KWHR, Hawaii
Jeff: Harry Secombe, with the Christmas hymn ‘O Holy Night’. Now, here’s Ray again with the story of shortwave station KWHR, which was located at a lonely, isolated spot almost at the very southern tip of the Hawaiian Islands.
Ray: Thanks, Jeff. This story begins back in October 1989, which was when LeSea Broadcasting in South Bend, Indiana applied to the FCC for a license to establish a new shortwave station in Hawaii. This new Hawaiian station would become their second shortwave station, following in the footsteps of their already established station WHRI, which at that time was located a little north of Indianapolis.
The location for this new shortwave station was right at the southern tip of the Big Island of Hawaii. The new KWHR was installed just 8 miles due north of South Point and half a mile from the transmitter site of KIPA AM/FM in Naalehu, Hawaii. The area was grass and tree covered, on top of the lava flow that had erupted from nearby Mt Kilauea in 1868.
Construction work for the new shortwave station began two years later in 1991, at a total cost of around $2 million. Four antenna towers were erected, two at 253 feet high for the slewable TCI curtain at 270 o , and two at 180 feet high for a fixed net style log periodic. All the towers, and the transmitter building, were constructed to withstand wind speeds up to 150 mph.
A high voltage power distribution line from a nearby wind farm did run quite close to station KWHR, but it is understood that the station generated its own power. Electricity was first applied to the 100 kW Harris 100B shortwave transmitter on December 16, 1993; and three days later, test transmissions began at 0500 UTC on 9930 kHz. Then, according to the noted shortwave historian Jerome Berg in
suburban Boston, this new LeSea shortwave station KWHR on the recovered lava fields on the big island of Hawaii was formally inaugurated six days later on Christmas Day, 1993. Here’s station owner, LeSea Broadcasting’s Lester Sumrall, interviewing chief engineer Doug Garlinger about the curtain antenna in 1993:
Around the turn of the century, shortwave KWHR was off the air for many months, and only WHRI near Indianapolis was on the air, with programming beamed to Latin America. Sometime after KWHR returned to the air, it started carrying program relays on behalf of the American operated AFRTS, Armed Forces Radio TV Service, AFN and Radio Free Asia and also three different organizations in the Vietnamese language. These syndicated relays were on the air for around three years, with listings in the WRTH for the years 2003 through 2005.
An additional 100 kW transmitter, a Continental Model 419F, was installed nearly four years after the station was officially opened and this additional unit was inaugurated on October 10, 1997. Transmitter KWHR1, identified as Angel 3 in LeSea terminology, was permanently connected to the log period antenna for coverage into Asia, and KWHR2 or Angel 4, was permanently connected to the curtain antenna for coverage into the Pacific Rim countries.
Programming for the two shortwave transmitters was assembled in the LeSea radio and TV facilities in South Bend, Indiana, with satellite delivery to Hawaii. Initially, KWHR2 carried a program relay from Pulse FM, a local contemporary Christian program service in South Bend.
However, changes were on the horizon, and in October 2008, the station was closed and dismantled, and the two transmitters were shipped to another LeSea shortwave station, T8WH on the island of Palau. During a visit I made to the LeSea station on Palau in May 2017, I saw an old sign in a storage shed there, which had obviously been salvaged from the previous site on Hawaii. It said: “Future Home of KWHR shortwave radio”.
Over the years, LeSea verified listener reception reports with at least three different colorful QSL cards, including an introductory limited edition First Day QSL. KWHR QSL cards have depicted a Hawaiian map, and a collage of Asian peoples. All that remains these days of the twenty year tenure of shortwave station KWHR on the big island of Hawaii is the sturdy concrete transmitter building, still apparently
in very good condition, and readily visible in satellite imagery on both Google Earth and Google Maps.
Back to you, Jeff.
(Ray Robinson/Jeff White/Wavescan)
