Radio World, March 1, 2008

Last of VOA's Wartime Transmitting Stations Goes Dark

How International Broadcasting Found Its Way to Delano

by James E. O'Neal, 3.01.2008

(James E. O'Neal is the Technology Editor for TV Technology
magazine and a Radio World contributor.)

(This is the full-length version of an article that
appeared in briefer form in the print edition of Radio
World).

The Voice of America's Delano shortwave transmitting station is
difficult to ignore. Even though it's set back nearly two miles
from California's Route 99, the massive metal antenna structures
rising from the almond groves and citrus orchards can't help but
command the attention of motorists. The sheer size of the
installation makes it appear intriguingly close to the highway,
yet few motorists ever stop to investigate. After the sun sets,
the station begs attention with the bluish-white pulsing of
strobe lights and red beacons, too numerous to even begin
counting from a moving car.

If locals in the nearby town of Delano are asked about the steel
appurtenances and the lights, most answer that it's some sort of
government facility. Perhaps there's a little secrecy involved —
some kind of a big radio station maybe, or something to do with
radar, or a cold war left-over.

Should an extra-curious motorist decide to exit the main highway
and meander along the series of right-angled section-line byways
leading to 11015 Melcher Road, he or she can't help but be
impressed by the bulk of the buff-colored building and the acres
of antennas spreading out around it. Most would-be visitors get
no closer than the station's mail box. The operation is fenced
and gated, with special permission needed to enter.

Few of those living in Delano have ever been past that gate, and
as with most government facilities, there’s something of a
mystery about what goes on inside the compound, which occupies
almost a square mile of the San Joaquin Valley.

The main structure was large at its inception and has grown over
the years, standing now at some 26,000 square feet. Close by are
a cluster of smaller outbuildings interspersed with large
satellite dishes. Stretching far behind these masonry structures
are the acres and acres of large antennas — immense Sterba
curtain arrays and the more conventional rhombics, all connected
to the building by a switching bay and open wire feeders.

No one in Delano takes much notice of the station. It's been
there, just west of the downtown area, longer than most people
can remember. The buildings and antennas are like the highways
and railroad tracks that punctuate and define Delano — they're
just there and they've always been there.

In the fall of 2007, the ebb and flow of daily patterns around
the station changed rather abruptly.

For the first time in nearly 63 years, the station is now
strangely quiet. Save for an occasional lizard or cotton tail,
the parking lot is vacant. There's no roar from massive cooling
blowers, no amplified voices in the control room booming in
from Washington, no "dawn patrol" antenna and feeder
inspections, no morning runs into town for coffee, rolls or
breakfast burritos by station employees. There will be no more
invisible thunderbolts generated by the station to slam into
the ionosphere and rain down on the other side of the world.
Instead of the megawatts they were designed for, the heavy
feeders connecting the facility to the Southern California
Edison grid now only carry a small trickle of electricity —
just enough to keep the lights on.

After 23,000 days of continuous transmissions, the station
is empty and silent. This past July, its management authority,
the Broadcasting Board of Governors, made the decision to
shut it down permanently at the end of October.

Among the VOA's international broadcasting assets, Delano
is unique. It's the last of three such stations hastily
constructed under extreme wartime restrictions and shortages
for the express purpose of providing permanent shortwave
broadcasting capability for the Office of War Information,
the VOA's precursor organization.

Before the gigantic transmitters are removed for service
elsewhere, or the tons and tons of steel antennas are hauled
away as just so much scrap metal, it seems appropriate to pay
tribute to the station's architects and the generations of
those worked there by offering up a little history and a few
facts about the facility.

For starters the Delano Transmitting Station wasn't even
supposed to be located there. It was built under the watchful
eye of an engineer who had earlier been occupied by building
bigger and bigger radio transmitters for a quack medical
doctor. Even though it was constructed for government purposes,
a private entity, CBS (the Columbia Broadcasting System at the
time) was solely responsible for building the station and
keeping it running, even down to obtaining call signs that
were representative of that network.

During its first year of operation, the Delano station
unknowingly found its way into the midst of the super-secret
project to build the world's first atomic bomb.

The stated purpose of Delano was for transmitting wartime
news from America to the Pacific Ocean nations during
World War II. Afterwards, it lived on, performing a similar
mission for the duration of the Cold War and beyond.

HOW IT ALL BEGAN

The original wartime building was expanded in the mid-1960s
to accommodate three Collins 250 kW transmitters.

To get a better grasp on Delano's unique history, we have
to go back to the first days after America's entry into the
Second World War.

At the time of the attack on Pearl Harbor, the United States
government had no international broadcasting facilities, or
any real interest in reaching out to the world by radio.
t had been reasoned that this was something best left to the
commercial broadcasting entities. In sharp contrast were the
scores of HF transmitters that Hitler and Hirohito had been
keeping busy, spreading their version of the facts to anyone
within reach of a shortwave set.

Pearl Harbor changed the U.S. perspective on many fronts,
and in early 1942 the international broadcasting imbalance
began to change with the establishment of the Office of War
Information (OWI) and construction of the first radio
studios expressly for government use.

To get the message out, these studios were linked by AT&T
Long Lines to shortwave transmitters owned by the likes of
General Electric, Westinghouse, RCA, Crosley and virtually
anyone else with an HF transmitter and a commercial shortwave
broadcasting license.

However, the founding fathers of this first generation of
U.S. international broadcasting knew that this was not good
enough. Permanent transmitting facilities would have to be
constructed solely for the government's purpose, and there
would have to be more powerful transmitters than those that
could be rented or leased.

R.J. Rockwell, director of broadcasting engineering for the
Crosley Corporation, recalled the meeting that spearheaded
that effort.

"In a drastic effort to remedy the situation, the Board of
War Communications called a council of war in Washington.
All interested parties were invited — international
licensees, equipment manufacturers, representatives of the
Federal Communications Commission, Office of War Information,
Office of Inter-American Affairs (CIAA), the Department of
State, and others — to determine how soon existing facilities
could be augmented and new facilities added, and what powers
could be attained. As a result of this and subsequent
meetings, it was decided that, within one year, a total of
32 transmitters could be in operation and at the disposal of
OWI and CIAA."

ENGINEERING FOR THE GOAT GLAND MAN

The organization searched for an engineering presence to head
up this massive and very demanding effort — someone who
understood high power transmitters and radio broadcasting.
That quest ended with the eventual appointment of one James
Oliver Weldon to the position of the OWI's Chief of
Communication Facilities Bureau.

Weldon's credentials were unique, as at that time there were
only a handful of engineers with experience in high power
transmitters and antennas, and most of these were fully
occupied with critical wartime jobs and defense-related
research.

Weldon's knowledge of high power operations, however, had not
come from such conventional and orthodox directions as say,
the 500 kW WLW station in Cincinnati or RCA's vast Long
Island international communications facility.

Weldon was 33 years old then and had been plucked from his
work at the Federal Telephone and Radio Corporation in
designing several 50 kW New York City stations. Just a few
years before, Weldon's small consulting firm located in
Del Rio, Texas had been kept busy catering to the demands of
the notorious Doctor John Romulus Brinkley — aka "The Goat
Gland Man," (or more simply "Doctor") — for a progressively
louder and more potent radio station.

In a world before Viagra, Brinkley catered to the victims of
impotence, offering male rejuvenation through the surgical
implantation of testicular tissue taken from a particular
breed of goat.

At a time when many in this country were facing starvation
due to the Great Depression, this unique type of quackery
made Brinkley a multimillionaire. His success in locating new
patients was greatly enhanced by the power of radio.

Weldon first consulted for Brinkley in connection with the
Doctor's first radio enterprise, a 1 kW station located in
Milford, Kan. However Brinkley's rather questionable medical
practices and battles with authorities eventually resulted in
the loss of this station license and prompted a relocation
of the Doctor's clinic southward to Del Rio. While exhausting
his appeals, Brinkley had been busy cutting a deal with high
Mexican officials, and secured permission to construct a new
radio transmitter just across the Rio Grande, and out of the
reach of the U.S. government. Weldon made the move to Texas
too and was tasked with putting the new station on the air,
and eventually expanding its power to more than 500,000 watts.
Brinkley's XER/XERA became known as "The Sunshine Station
Between The Nations" and Weldon made radio engineering
history by constructing the first-ever high-power Doherty
amplifier and installing an early "flattop" directional
antenna to focus the Doctor's RF away from Mexico and into
the heartland of America.

What the Doctor did with his station did not really concern
Weldon. He loved radio engineering and was a workaholic of
the first order, choosing to build stations over listening
to them. The experience gained in constructing the giant
transmitter in northern Mexico was to prove invaluable in
Weldon's new position with the OWI.

Once he made the move to Washington, Weldon's first priority
was in creating the needed permanent transmission facilities
for the United States government. CBS, NBC and the Crosley
Corporation all agreed to take part in this mission, with
their respective engineering departments constructing and
operating stations to OWI specifications. The government
would run interference as necessary to ensure that any
roadblocks to the project were removed and that the
necessary equipment would be made available during this
period of wartime shortages. As part of the arrangement,
Crosley would continue to operate that company's existing
shortwave station which was co-located with WLW transmitter
plant in Mason, Ohio until a new free-standing facility
could be built in nearby Bethany. NBC/RCA would assume
the task of building a shortwave plant in northern
California, and CBS would construct a sister station
near Los Angeles.

AN EASY PROJECT?

For the CBS engineering unit in Los Angles, on first
appearance, the construction of an OWI shortwave station
seemed to be an easy project — possibly no more than the
purchasing some additional real estate near their existing
KNX transmitter, putting up a few rhombic antennas per
Weldon's specifications, along with a building to house
some government-provided transmitters, and then staffing
the operation with some members of IBEW Local 40. That
would be it. After some preliminary east coast meetings in
early October of 1943, the project went into high gear.

Lester Bowman, who was based at the CBS Columbia Square
operation in Hollywood, drew the card to spearhead the
effort to locate property and build the southern California
shortwave station. He had been with the CBS for some time,
and in 1943 wore the title of Western Division Engineer.
Bowman was remembered by his associates as a hard driving
and successful manager. He would eventually head up all of
CBS's west coast radio and television engineering
operations.

During the east coast kickoff meetings, it was established
that CBS would work in liaison with the Defense Plant
Corporation (DPC), which had been charted by Congress in
1938 in anticipation of the America's entry into war, and
served as front end organization for expansion of
military-related production. When the war began, it became
the DPC's job to facilitate the construction of facilities
that were deemed to be in "the public interest."

Bowman and representatives from DPC got the ball rolling on
by contacting an L.A. real estate firm specializing in
commercial property.

It was not long, however, before the CBS engineering
personnel found out that their part of the OWI transmitting
station project might not be quite so easy as first
imagined.

For starters, Weldon had laid down some very specific
criteria for the stations:

* they were to be sited at least three miles from the coast
* there must be no mountain peaks exceeding three degrees
above the horizon within line-of-site from the
transmitter location
* the real estate parcel for each had to be one mile long
in the east-to-west direction and one-half mile in the
north-south dimension
* the site would have to accommodate 150-foot high antenna
masts (later changed to 170 feet)
* cost for land acquisition could not exceed $400 per acre

50 CYCLE POWER

Not mentioned in Weldon's criteria was additional factor in
the location of the station — availability of electrical
power, and as the southern California OWI team soon realized,
not all power is created equal. In anticipation of the
construction of the California station, a priority order had
been placed for three RCA 50 kW transmitters and a behemoth
Federal Telephone and Radio Corporation 200 kW machine
(it required one of the RCAs as a dedicated driver stage),
and a not inconsequential amount of electricity would be
needed for their operation. A concern that was not so obvious
was the frequency of the available power source.

It may come as a surprise, but for a time the entire
Los Angeles area was supplied with 50 cycle (Hz) power.

Although a move to put the region on 60 Hz power started in
the 1930s, pockets of 50 Hz distribution existed for many
years thereafter. (It’s reported that as late as 1949, the
power being supplied to Mt. Wilson was 50 cycle and early
television transmitter installations there depended on
rotary converters for 60 cycle power.)

As the original plans were to locate the southern California
OWI shortwave station within the confines of Los Angeles,
transmitters had been ordered with 60 cycle power supplies.
While 50 cycle power supply components could be retrofitted,
wartime shortages would likely have slowed things
considerably.

THE OIL BOOM

Another factor put several other prospective sites off
limits. This was a direct result of the wartime demand for
petroleum products. To supply the needed fuel supplies for
the military, drilling rigs and oil wells were springing up
all over southern California. By late 1943, property that
had at one time been considered worthless in terms of
development was now selling and leasing at a premium.

MOVING OUT OF L.A.

As a station site within the environs of Los Angeles
seemed more and more of impossibility, Bowman and his
team extended their search to include neighboring Orange
County. This area was basically farm country then, with
little commercial development and a population of less
than 150,000. Some potential sites were identified, but
before they could be claimed, objections to the planned
170-foot antenna masts were voiced. Even in a region as
wide open and sparsely populated as Orange County,
military aviation training fields were popping up like
weeds.

By the time 1943 drew to a close, Bowman's group had
investigated more than 40 sites, with each being
rejected for one reason or another.

A LETTER FROM THE UNION

The coming of the new year brought little joy and
encouragement for the CBS group. Their project was
really no further along than it had been in October.
Compounding Bowman's worries was an early January
letter from the business manager of the IBEW local
representing CBS Columbia Square technicians. As the
OWI project shortwave project was not swathed in a
lot of wartime secrecy, the union was aware of it
and of the ever widening search for a transmitter site.
The letter to Bowman warned of some rather dire
consequences if the station were to be built outside of
greater Los Angeles.

"From its inception, such a project would be cursed by
the shortage of skilled labor. Not long ago contractors
who had undertaken jobs in these areas (remote from Los
Angeles) were offering $2.20 per hour for building and
construction tradesman, with a guarantee of all the
overtime that they could work. They had much difficulty
in manning the jobs.

Once the construction had been completed you would be
faced with an even more difficult problem when you
attempted to secure engineering personnel. As you know,
almost the entire Pacific Coast area is classified by
the WNC as a Number One Shortage Area, with broadcast
technicians considered a craft in which a critical
shortage exists."

The letter went on to warn Bowman that radio stations in
the more remote parts of California were experiencing
extreme difficulties in attracting and keeping qualified
personnel and:

"…that no man, trained in radio, will desert the
metropolitan areas where work can always be had in one of
the many war industries, to bury himself in some such
out-of-the-way place."

Undaunted, Bowman continued his search for a place to
build the new station.

DOCUMENT, DOCUMENT, DOCUMENT!

As ground for the CBS OWI transmitter plant was scheduled
to have been broken no later than the fall of 1943,
concern arose in the network’s New York headquarters that
someone might be called to task over the amount of time
that was passing without tangible results. This prompted a
letter from CBS's director of radio engineering, William
Lodge, instructing Bowman to create a document for the
record, should there ever be any questions about the
efforts to get the facility constructed.

Bowman complied, producing a five-page single spaced
typewritten letter to Lodge. It described all of trials
and tribulations befalling Bowman in his search for a
suitable piece of real estate. This document, 60-odd years
later, makes it much easier to follow the initial twists
and turns on the road to getting the Delano station built.

THE SEARCH EXPANDS AGAIN

With any hope of locating the station within commuting
distance of Los Angeles gone, Bowman's search moved out
further and further. He even investigated — without
success — Mojave Desert acreage near Barstow for a site
that met Weldon's criteria. However this didn't pan out
either.

After the Mojave trip, proximity to the greater Los Angeles
area didn't seem to matter anymore, so the exploration team
decided to travel north. Land some distance from
Bakersfield was examined, but rejected as too mountainous.
Areas closer to that city had already been staked out for
oil prospecting.

By now Bowman's team was more than 100 miles from downtown
L.A., so what difference could another 25 or 30 miles make?

They continued north past the small towns of Cawelo and
McFarland, finally stopping with a surveyor in the small
town of Delano on January 27.

The next day, C. R. Jacobs, a CBS staffer working with
Bowman, fired off a terse telegram to CBS management in
New York.

"SPENT THURSDAY JANUARY 27 IN BAKERSFIELD AREA FOUND
PROPERTY APPROXIMATELY FIVE MILES WEST OF DELANO IN
VICINITY OF SECTION 13 TOWNSHIP 25 SOUTH RANGE 24 EAST
KERN COUNTY WHICH CAN BE HAD AT $50 PER ACRE OR LESS STOP
APPROXIMATELY 145 MILES FROM HOLLYWOOD OFFICE STOP DELANO
POPULATION 5000 STOP NO OBSTRUCTIONS 360 DEGREES STOP
WIRE REACTIONS TODAY SURE INCLUDING WELDONS APPROVAL.
AM STARTING ACQUISITION AND WILL ADVISE WITHIN A FEW DAYS
IF ANY COMPLICATIONS SHOULD ARISE STOP NBC STARTED
CONSTRUCTION JANUARY 27 STOP BEST REGARDS."

C R JACOBS

(The NBC reference is to the parallel project being
staged by that network — the construction of the OWI’s
Northern California shortwave at Dixon.)

Initially, the presence of an emergency landing field some
five miles away from the proposed Delano site created
strong opposition from the Army and the CAA (Civil
Aeronautics Administration). However, Bowman's mind was
made up that Delano was going to be the home to the CBS
shortwave station.

A special meeting to resolve differences was set up on
Feb. 15. Weldon had been briefed on the Army and CAA
opposition, and he prepared a telegram to be read at the
meeting. It described the necessity for constructing the
overdue station and also played on patriotic sympathies.

"THE OFFICE OF WAR INFORMATION AND THE COORDINATOR OF
INTERAMERICAN AFFAIRS AND THE ARMED FORCED RADIO SERVICE
OF THE ARMY ARE CRITICALLY IN NEED OF ADDITIONAL HIGH
POWERED BROADCAST TRANSMITTERS ON THE PACIFIC COAST FOR
CONDUCTION (sic) PSYCHOLOGICAL WARFARE IN CONJUNCTION
WITH THE MILITARY EFFORT IN THE PACIFIC AND IN THE CASE
OF THE ARMED FORCES RADIO SERVICE FOR BROADCASTING
PROGRAMS TO THE AMERICAN TROOPS SCATTERED OVER THAT
AREA.… THE WAR EFFORT IS DEFINITELY CRIPPLED BY THE FACT
THAT SUCH FACILITIES ARE NOT IN OPERATION AT THE PRESENT
TIME….I HOPE THAT THE COMMITTEE WILL CONSIDER THIS
PROJECT AS AN IMPORTANT PART OF THE WAR EFFORT AND GIVE
DUE CONSIDERATION TO THE NECESSITY OF PROMPT APPROVAL"

J O WELDON CHIEF COMMUNICATION FACILITIIES
BUREAU OFFICE OF WAR INFORMATION

After the reading of the telegram, all opposition was
dropped and Delano was given a green light.

RECORD CONSTRUCTION

In what seems nothing less than miraculous today, ground
was first broken on the station project in May of 1944,
and by that November, the first transmitter was delivering
current to a 170-foot-high rhombic.

Not long after Delano went on the air, Jack Quinn, a CBS
engineer who had previously worked at General Electric’s
KGEI shortwave station near San Francisco, was assigned to
Delano in the capacity of engineering supervisor.
He remembered the area then as more or less the end of the
earth.

"There were no farms, no nothing, just arid desert — miles
and miles of white alkali soil," he recalled. "It was
really worthless real estate. Maybe $60 an acre."
Of course that was before the irrigation canals were built,
bringing water from Northern California.

Badlands or not Delano became the first of the three OWI
stations to go on the air, beating NBC's efforts at Dixon
and those of Crosley at Bethany, Ohio.

Anticipating the day when the station would start operations,
CBS, some months before had requested FCC call signs that
reflected the network's operating presence. These were KCBA,
KCBF and KCBR.

DELANO AND THE BOMB

For reasons unknown today, the use of harmonic filtering in
large transmitter output stages 60 or 70 years ago was not
commonplace. Quinn, who would remain with the Delano station
until 1952, recalled that the early transmitters there were
not so equipped.

"The Federal and the RCA transmitters didn't have filters;
they just weren't used then."

In less than a year, this absence of harmonic energy trapping
was to create problems in the most secret project of the
war — the Manhattan Project's testing of the world's first
atomic bomb at a secret New Mexico desert site, nearly 1,000
miles east of Delano.

That test, conducted in the predawn hours of July 16, 1945,
relied on HF radio for communications between various
observation posts. This radio communication system had been
checked out and was functioning well as the minutes and
seconds leading up to mankind's first nuclear blast ticked
off. However, at a most inappropriate time (and completely
unknown to the station's operators) Delano butted in.

As recorded in one account of the atomic test:

"The final countdown began at 5:10 a.m. with a crashing
rendition of the 'Star Spangled Banner.' Just as (Kenneth)
Bainbridge (a Manhattan Project scientist) gave the signal
to Sam Allison (another Manhattan Project scientist and the
countdown announcer) in the control center, radio station
KCBA in Delano, California, crossed wave lengths with the
Trinity frequency. The station, operated by the Office of
War Information, was opening its morning Voice of America
broadcast to Latin America. The National Anthem provided
stirring accompaniment for Allison as intoned the
announcement: 'It is now zero minus twenty minutes.'"

Following the sign-on at Delano, the OWI had scheduled
musical programming.

"The Voice of America program now punctuated Allison's
countdown with rapturous background music. Ken Greisen,
lying next to I.I. Rabi (both bomb scientists) listened
dreamily to the waltz from Tchaikovsky's "Serenade for
Strings." The violins seemed to rise in crescendo with
Allison's excited blurts."

NO VSWR WORRIES

The Federal transmitter at Delano also lacked other
niceties taken for granted today. One of these was VSWR
indication and a circuit for shutdown should there be a
problem in this area.

Large stations with multiple antennas and transmission
lines rely on frequent inspections to catch little
problems before they can mushroom. Delano was no exception.
At Delano, early in the day, before the valley sun beat
down too fiercely, an operator would venture outside to
make a routine examination of the various antenna elements
and feeders.

On one such occasion, the technician spotted a downed
transmission line that had apparently failed during the
nighttime operating schedule. There had been no alarms in
the control room and it was business as usual. However
instead of launching words and music from Washington to
the world, the Federal 200 kilowatter spent the hours
dumping its RF energy directly into the ground. When the
downed feeder was being lifted back to its normal position,
a large mass of glass was found, the result of the intense
heat generated in the transmitter load that the desert
sand provided.

Quinn remembers another heating effect provided by the
Federal.

"The transmitter was just plain brute force, with
unshielded open wire balanced 600 ohm lines," Quinn
recollected.

"The tank circuit consisted of two huge parallel
three- or four-inch diameter water-cooled tuned lines
approximately 15-feet long, with one having a variable
shorting bar for tuning. There was a copper hairpin
output loop which coupled directly to the transmission
line and it went out the window to the switching bay.
As a demonstration of how open this arrangement was, when
there was arcing, I would go in alongside this output
lines — maybe six-feet away — and have the operators
close the interlocked glass door and turn the
transmitter on. Almost immediately you could feel both
feet heating up. Then the heat would slowly creep up your
legs. When it almost reached the groin area you'd flag
the operator to shut it down. After power was removed
your legs were still hot to the touch for some minutes,
before they cooled down to normal!"

(Later transmitters installed at Delano did concern
themselves with VSWR and included measuring devices.
For those of us who have spent our careers with slightly
more modest transmitters and operating powers, it's
instructive to run the numbers for reflected power on a
good day from one of Delano's 250,000 Watt transmitters.

Assuming a reasonable VSWR of 1:5, or 4 percent reflected
power, this is about a 0.18 dB loss, or only some 10,000
Watts arriving back at the transmitter!)

A 'SLIGHTLY ILLEGAL' HAM RIG

Historically, many radio engineers and technicians were
licensed as radio amateurs before beginning their
professional careers. Such was the case with many of the
operators at Delano.

Most of the ham fraternity is content with loading their
rigs, generally limited to a few hundred watts, into
dipoles, beams or sloppers. However, when there was time
for idle talk among hams at Delano it often turned
speculative. Just what kind of signal might they deliver
to their brethren on the other side of the planet, if only
they had a transmitter the likes of the Federal and an
antenna with 20 dB or so of gain like the station's giant
co-linear curtain array?

One day, the temptation for experimentation proved too
strong.

Quinn remembers that occasion well.

"I'll never forget connecting one of those curtains to the
200 KW transmitter, and connecting the station RCA AR88
receiver to another and calling CQ just once," said Quinn.
"This was at noon and there was absolutely no propagation
to Japan at my home station until 5 p.m. There must have
been a thousand JA's calling back with S-9+ signals. Amazing
what a good antenna and lots of power will do."

Eventually more modern and better behaved transmitters
replaced the start-up Federal and RCAs. The first upgrade,
saw two massive "walk-in" General Electric 100 kW machines
were installed in wings located to the north and south of
the control room.

During the 1960s, three much more modern 250 kW transmitters
manufactured by Collins were added to the HF arsenal. This
expansion necessitated "blowing out" the front of the
building and creating another wing to accommodate this
additional 750 kW of HF capacity.

The GEs, along with the Federal and the RCAs were eventually
displaced by four much more compact and efficient Brown
Boveri 250 kilowatt units.

A PLACE CALLED PIXLEY

During the same decade in which the building was modified
for the Collins "autotune" transmitters, Delano received
funding and a mandate to expand operations to another campus.
This was located some 20 miles away, near the tiny town of
Pixley.

The 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis prompted the government to
take another look at emergency preparedness and one of
the areas examined was connectivity between Washington and
Delano. Since its inception, Delano had been linked to VOA
studios by AT&T Long Lines copper. Even though the
communications giant had its own emergency preparedness
plans, it was thought that U.S. VOA stations should have a
work-around if, for some reason, AT&T couldn't deliver.
Communications satellites were in their infancy then, so
the only logical backup linkage was by HF radio. For Delano,
the funding provided for the purchase of an isolated tract
of land near Pixley. There, a large HF receiving station
was constructed. It included numerous rhombic antennas and
racks full of Racal "digitally-tuned" shortwave receivers.
The Pixley facility was linked to Delano with a single-hop
microwave system. Fortunately, the operation never had to
be used during the remaining years of The Cold War.

HF BROADCASTING BEGINS TO FADE

In moving with the times, the VOA linked its relay stations
via satellite and Delano, in addition to serving as an HF
transmitting facility, became a gateway to the Pacific Ocean
Region satellites.

This was expanded in the early 1990s by the addition of
video capacity in order to push television programming from
the Worldnet side of the VOA's parent organization, the
United States Information Agency. This involved not only
the installation of additional high power amplifiers and
video exciters, but also standards conversion equipment
needed to turn the 525-line NTSC programming produced in
Washington into 625-line PAL required by most of the
Pacific Rim countries.

For a time too, the Delano facility was also used to
increase the reach of the BBC's worldwide shortwave
broadcasting. In a sort of "trade-out" arrangement, BBC
programming targeted to the Pacific was transmitted by
Delano and, in turn, the BBC transmitted VOA programming
to Europe from its HF broadcasting facility in Woofferton,
England.

However, times change.

Both the "Beeb" and the VOA have deemphasized program
placement via HF radio, relying more and more on
retransmission by existing AM and FM broadcasters in
countries they wish to reach. The Internet has also come
into its own as a conduit for international "broadcasting."

In 1979, the Dixon facility was the first of these pioneer
OWI/VOA stations to be silenced. It was initially placed in
mothball status, coming back to life for a five year stint
in 1983. It was completely decommissioned some years later.

The Bethany, Ohio station was next to go, transmitting its
last VOA programming in late 1994.

The clock finally ran out for Delano on the evening of
Saturday, October 27 at 8:30 local time. (Measured from the
UTC reference, that was 3:30 a.m. the following day —
October 28).

There was no special observance or program to honor the
station's nearly 63 years of continuous broadcasting to the
world.

The final transmission, done on 5,890 kHz, was nothing out
of the ordinary — just a scheduled program in the Thai
language.