Greenville Transmission Station B, North Carolina

The transmitting station in Greenville, North Carolina, known as Site B, and also as the Edward R. Murrow Transmitting Station, has broadcast Voice of America programming globally via shortwave since 1963, and is the only federal facility in the USA that continues to do so (four others have closed, including its double, Site A, 15 miles north). It is the largest shortwave broadcast transmission facility in the country, with nine 500,000-watt transmitters and 39 antenna arrays, with masts as high as 450 feet, in a clearing that covers four square miles. A dozen federal employees keep the transmitters and antenna arrays functioning, often themselves manufacturing spare parts for the old equipment. The facility typically uses at least three of its transmitters for Spanish programming aimed at Cuba. English language news and music is also broadcast from here to Africa, Europe, and the Middle East, and by relays to former Eastern Bloc countries. Voice of America programming is produced in Washington DC, and the VOA is one of several entities operated as part of the U.S. Agency for Global Media, which includes Radio Free Europe, Radio Free Asia, the Middle East Broadcast Network, and Radio y TV Martí (which produces programming specifically for Cuba). The agency employs 3,500 people, who work over a wide spectrum of media, including FM and AM radio, television, web, and social media platforms, distributed by radio, satellite, and internet around the world, in more than 50 languages. To do so, the agency operates 19 transmitting stations, in countries that include Kuwait, Djibouti, Burkina Faso, Botswana, Germany, Thailand, Tajikistan, South Korea, and the Philippines. Some of these overseas facilities have been enhanced by transmitters and parts that were salvaged from the four other, now closed VOA transmission plants in the USA. There are an estimated 250 million people in remote parts of the world that still listen to shortwave radio.