WRMI Shortwave has started SW broadcasting on the former WYFR SW facilities

WRMI, Radio Miami International has started Shortwave broadcasting on the former WYFR, Family Radio Shortwave facilities in Okeechobee, FL.

I'm wondering how well Jeff White and the new WRMI is doing since taking over the former WYFR SW facilities. Any updates?

He has a few frequencies leased out to Brother Stair and the Overcomer Ministry. Also a couple leased out to Rick Wiles (or Wilds?) for another religious program.

New Brother Stair slogan: Brother Stair he's everywhere!

How old is this guy? He has sounded like he's 90 for about 30 years now.

Tuning by today (hard to avoid him) he says he is 81 years old.

PLEASE not another dollar a holler station!!! This is probably another sham of a "Christian" station that will play any crackpot that flashes enough money in their faces like WWCR. I hate to say this but Family Radio staying on would better than this!

DavidEduardo said:

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.

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I've been a shortwave listener for nearly 50 years. Broadcasting is on its last legs, and even some of the other users of the band (maritime, aeronautical, various "utility" users) have shipped out. The hams hang on, but they're an aging bunch and, with Morse Code no longer a requirement for licensing, activity on the code segments of the ham bands is dying a slow death. So much of what shortwave did well, the Internet does better.

Jeff White's original Radio Miami International was a fun listen, but like so many domestic SWs before it (WRNO, KUSW ... and NDXE, which took out a big ad in Passport to World Band Radio one year but never signed on), WRNI has had to sell airtime to anyone whose check clears in order to pay the bills. WCSN, the Christian Science Monitor's SW service, was a great idea, but bled buckets of money until it had to be shut down. 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.

HCJB has moved it's transmission facilities to the north coast of Australia, and is beaming to China/Asia. Not nearly as many transmitter hours as when they were in Quito, though. The audience for shortwave in the US has dwindled.

DavidEduardo said:

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.

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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. I think the only English I ever heard on that band was Radio Five from South Africa, a Christian station in Honduras, and a government-operated station from Uganda. But I kept tuning in because, in those pre-internet days, that was the only convenient way to hear popular and traditional music from a lot of those countries.

I used to enjoy listening to Radio Canada, and the rest. I think the internet killed off some of these stations. It's cheaper to put up an internet stream rather than a transmitter site that gobbles real estate and tons of electricity. Internet stream audio quality is better too. Shortwave radios aren't as common as they once were and the demand isn't there. On the plus side the Amateur Radio operators have gained frequencies with the reduction in shortwave broadcasters so their is an upside. The downside is many Amateur Radio operators started as shortwave listeners, so a potential entry point to the hobby is fading away.

WRNO in New Orleans and KUSW Salt Lake City tried domestic SW for awhile, even though domestic shortwave is technically against FCC rules. Both stations were interesting to listen to. WRNO was around a bit longer than KUSW not because of any profit but because the owner loved having a shortwave station. WBCQ Monticello, Maine is still on several frequencies and doing okay. It appears to be a kind of hobby Shortwave station run by the guys who did Radio New York International shipboard off the coast and another outlet for Brother Stair.

Mike Sheridan said:

WRNO was around a bit longer...because...

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...a good deal of the time, they just simulcasted their FM or time-shifted it.

One more use for shortwave was for extending coverage of local Canadian stations to the tundra and the fishing fleets. I think their were about four or five such forty-nine meter relays. I used to hear CFRX, which relayed CFRB, Toronto, and CHNX, which relayed CHNS, Halifax. These stations were mostly 500w or 1KW and could only be received when the full path to Europe was in daylight.

My timing could not have been worse, my last radio bit the dust shortly before the ANC took over South Africa and the Iron Curtain fell over. Somewhere on the web you can find better copies of RBI's final broadcast than this.