International broadcasting
With the severing of Germany's undersea cables, the wireless telegraph station in Nauen was the country's sole means of long-distance communication.
In June and July 1923, wireless transmissions were completed during nights on 97 meters from Poldhu to Marconi's yacht Elettra in the Cape Verde Islands.
[3] High speed shortwave telegraphy circuits were then installed from London to Australia, India, South Africa and Canada as the main element of the Imperial Wireless Chain from 1926.
Clarence W. Jones started transmitting on Christmas Day, 1931 from Christian missionary radio station HCJB in Quito, Ecuador.
[8] Once Adolf Hitler assumed power in 1933, shortwave, under the Auslandsrundfunk (Foreign Radio Section), was regarded as a vital element of Nazi propaganda.
[citation needed] Several announcers who became well known in their countries included British Union of Fascists member William Joyce, who was one of the two "Lord Haw-Haw"s; Frenchmen Paul Ferdonnet and André Olbrecht, called "the traitors of [Radio] Stuttgart"; and Americans Frederick William Kaltenbach, "Lord Hee-Haw", and Mildred Gillars, one of the two announcers called "Axis Sally".
[citation needed] The Cold War led to increased international broadcasting (and jamming), as Communist and non-Communist states attempted to influence each other's domestic population.
In addition to the U.S.-Soviet cold war, the Chinese-Russian border dispute led to an increase of the numbers of transmitters aimed at the two nations, and the development of new techniques such as playing tapes backwards for reel-to-reel recorders.
[citation needed] Some services, such as Swiss Radio International, left shortwave altogether and exist in Internet form, Swissinfo.
Radio Canada International ceased shortwave broadcasting in 2012 becoming a purely online service producing podcasts and maintaining a website in several languages.
[15] Radio Moscow's successor, Voice of Russia, was disbanded in 2014 and replaced by Sputnik, a multimedia news platform, which does not broadcast on shortwave.
[17][18] In addition, new standards, such as Digital Radio Mondiale, are being introduced, as well as sending programs over the Web to be played back later, as "podcasts".
[citation needed] The BBC World Service was the first broadcaster to consider setting up a satellite television news and information channel as far back as 1976, but ceded being the first to CNN (that had primary access to Canada soon after launch).
The defunct BBC World Service Antigua Relay Station was built in 1976, but its setup costs were not known to have been part of the BBCWS decision processes at the time.
[citation needed] In the early 1990s, many international (as well as domestic) 24-hour news and information channels launched as part of the post-Cold War prosperity bubble.
A second reason is to advance a nation's foreign policy interests and agenda by disseminating its views on international affairs or on the events in particular parts of the world.
Other reasons include teaching a foreign language, such as Radio Exterior de España's Spanish class, Un idioma sin fronteras, or the Voice of America's broadcasts in Special English.
An additional reason for international broadcasting is to maintain contact with a country's citizens travelling abroad or expatriates who have emigrated and share news from home as well as cultural programming.
A number of international services such as the original BBC Empire Service, Radio Netherlands, France's Poste Colonial (now Radio France International) and others were founded in part with the goal of helping draw overseas empires closer to the mother country and provide closer cultural and communication connections between the home country and its colonies, a role that became largely obsolete due to decolonization.
Because of this many broadcasters are discovering they can reach a wider audience through other methods (particularly the internet and satellite television) and are cutting back on (or even entirely dropping) shortwave.
Depending on time of day, season of year, solar weather and Earth's geomagnetic field, a signal might reach around the world.
In previous decades shortwave (and sometimes high-powered mediumwave) transmission was regarded as the main (and often the only) way in which broadcasters could reach an international audience.
In recent years the proliferation of technologies such as satellite broadcasting, the Internet, and rebroadcasts of programming on AM and FM within target nations has meant that this is no longer necessarily the case.
The BBC World Service considered setting up a global TV news channel as far back as 1975, but abandoned the idea for internal reasons.
As Morse Code is considered to be a data format, with email and RSS merely being refinements of the technology it can be said that international broadcasting has a deep relationship with modern-day datacasting.
The global economic downturn of 2008-2009 will probably increase the email and RSS audience sizes as fewer people will be able to afford high speed internet connections in North America, Western Europe and the Asia-Pacific regions.
A third audience consists of journalists, government officials, and key businesspersons, who exert a disproportionate influence on a state's foreign or economic policy.
Similar programming came from an unlicensed, or "pirate" station, Radio Caroline, which broadcast from a ship in the international waters of the North Sea.
In Nazi Germany, a major propaganda campaign, backed by law and prison sentences, attempted to discourage Germans from listening to such stations.
[23] David Jackson, director of the Voice of America, noted "The North Korean government doesn't jam us, but they try to keep people from listening through intimidation or worse.
