REMEMBERING HCJB, QUITO, ECUADOR

 

HCJB Studio QSL

Our thanks to Ray Robinson and Jeff White for sharing this week's feature on HCJB .... great memories for shortwave listeners!

Jeff: Many shortwave listeners fondly remember the broadcasts of HCJB, the ‘Voice of the Andes’ from Quito, Ecuador, but having looked back through our archives, it appears we’ve never done a feature on that station.  So once again, to put that right, here’s Ray Robinson in Los Angeles.

Ray: Thanks, Jeff.  And yes, that is correct.  I’ve searched through all our Wavescan scripts going back to the year 2000, but there’s no trace of HCJB anywhere.  And, there’s a very interesting story to be told.

HCJB was the vision of Clarence Wesley Jones.  In the late 1920’s, he’d worked for a radio ministry in Chicago, Illinois, and, impressed by the impact it was having, felt called to establish a missionary radio ministry in Latin America.  In 1928, he travelled to Venezuela, Colombia, Panama and Cuba looking for a suitable location, but was unable to obtain the necessary government permits.

Then on September 18, 1929, Clarence Jones met Reuben Larson, who’d previously served as a missionary in Ecuador, and Reuben encouraged Clarence to consider Ecuador as a location for the radio ministry.  Reuben returned to Quito in 1930, where he and a colleague approached the Ecuadorian government requesting a license for broadcasting.  At that time, there were no radio stations in Ecuador, and there was no basis in law for granting a broadcasting license.  So, as has happened since in other countries such as Zambia and Israel, a permit was issued by personal decree of the President of the Republic.

The internationally allocated prefix for Ecuadorian call signs was HC, and so the call letters ‘HCJB’ were chosen for the station as an acronym for ‘Heralding Christ Jesus’ Blessings’ (in English), or Hoy Cristo Jesús Bendice (‘Jesus Christ’s Blessings Today’ in Spanish).

Back in the States, Clarence Jones incorporated the World Radio Missionary Fellowship in March 1931 as a non-profit to oversee the operation of HCJB, and construction of a transmitter for the station began in Quito.

Famously, HCJB’s first broadcast was at 4pm on Christmas Day, 1931, when it had the potential of being heard by the six radio receivers existing in the country at that time.  The inaugural program was broadcast in English and Spanish from a studio in the Jones' living room.  The 30 minute broadcast was powered by a home brew 250-watt, table-top transmitter on 50.26 meters (5986 kHz), with a simple, single wire antenna strung between two telephone poles.  Soon after that, they built a studio in a mud-walled, half-finished sheep shed in central Quito, and began regular broadcasts in Spanish for two hours per day.

HCJB was the first missionary radio station in the world, and it began issuing QSL cards in 1932.  A better studio and transmitter site was acquired a few years later in the center of Quito city, where in 1936 they added an RCA medium wave transmitter, and the following year replaced the shortwave unit with a 1 kW one designed and built by a local HCJB engineer.  English programs were introduced in 1937, and then in 1940, they added a 10 kW shortwave transmitter designed and built by another HCJB engineer, and this allowed them to broadcast internationally for the first time.  This transmitter was inaugurated on Easter Sunday, 1940, by the President of Ecuador.

In 1941, live programs were added in Russian, Swedish and Quechua, the predominant indigenous language of the Andes.  The frequencies in use at this time were 6050, 9745, 11775 and 15155 kHz.  By 1944, the station had aired programming in 14 languages including live programs in Czech, Dutch, French and German.  Programs in languages such as Arabic, Italian and Hebrew were recorded elsewhere and sent to Quito on large acetate-coated aluminum transcription discs.

 In 1951 HCJB acquired 45 acres of land near the town of Pifo, 20 miles east of Quito, where they constructed transmission and antenna facilities that enabled considerable expansion over the following decades.  Initially, eight curtain antennas and two dipoles were erected, and all broadcast activities were moved to the Pifo site in 1953, with two studio-to-transmitter links operating on FM.  Broadcasts in German were expanded, not targeting Europe, but rather the many post-war German-speaking communities in South America.  HCJB’s first ‘high-power’ shortwave transmitter, a 50 kW unit, was again designed and built in-house in 1956.  Here’s a recording of HCJB from 1957:

Then in 1961, HCJB launched a TV station for Quito - the first licensed TV station in Ecuador.  And in 1965, HCJB’s own hydro-electric plant at Papallacta began generating sufficient electricity to power all the broadcasts from Pifo.  Pre-recorded ‘Voice of the Andes’ radio programs in Central European languages began to be aired, and more live programming in Portuguese and Japanese was added in 1967. 

Also in 1967, three 100 kW RCA transmitters were acquired from Vatican Radio, and these were placed into service progressively between 1968 and 1970.  HCJB was then receiving hundreds of letters each week with reception reports from shortwave DXers around the world.  The correspondence department of HCJB responded to its listeners with QSL cards and Christian tracts.

photo via Radio Heritage

One fondly remembered program was "DX-Partyline", which was hosted from its inception by HCJB missionary Clayton Howard and his wife, Helen.  The program was heard for more than 40 years, twice a week, and included the reading of letters from shortwave listeners around the world as well as reception reports sent to the station. "DX-Partyline" also included shortwave radio listening tips, information on antennas, and equipment reviews.  In 1974, Clayton Howard suggested a shortwave listeners' club be created, and so ‘Andes DXers International’, (or "ANDEX") began.  Members would receive a membership certificate and membership card with the member's name and individual member number, along with Howard's signature.  A monthly bulletin was sent to members, of which I was one.  In fact, I was one of HCJB’s monitors in the UK, sending them many dozens of reception reports over the years, and I still have an HCJB pennant hanging in my studio.  ANDEX eventually had a membership in the thousands and continued as a service of HCJB until 1996.

 Besides DX-Partyline, other original radio programming produced by HCJB staff members included "Morning in the Mountains," "Musica del Ecuador," "Musical Mailbag," "Happiness Is," and “Passport”.

In the mid-1970s, HCJB constructed a secondary transmitter site halfway up Mount Pichincha, the volcano in whose foothills Quito is built.  There, they installed a 50 kW medium wave transmitter, operating on 690 kHz.  On Sunday nights they often ran DX tests, such as this one:

In 1979, a steerable ‘egg beater’ antenna was constructed, and in 1981 a 500 kW transmitter, designed by HCJB’s own engineers, was built at the facilities of Crown International in Elkhart, Indiana.

This transmitter was put into use from Pifo to try to overcome some of the Russian jamming efforts their broadcasts to Soviet bloc countries were facing.  In 1986 they acquired the Crown International facility at Elkhart, now called SonSet Solutions, and used it to modify a 500 kW Siemens single side-band transmitter to operate on SSB with a carrier, so it could be heard on AM radios

Then in the 1990’s, HCJB engineers built a number of new 100 kW transmitters using the HC-100 design, which also used operation on SSB with a carrier.  These transmitters were the ministry’s contribution to the “World by 2000” challenge, and they were of a successful design that was deployed not only in Pifo, but also at TWR in Swaziland and later at Reach Beyond in Australia.  Here’s an Id from June 1994:

Over the years, more land was bought adjoining the Pifo site, such that it eventually covered more than 200 acres.  By 1995, there were 13 transmitters and 32 antennas on the Pifo site, beaming to all corners of the globe.  The main studio compound was in downtown Quito, from where programming was fed to the transmitter site via a microwave link which replaced the earlier FM links.

A staff of over 100 people was employed in the radio ministry, and nearly double that were involved in the operation of HCJB’s medical clinics throughout the country.

 The eventual closedown of HCJB from Quito came not because of falling listenership or loss of commitment to shortwave broadcasting, but rather because of the decision of the Ecuadorian government to demand the removal of HCJB's shortwave antenna masts, which they determined would be too close to the new Quito airport then under construction.  Consideration was given to building a new shortwave station near Guayaquil, but in the end, the mission leadership in the USA decided instead to move their base of operations from Ecuador to Australia.

HCJB QSL via Teak Publishing Archives

 The station at Pifo near Quito was gradually shut down and dismantled in the mid-2000’s, and their final broadcast in English was on Saturday May 6, 2006, and on Sunday, September 30, 2009, after nearly 80 years of international shortwave broadcasting from Ecuador, radio station HCJB made its last high-power transmission.  The 50 kW medium wave transmitter on 690 kHz was shut down in 2017, but the station does continue to this day from the Mount Pichincha site, with Spanish and Quechua on 6050 kHz, using a 1 kW transmitter and a double-dipole antenna designed to reach the remote rural areas of Ecuador.

 Back to you, Jeff.