National Voice of America Museum of Broadcasting

The story

In 1942, a month after the attack on Pearl Harbor, the U.S. Office of War Information needed a radio installation powerful enough to blast news and anti-Axis reporting past enemy blockades into Europe, North Africa, and South America—far out of range of German U-boats patrolling the East Coast. The government turned to Cincinnati industrialist Powel Crosley Jr., whose team had already engineered WLW into a 500,000-watt broadcast monster known as 'The Nation's Station.' Crosley's engineers bought 600 acres of farmland 25 miles north of the city in what was then Union Township, built 27 curtain antenna arrays, and erected the Bethany Relay Station: an Art Deco brick fortress engineered so aggressively that Adolf Hitler reportedly complained about 'those Cincinnati liars.'

For half a century, until satellite technology rendered ground-based high-frequency shortwave obsolete in 1994, this high-security site beamed Voice of America signals straight past the Iron Curtain. The towering antennas were razed in the late 1990s, but the 30,000-square-foot transmitter building survived. Inside, you can literally step inside a 1960s 250,000-watt Collins 821A shortwave transmitter—a room-sized metal cabinet lined with heavy copper bus bars, giant vacuum tubes, and crossbar switching gear that once redirected local electrical grid power out into the ionosphere.

The rest of the floor plan doubles as a shrine to Crosley's wider mechanical empire—housing vintage Crosley radios alongside his Shelvador refrigerators and tiny post-war automobiles—plus local broadcast relics ranging from mid-century television cameras to regional TV puppets like Larry Smith's creations. Up on the second floor, licensed operators from the West Chester Amateur Radio Association still operate an active ham radio shack under callsign WC8VOA, keeping live shortwave transmissions leaving Bethany Station.