History
Shortwave services from the Australian Broadcasting Corporation were inaugurated in December 1939 by Prime Minister Robert Menzies.
One of the functions of Australian shortwave broadcasting was to counter Axis powers propaganda, particularly that of the Japanese. However, the ABC's transmitters were much weaker than the Japanese or German services. The transmitter of Amalgamated Wireless (Australasia) (AWA) near Sydney had 10 kilowatts (kW) of power, and stations VLR and VLW had 2 kW each.
In 1941, following consultation between the British and Australian governments, a transmitter site in Shepparton, Victoria was selected, in part because of a flat landscape and soil conductivity. The site was completed in 1944 with one 50 kW and two 100 kW transmitters. The station was then formally named Radio Australia.
It had a considerable range of broadcasts to the Asian region in the 1970s and 1980s, however in the late 1990s political influence on its broadcasting range and programming limited its Asian spread. In recent years Radio Australia programs have also become available via the internet. These services are streamed from machines hosted by Akamai Technologies in Steinsel, Luxembourg ensuring good network connectivity for listeners in Europe.
Read more about this topic: Radio Australia
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“A great proportion of the inhabitants of the Cape are always thus abroad about their teaming on some ocean highway or other, and the history of one of their ordinary trips would cast the Argonautic expedition into the shade.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“All history becomes subjective; in other words there is properly no history, only biography.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“I believe that history has shape, order, and meaning; that exceptional men, as much as economic forces, produce change; and that passé abstractions like beauty, nobility, and greatness have a shifting but continuing validity.”
—Camille Paglia (b. 1947)