W1XAL / WRUL / WNYW / WYFR

[mwaters@wesleyan.edu (Martin J. Waters)]

        The October 1998 issue of Monitoring Times magazine carries an
article on the history of this shortwave station, which had its
transmitters in the Shore Acres section of Scituate from 1936, when it was
experimental station W1XAL, until it moved to its present site in
Okeechobee, Florida, in 1979. The magazine is at www.grove-ent.com,
although I don't know if the article is available there.
        The article says that WYFR still is using the five 50-kW and 100-kW
transmitters moved from Scituate, along with other transmitters. It has a
photo of the WNYW call letters on a large chimney of the old industrial
building that was the Scituate transmitter building. That was a local
landmark when I was growing up there.
        It's now a Christian radio format station (Your Family Radio). Its
first four-letter calls stood for World Radio University for the Listener.
In 1966, it became Radio New York Worldwide and tried to operate as a
commercial station. WYFR bought it in 1973. In the '30s, and as WRUL from
1939 until some years later, it was run by the University Club of Boston.
        It had an interesting history in Scituate, including takeovers in
World War II by the federal government (which had no shortwave stations of
its own) and again in the early days of Castro to broadcast to Cuba. The
Scituate system of nine rhombic antennas, gone now except for some concrete
bases, was designed for broadcasting either to Latin America or to Europe.
        There's a main road going past the old transmitter site, where you
would drive along with towers on both sides of you, and transmission lines
strung up on poles going along and across the road. I remember getting
severe distorted signals on my old AM car radio in the 1960 Thunderbird. I
guess that was a 28th harmonic <g>?
        The article does not mention that you also can still see some of
the minor military fortifications that were installed during World War II
to protect the station from possible sabotage or attack by German scuba
divers coming ashore from U-boats along the beach just beyond the antenna
farm. I've heard that in later years local teen-agers used to hang out in
those old concrete bunkers and drink beer, but I don't really know anything
about that.

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