WRMI on 9395 kHz: the Florida shortwave station that relays everyone

What you hear

On 9395 kHz you never quite know what is on until you have listened for a minute. WRMI is a commercial station that sells time, so one hour may bring an English programme from Radio Prague or Radio Slovakia, the next a preacher, then a programme about radio for radio hobbyists, a block of old recordings, or an hour of Spanish. The common thread is the identification, "WRMI, Radio Miami International", and the jingles between programmes. The audio is clean and the transmitters are strong; the programmes are whatever the clients have booked this week.

Who transmits and why

WRMI started in 1994 as a small station in the Miami area, and in 2013 it moved to Okeechobee in central Florida, where it took over the large transmitter plant that Family Radio had built for its worldwide broadcasts. The site came with more than a dozen transmitters and a field of curtain antennas aimed at the Americas, Europe and beyond, which made WRMI, almost overnight, the biggest private shortwave station in the United States. The catalogue's coordinates, 27.5° N, 80.9° W, are the Okeechobee site.

The business model is simple: anyone can buy airtime. The clients have included international broadcasters that gave up their own transmitters but wanted to keep a shortwave presence in the Americas, religious organisations large and small, hobby programmes and independent producers. 9395 kHz is one of the station's workhorse frequencies, on the air for many hours a day with a changing mix.

When and where to listen

9395 kHz is in the 31 metre band, which works day and night but favours the evening and night for distance. In North America the signal is loud from late afternoon until morning, and public receivers in the eastern United States and Canada hear it as if it were a local station. From Europe the best window is the European night, from around midnight until sunrise, when the transatlantic path is dark; the signal is usually readable in western Europe and weaker further east. The catalogue gives no hours because the schedule is a patchwork that changes with the clients; the station's own published grid is the place to look for a particular programme.

The band is crowded. Other broadcasters sit 5 and 10 kHz away, and when one of them is stronger the trick is to switch to the sideband that faces away from it, or to narrow the filter.

In ShackDeck

Station catalogue → Shortwave broadcast → WRMI. The program picks a public receiver that covers 9395 kHz, tunes it and sets AM; no receiver, antenna or account of your own is required. Choose a receiver in North America for an easy signal, or a European one at night for the challenge. The same station relays the Russian-language WRN block on 15770 kHz in the morning, which is covered in the WRN article.