WRMI, Radio Miami International has started Shortwave broadcasting on the former WYFR, Family Radio Shortwave facilities in Okeechobee, FL.
I wonder what the audience for short-wave is today? When I operated stations in South America in the late 60's, most larger portables and nearly all home model radios had short wave, but the newer models did not come with the added bands. Over the next decades, short-wave consumer radios became an item of limited availability as nearly everything replaced AM / SW with AM / FM.
I assume, since most radios were and are made in Asia, that this is a world-wide issue. Who has short-wave radios today and are there enough of them to sustain those radio ministries? HCJB abandoned its international broadcasts, which tells me that rational minds in the area of religious radio are not thinking about short-wave.
Look at the problems satellite radio has had in attracting advertisers for a service that doesn't have great numbers in any one market, and you'll realize how impossible it was to sell shortwave, with listeners worldwide but maybe a couple dozen in any given town, on Madison Avenue.
International shortwave has always had issues when the intent is to be a commercial, advertiser supported service. Back in the late 30's, CBS and NBC tried to do international services on shortwave and these never got traction and were discontinued by the time W.W. II changed broadcasters' priorities.
Part of the issue is that international brands generally have local ad agencies in each country which do media placement. They have a local budget, and they are not going to spend it on coverage of nations that are not part of their budget.
There is a different area where commercial short-wave was very successful for many decades, which is the area of Tropical Band stations. Those, intended to serve a single country or region of a country, were successful when smaller local markets had no local stations. As more and more and more stations sprung up in smaller towns, the tropical band stations became less relevant. And when there was a wide assortment of local or networked FM stations in every country, those shortwave stations with their static, fading and lower quality started disappearing.
They're almost gone now. There used to be some great listening on the tropical band (4700-5000 khz) from Central America, South America and Africa, especially the music.
...a good deal of the time, they just simulcasted their FM or time-shifted it.WRNO was around a bit longer...because...