The Voice of America has one transmitter site left inside the USA, at 
Greenville, North Carolina.  In the 1950s there were many, including 
Schenectady NY; Bound Brook, NJ; Cincinnati, OH, and Dixon and Delano, CA. 
VOA is now primarily transmitted from places such as Sao Tome Island, Tinian 
Island, Sri Lanka, Thailand, Phillipines, and many others.

Saudi Arabia still runns 1.5 megawatts on 1522 KHz.  Many shortwave stations 
are still running 500 KW.  They understand propagation a lot better, and 
tend to put more effort into laying down a loud signal in their target area 
with less spilling off in all directions.  If they can do it, most try to 
transmit from locations within a couple of thousand miles of their target 
area, and not expect many people to look for them over distances of several 
thousand miles.


-----Original Message----- 
From: Colin McDonald
Sent: Wednesday, June 26, 2013 11:04 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Danny's June 27 comments on the small portable SSB capable 
shortwave radio thread.

the bbc used to have LW band transmitters too scattered all over the
place...this is on the band below the Am broadcast band.  Those transmitters
could often be heard in north america late at night as they were powerful
and had very large antenna systems that made them copiable even this far
away.
I seem to recall they might have one LW transmitter left in the UK, but it's
relatively low power and more of a nod to the traddition more than something
useful to SWL's.
When I first got into ham radio back over 20 years ago, I had an FT101E with
a 12 foot piece of wire strung across the ceiling of my bedroom.  I could
pickup voice of america on several different frequencies back then and it
was always fun to listen to that along with other big gun shortwave stations
that you could hear with a wet noodle.
Gone are the good old days of 1 megawatt or 1.5 megawatt broadcast stations.
And, gone are the days when you could get a 50 foot roll of 14 gage bear
high purity copper wire for 5 bucks too haha.
I must have gone through 10 of those in the first few years making antennas
and loading coils and all sorts of cool stuff.
Now, your lucky if you can find 14 gage bear copper, and if you can, it's in
10 foot rolls and it'll cost allot more than 5 bucks.
They claim our copper resources are beginning to run short, that is, there
is only a couple hundred years left at current consumption rates based on
the deposits they know about.
I figure if we actually get serious about recycling copper we'll find that
we have allot more of it available to us lol.

73
Colin, V A6BKX