 |
| TWR - Bonaire |
Thank you to Ray Robinson and Jeff White for sharing this week's programming, featuring Trans World Radio- Bonaire.
Jeff: Some of you may have seen the article in Radio World magazine last month called ‘A Visit to Shine 800 AM’. It was all about Trans World Radio’s medium wave station on the Dutch Caribbean island of Bonaire, and that caused Ray Robinson to do a bit more digging. So here he is, with the TWR Bonaire story.
Ray: Thanks, Jeff. The island of Bonaire lies about 50 miles north of Venezuela and about 850 miles north of the equator. It’s 24 miles long and three to seven miles wide. It’s part of the ABC islands, which along with Aruba and Curaçao, used to form the Netherlands Antilles. But in 201,0 their status was changed, and the Netherlands Antilles, as an entity, was dissolved. Bonaire, whose population is only about 24,000, became a special municipality within the country of the Netherlands itself.
Trans World Radio started life, of course, as the Voice of Tangier in 1954, from where it broadcast first to Spain, and then to much of Europe and Scandinavia over the following five years. When the International Zone was placed back under the control of the Moroccan Government in 1959, all international broadcasters were forced to close by the end of that year. But by May 1960, TWR had resumed broadcasting on shortwave from a new facility in Monte Carlo, and a high-power medium wave transmitter was added four years later.
But in 1963, TWR first expanded to the Western Hemisphere, opening a high-power medium wave station on the island of Bonaire. The salt flats on the south coast of the island provided the perfect environment for a medium wave station to propagate to South America and the Caribbean. Their initial transmitter was a 500 kW Continental Electronics unit, which operated at full power on 800 kHz for 35 years. It was assigned the Dutch callsign PJB.
 |
| TWR's Original 500 kW Continental Medium Wave Transmitter |
Later, two shortwave
transmitters were added – one at 50 kW and one at 250 kW – and they were used
mostly to broadcast Spanish, Portuguese and German programming to South
America, and English programming to North America with an expanded schedule on
Sundays. Diesel generators were also
installed to provide the power necessary to operate all the equipment.
But as time went on,
the costs associated with operating and maintaining such high-power tube-type transmitters
forced them to cutback. In the late
1980’s, the power output from the 250 kW shortwave transmitter was reduced to
100 kW, and then in 1993, all shortwave broadcasting from TWR Bonaire
ended. In 1998, the 500 kW medium wave
unit was replaced with a 100 kW one, a Nautel NX100, and the diesel generators
were taken out of service. The station
still had twice the power on medium wave of any station in North America, but it
was nothing like the flame thrower it had once been.
But the following
year, in 1999, a new medium wave antenna was designed by Tom King of Kintronics
Labs in Bluff City, Tennessee, who also engineered and installed it. The design utilizes four 478’ tall active
towers at the four corners of a rectangle, which through selective termination
can be used to create three different directional antenna patterns – one for
the Caribbean, Venezuela and Colombia, one with a beam to the north west for
Cuba, and a third with a beam to the south east that reaches much further down
into the Amazonia region of northern Brazil.
By using this new antenna, TWR aimed to maximize the impact of the 100
kW transmitter.
 |
| TWR Bonaire Directional Medium Wave Antenna at Night |
They had many loyal listeners, but by the early 20-teens, it was apparent there was still a need for higher power. The station said they had a lot of people in Cuba asking if they could increase the power again to cover the whole island with Christian programming on medium wave. So, they launched a new project, and over a period of about four years, managed to raise almost $4 million for the purchase and operation of a new high-power solid-state transmitter.
 |
Coverage Patters of the Three Antenna Beams
|
But, there were no 500 kW transmitters now being manufactured. One option they had was to combine two 250 kW units to achieve the same output power as the old Continental. But instead, they found they could get close to that level by selecting a Nautel 400 kW unit, the NX400, which could be assembled from ‘off-the-shelf’ parts for much less cost than two 250 kW units. It uses MDCL – modulation-dependent carrier level – which enables it to achieve greater than 90% efficiency, and thus it is also quite economical to operate.
The antenna was upgraded for the higher power with new tuning houses at the base of each mast. The new NX400 transmitter was shipped from Nautel’s facility in Nova Scotia, Canada in eight crates, and it was received in Bonaire in December 2017. It was installed in the space occupied until 1998 by the old 500 kW Continental, and a dedication ceremony was held on January 30th 2018. As with all Nautel solid-state transmitters, the NX400 has what the manufacturer calls a “10% overhead”, which means TWR can and does put out closer to 440 kW from Bonaire. Combined with the more effective antenna design, this means the station now actually sounds stronger than it did with the old 500 kW transmitter decades ago.
 |
| The NX400 with TWR Engineer Matt Folkirt (N3FLW) |
The current technology also allows the station to operate with a smaller staff. Back in the 60’s and 70’s, TWR had close to 100 people doing live radio out of Bonaire, but today’s operation is much more labour-efficient. Both the transmitter and the antenna switching equipment can be monitored remotely, and program producers no longer need to leave the target audiences they are serving.
Mark Persons of Radio World visited TWR Bonaire recently, and he wrote in last month’s issue that the station “is silent during the day but comes alive at night. From 7:30 to 8 p.m., they broadcast in English to the Caribbean islands, then the pattern is switched to the northwest from 8 p.m. to midnight, when Spanish programs are sent to Cuba via skywave bouncing off the ionosphere. And yes, they do put a reliable signal into Cuba, some 900 miles away. In the mornings, “The antenna is on the southeast pattern from 4:30 to 6 a.m. when Portuguese is beamed as far as 1,200 miles into Latin America, again by ionospheric reflection. Then from 6 to 7:30 a.m., the station is nondirectional with Spanish programs to the Caribbean, Colombia and Venezuela. Listeners know when to tune in.”
Lauren Libby, the former President of Trans World Radio before his debilitating stroke last year, said the station’s enhanced power and coverage not only helps spread Christian programming to a wide area, but is also useful in other ways. He said: “When you get into an emergency situation, there’s nothing that beats medium-wave. For instance, when the hurricanes came across the Upper Antilles we were on the air every night with weather, encouraging those affected and talking to people throughout the region live on the air. The Dutch government says whenever there’s a disaster, just tune to 800 AM because that’s where you can get information. That was one of the reasons that we did what we did — to allow the Dutch government to be able to talk to their territories in the Caribbean, all the way from Saba in the north to Aruba next door. You need this kind of power if you’re going to do that.”
Here in North America, unless you happen to be close to CKLW in Windsor, Ontario or are unable to null them out, those late evening hours are probably the best time to try to log the 800 kHz signal. Bonaire is on Atlantic Standard Time all year round (currently the same as Eastern Daylight Time), so that corresponds to midnight to 0400 UTC. Listen out for their ID in Spanish – Radio Trans Mundial.
Ray: Back to you, Jeff
(Numerous audio/video samples of TWR Bonaire are available at YouTube)
