RADIO TIMES (5) Closing down.

Words to conclude this series of rambling personal radio memories.  Or should I say “sign off?” There will be further chapters. Many more. Besides, that highly irregular and illegal radio station in north Worcester was about to come to an abrupt end.

It was Easter Eve 1972.  April Fools’ Day also, and a special Easter weekend programme had been prepared for the following day, recorded on a new seven inch reel of tape that was waiting in its box on the table ready to be threaded into the recorder.  But later that afternoon when I went up to listen to and preview the tape I was concerned to find it already on the spools ready to play.  Who could have done that?  I shrugged it off.  Perhaps my brother.? Or one of my parents out of curiosity? But it was none othe these. I powered up the machine, put on a set of headphones, and rotated the “play” switch.  What I heard next chilled me to the bone.

Instead of the introductory music that I had been using for months there was a man’s voice, deep and with a definite air of authority, which repeated this message.  Three times.

“Close this station down.  This station is operating illegally.  We have found you out.  Close this station down!”

The back-story to all of this was very unfortunate. The VHF signal emitted by the transmitter was not only more powerful than I had measured (and I had not measured its east-west range,) it was also, unbeknown to me, producing a harmonic signal which was radiating in the 68-88 MHz band – right in the middle of frequencies used by the West Mercia Constabulary.  Yep!  I was busted!

Yet it was a very gentle “bust.”  This was due to the fact that when the police (who had used the General Post Office detector vans) located the source of the signal(s) and realized that they were emanating from the home of a much respected and highly popular clergyman, it was decided to send the matter upstairs to a certain Chief Inspector.  And Chief Inspector Hunt was not only a friend of the family but a regular worshipper at the parish church.  So a quiet conversation took place; the officer visited the house, a message was left, and that was that.   No fine.  Not even a caution. No confiscation of equipment.  All very fair and sporting. 

I’m not sure if my parents were annoyed or not, for little was said.  I’m sure that my father had an amusing time of it all for there was a twinkle in his eye that weekend.  And my mother’s mood never changed.  But it was the end of clandestine broadcasting from St Stephen’s Vicarage.

Is there an Epilogue to this tale?  If there is then it’s certainly not a cautionary one for it was fun while it lasted and I have no regrets.  The transmitter was dismantled.  The recording equipment remained wired up as from time to time I would record a show and send it to be broadcast on the equally illegal Super Radio station in the next town of Malvern.  I would even record a fifteen minute demonstration tape and send it to Radio Atlantis, an offshore station operating from a ship off the Dutch coast from 1973-74, and I later learned that they had played five minute of it on air.  What a claim to fame!

But time was moving on, and I was moving on.  It was the end of the care-free and often cavalier free radio days (Radio North Sea closed in 1974,) academic study beckoned with a vengeance, and getting into university was the sole interest and purpose.  Was it the end of radio for me?  No.  But that tale has not yet been written... until now!

PIRATE RADIO USA (1.5 hour film but worth watching!)

THE END OF RADIO NEW YORK INTERNATIONAL

RADIO NEW YORK INTERNATIONAL

RADIO TIMES (3) Waiting for the Postman!

Listening to radio stations which broadcast from exotic places was not simply a matter of hearing a diversity of programmes in a host of languages; it was also about obtaining proof from those stations that you had actually heard them.  This involves submitting a reception report via the mail, hence the need for overseas postage and occasionally (for smaller, third world stations) an enclosed International Reply Coupon.  Having listened to, for example, Radio New Zealand, the DXer (a new, proper noun!) would write up a report that included date and time, frequency tuned, quality of reception, programme details and the equipment used.  It would then be posted to the station in the hope that a verification card or letter would be received. This was known (is known) as the QSL, from the Q code beloved of ham radio operators the world over, meaning that the message has been confirmed.  Often these took weeks, even months to arrive, but the opening of the envelope on arrival was always a moment of pleasure!

Sometimes it was a simple, signed postcard.  Occasionally there would arrive a large envelope stuffed with goodies!  The larger broadcasters liked to do this, and I received pennants and magazines from Moscow and Havana, as well as posters from Peking and a copy of Mao Tse-tung’s “Little Red Book.”  (This would live next to my poster of Che Guevara!)

Short wave was a wonderful place in those days, for we were still emerging from the chilliest part of the Cold War. Apart from the BBC and the Voice of America, the big three broadcasters, all Marxist-Maoist in nature, were Radio Moscow, Radio Peking and surprising Albania.  Radio Tirana not only punched above its weight, it also developed the reputation of producing the dullest and most sonorous programming!

All this was, to a teenager, exotic and appealing.  Britain in the early 1970s was rather dull and grey with low horizons and sometimes even lower expectations, but pulling on a pair of headphones changed all of that.  There was a different world out there!

RADIO TIMES (2)

2.  Listening (Part One)

I used the phrase “slippery slope” in an earlier post, but before I invite you to join me in that particular broadcast helter-skelter I’d like to keep the whole story in balance and mention the other, conventional side of my radio hobby.  Listening.  Yet listening with a difference.  Tuning in to radio stations the other side of the world.

The popular name for this in the radio world is DXing.  Whereas not a proper acronym it has come to be understood as “distance listening” on all parts of the radio spectrum.  My favorite parts, and a new discovery for me in those days, were the short wave bands.  I had been given a new and shiny blue and Bakelite “chrome” radio and in addition to the usual medium and long wave bands it had short wave.  A mystery to me, but one I continue to enjoy even forty five years later.

Not content with the slender telescopic antenna that the radio provided, I had read that extending this by a long wire would vastly increase reception of very far away stations.  Given that my receiver (it had now been promoted from the rank of transistor radio) was on my desk in my bedroom this required an imaginary approach and an enormous spool of thin, plastic-coated wire.  And a bit of dare-devil roof work!  Climbing out of a third storey window in the red brick Victorian vicarage, gingerly clambering up some ten feet of tiles to reach the wide and level lead roof drains, throwing some fifty feet of wire over a gable in the hope that it was reach my bedroom window (it did!) and tossing the spool of the remaining one hundred and fifty feet towards the back of the house.  This I retrieved from a flower bed and anchored it to a tall tree on the other side of the garden.  Two hundred feet of antenna in place sixty feet above the ground, and I had not broken anything or annoyed my parents.  Easy, and in business!

It has to be said that my parents fully supported my new hobby and passion.  They agreed to pay for a monthly subscription to the magazine Practical Wireless, now proving essential to all aspects of my radio interests, and even surprised me with the gift of a “retro” receiver kit – the Hear All Continents valve (U.S. tube) radio which required over ninety volts of power but was an amazing receiver in all its simplicity.  I was truly hooked, and began saving up money for postage stamps and International Reply Coupons…

RADIO TIMES (1)

1.  My Early Teens

Worcester, England.  The year was 1971 and I was not yet fifteen years old.  The Irish Republican Army had bombed the Post Office Tower in London, decimal currency had been introduced in the UK, sixty-three people had been killed in a stairway crush at a Celtic-Rangers soccer game, and the yearly inflation rate was 8.6%.  Of course I was largely unaware of these dreadful things as a young teen, my interests and influences lying elsewhere.  Setting aside school for the moment, for I was not the most excellent of pupils, I think it accurate and fair to say that my life was ruled and shaped by two things.  Rugby and music.  Now that’s an odd combination of the conservative and the progressive.  I would eagerly await the monthly magazine Rugby World, yet at the same time pore over the pages of New Musical Express (as well as the scurrilous “underground” presses of Oz and Frendz.)

But music was expensive.  A vinyl LP cost in the region of two pounds sterling which was outside of the immediate reach of my pockets.  Buying an album required careful saving and then selection.  As a result there was much lending and borrowing of vinyl, and with the advent of the cassette tape recorder much illicit recording as well!  Records were played on a Decca mono player in my room, or occasionally on the new stereo radiogram in my father’s study.  Now that was a great sound!

Radio was the solution, but looking back I realize that this is how my interest began.  There was little in the way of pop radio in the UK at that time.  Radio One, the BBC’s answer to the offshore stations of the 1960s, was bland, boring and entirely establishment.  Not the station for us radical, rebellious, anti-establishment public school types who nevertheless wanted to go to university and be successful!  (For U.S. readers that reads “private” school.) Besides R1 only broadcast during daylight hours, sharing its frequency with another station, Radio Two, after seven o’clock.  It was good for one show however – Pick of the Pops with Alan Freeman every Sunday between five and seven.  Then the entire “Top 20” would be played with minimum talk, making it relatively easy to record the entire music collection whilst fading out before the end of each song!

An alternative in the evening was the mighty Radio Luxembourg which broadcast pop music on 208 metres via a thirteen thousand kilowatt transmitter (the most powerful privately owned transmitter in the world back then) from the Grand Duchy, but somehow that wasn’t the best of media.  It was to an offshore station, Radio North Sea International, broadcasting from the radio ship Mebo 2 on medium wave and short wave that we all turned.

This is isn’t the place to recall the history of RNI.  Wikipedia does it rather well http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radio_North_Sea_International

and there are many other columns besides written about their exploits.  It is enough to say that not only did it provide us young teens with a music channel that truly appealed to us, it planted in the minds of some of us the notion that radio ought to be free and unfettered, and not under the control of governments or corporations.  And that was, some might say, a slippery slope!