The Antilles Radio Corporation was formed on April 20, 1963, and much of its origin story reads like improvisation. The electronic equipment that powered the station's early broadcasts came secondhand from Radio Africa in Tangier, Morocco, installed with technical cooperation from Radio Andorra in Europe. The broadcast studios were set up in Plymouth, Montserrat's capital city, while the transmission site sat at O'Garro's on the southern slopes of the Soufriere Hills volcano near Morris. It was an unlikely location for a broadcasting giant -- a Caribbean island of roughly 12,000 people, perched on the side of an active volcano. But the geography worked. Montserrat's position in the Leeward Islands gave the signal clean lines of propagation across open water in every direction, and before long, Radio Antilles had grown into something no one had quite planned: the most powerful radio voice in the Caribbean.

In 1971, Deutsche Welle, Germany's international broadcaster, injected a massive cash infusion into the station and became a major shareholder. The partnership transformed Radio Antilles from a regional Caribbean station into an international relay hub. By March 1977, the station was carrying regular programming from Deutsche Welle in Cologne and the BBC in London, transmitting their signals across the Western Hemisphere on shortwave frequencies through 15-kilowatt and 50-kilowatt transmitters. Radio Canada International joined the lineup in January 1984, followed by the Voice of America in 1985. For a brief, remarkable period, this small island in the Leeward chain was the broadcasting crossroads of the Caribbean -- a satellite downlink station funneling the voices of four continents through its transmitters and out across the sea. But the German-language programming proved unpopular with English-speaking Caribbean listeners, and by 1989, Deutsche Welle had withdrawn from Montserrat.

The Soufriere Hills had been dormant for centuries when they stirred back to life on July 18, 1995. Within two years, pyroclastic flows had buried Plymouth under meters of ash and rock, transforming Montserrat's capital into what observers would call the Pompeii of the Caribbean. Radio Antilles, with its studios in Plymouth and its transmitter perched on the volcano's own slopes, never stood a chance. The station went silent in 1995, its transmitter towers eventually collapsing under the weight of volcanic debris. Two-thirds of Montserrat's population fled the island. The exclusion zone that now covers the southern half of the island encompasses both the studio site and the transmission facility -- places where the Big RA once lit up the airwaves, now buried under a gray landscape of cooling rock.

For the people who remember it, Radio Antilles was more than a frequency. It was calypso and soca bleeding into news bulletins, weather reports that mattered to fishermen, cricket commentary that unified rival islands. A Facebook memorial group called "RADIO ANTILLES the BIG RA Voice of the Caribbean" keeps the station's memory alive among former listeners and staff scattered across the world by both the eruption and the passage of time. The replacement airport built in the island's north -- John A. Osborne Airport, with its modest 600-meter runway that can only handle nine-seater aircraft -- speaks to how dramatically the eruption shrank Montserrat's connection to the outside world. The old W. H. Bramble Airport had handled 14-seat planes. The old radio station had reached millions. What remains is an island rebuilding itself on a fraction of its former territory, where the volcano that gave Radio Antilles its commanding signal also took it away.