Adventist World Radio (AWR) was beamed across Europe from a 250 kW transmitter at Radio Trans Europe in Sines (“Seenesh”), Portugal. RTE, of course, no longer exists, but here’s Ray Robinson with part 2 of our series on the history of Adventist shortwave broadcasting.
Ray: Thanks, Jeff. Back in the 1970’s, besides the “Voice of Prophecy” program, there were also three main units of Adventist World Radio, each operated independently of the others. Like some other Christian broadcasters, AWR has always primarily been a program producer, with no real aspirations to run stations on shortwave with identities similar to domestic AM or FM stations. They made programs in various languages, usually about half an hour in length, and then bought time on shortwave transmitters operated by others to air them.
In Europe, Radio Trans Europe in Sines, Portugal had been setup as a Deutsche Welle relay station with two 250 kW Marconi transmitters, and AWR-Europe was able to purchase time on those transmitters, for programming produced in studios in Germany and France in the languages of various European countries, both East and West.
In Asia, the original AWR-Asia bought time on the shortwave transmitters of the Sri Lanka Broadcasting Corporation at Ekala, a dozen miles north of Colombo – an operation that undoubtedly developed following the “Voice of Prophecy’s” decision to use the Commercial Service of Radio Ceylon in Colombo in 1954.
In Latin America, AWR actually bought an existing shortwave station in Cahuita, Costa Rica, and used its five shortwave transmitters to broadcast programming in Spanish and English beginning in 1991.
So, let’s look at each of these operations in turn.
Europe
During 1968 while our Wavescan editor-in-chief Dr. Adrian Peterson was living in Lahore, Pakistan, he was invited to serve as an informal advisor to fellow Australian Dr. Walter Scragg who was serving in international radio leadership at the global
headquarters of the Adventist denomination in Washington, D.C. It was at that stage that serious planning was underway for establishing a coordinated global outreach on shortwave radio.
Three years later, the newly married Allen and Andrea Steele were transferred from specialized FM radio programming in Washington, D.C. to Lisbon, Portugal, to head up the inauguration of the new Adventist World Radio, a name, incidentally, that Adrian Peterson had first suggested to Walter Scragg.
After many weeks of coordination with the main production studios in Paris, France and Darmstadt, West Germany, the time came for the inaugural broadcast from the fledgling AWR on Friday evening, October 1st , 1971.
n a special studio of Radio Trans Europe on the top, 6 th floor of an ornate residential building at 84 Rua Braamcamp in Lisbon. Then by car, they
personally delivered the complete set of program tapes, now ready for broadcasting, to the Radio Trans Europe on-air coordinating studio at Sesimbra, some 24 miles south of Lisbon.
At Sesimbra, all programming was sent by VHF link 40 miles across Setubal Bay to the shortwave transmitter site located near the ocean on Monte Mudo hill, close to Cape Sines. The inaugural AWR broadcast was in Italian, and it began at 2015 UTC
on 9670 kHz.
By 1973, they were airing programming several days per week each in 16 languages – Arabic, Croatian, Dutch, English, French, German, Greek, Hungarian, Italian, Macedonian, Rumanian, Russian, Serbian, Slovak, Swedish and Ukranian. You may remember this interval sign
The two transmitters at RTE had originally been procured by Deutsche Welle for a new relay station in El Salvador, Central America. But when that project had to be canceled due to lack of government approval, the transmitters were diverted instead to Sines, Portugal. They are first listed in the 1971 edition of the WRTH, and the relay site was finally closed in 2011. AWR-Europe used the station in Portugal for some 15 years. After that, they hired airtime for 5 more years on another Deutsche Welle relay site in Malta – Radio Mediterranean, and even conducted some tests via a Deutsche Welle relay site in Kigali, Rwanda.
Asia
As we commented a few weeks ago, the first Adventist programming on shortwave in South Asia was via the original Emissora de Goa (or, Radio Goa), beginning in April 1950. In 1954, that shifted to the Commercial Service of Radio Ceylon, and their shortwave transmitters at Ekala, north of Colombo.
In the early 1970’s, the Peterson family were transferred first to Colombo, where they supervised the production of half a dozen programs in as many languages that were broadcast on shortwave by the now SLBC in Ekala. Then in 1975, they were transferred again to Pune, India, for the purpose of coordinating the Adventist
ministry across the 12 countries that had formerly comprised British India. Program production was likewise moved to new AWR studios in Salisbury Park, Pune. A year later, all of the radio programming that was organized under a combined unit, and on October 7, 1976, the Adventist headquarters in Washington, D.C. gave formal recognition to the Pune-based radio studio as “AWR-Asia”. All the AWR programming produced in the Pune studio was broadcast from Sri Lanka on shortwave, medium wave and FM. The Ekala shortwave station was closed in 2013, when its replacement at Trincomalee came online. The forerunner to this program, Wavescan, was Radio Monitors International, and here’s the beginning of an RMI program broadcast via SLBC in March 1980 – recognize the theme tune?
Latin America and Oceania
In Latin America, because of the large geographic areas many medium wave stations aspired to cover, it was common practice for them to install shortwave transmitters co-sited with their medium wave ones, to simulcast their programming to a wider
audience. Examples of such stations which were bought by local Adventist churches and carried Adventist programming on shortwave include:
Union Radio – TGMU – in Guatemala City on 5980 and 6090 kHz,
Radio Amanecer Internacional in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic, with 1 kW on 6025 kHz,
Radio Adventista Mundial in Celendin, Peru, with 350 watts on 3870 kHz, and
Radio Alajuela in Costa Rica.
Also, the same pattern emerged in many Pacific island groups, where stations were wanting to provide a signal to listeners on outlying islands. Here examples of stations carrying Adventist programming on shortwave included:
Papeete, Tahiti with 20 kW on 15170 kHz,
Noumea, New Caledonia also with 20 kW on 3355 and 7170 kHz,
Raratonga, Cook Islands, with 500 watts on 11760 kHz,
Port Moresby and in fact all 30 shortwave stations throughout Papua New Guinea.
Voice of Prophecy’ was also heard from Taipei, Taiwan, on 3335 kHz with 10 kW.
All of these stations carrying Adventist programming on shortwave were in addition to the services from Adventist World Radio that in the 1980’s was producing over 1200 hours of programming each week in 55 languages in Europe and South Asia. In 1991, under the leadership of David Gregory in Central America, a station that had previously been operated by the U.S. government – Radio Impacto at Cahuita on the Caribbean coast of Costa Rica – was procured for the central AWR organization. With studios in Alajuela, the programming of AWR-Latin America in Spanish and English was carried over the station’s five shortwave transmitters. However, only eight years later (in 1999), the Cahuita transmitter site was sold to new owners, and then two years later again it was closed.
KSDA
Well, subsequent to the story of the AWR shortwave units that were established in Europe, South Asia and Latin America, comes the shortwave site that was built in 1985 at Facpi Point, near the community of Agat, on the west coast of the island of Guam in the western Pacific. And that’s where we’ll pick up the history of Adventist shortwave broadcasting again, next week.
Back to you, Jeff.
Adventist Shortwave Broadcasting History, part 1 - November 30, 2024
