Early Radio Memories (4)

In the summer of 1971 free radio was in the air, culturally and on a number of frequencies across the United Kingdom and Western Europe.  Those of us living in the English Midlands would listen to Radio North Sea (Nordsee) International on shortwave during the daytime and on medium wave (AM) after dark.  Radio Caroline was still there, and Radio Veronica was another option (although her programming was mainly in Dutch.)  There were rumours of land-based “pirates” in London and other large cities, and despite the attempts of the BBC to provide a pop music service and the promise of local independent commercial radio to come (it came in 1973) the predominant culture was free radio, offshore or otherwise.

British politics crept in to the situation.  Both the outgoing Labour Party, and the incoming Conservative Party (after the 1970 General Election) continued the jamming of RNI and other offshore stations.  There was strong condemnation from the supporters of free radio with leaflets and press statements such as this:

As we write this, Radio Nordsee International is being jammed by the British Government “in the interests of Czechoslovakia.”  So the Government has now sunk to such a depth that it will employ Communist methods in support of a Communist occupation regime.

This Government has been determined to crush free enterprise radio by any method it thinks it can get away with.  The trickery, the blatant lies and now the jamming betray an utter contempt for freedom and democracy.

Strong stuff, eh? 

Meanwhile in a much smaller way the free radio revolution was ever a topic of conversation at the King’s School, Worcester, where a small group of us were being shown a small plastic box that had a wire antenna, two input jacks and a nine volt battery clip.  It was a small and primitive FM transmitter which would take both a microphone and an audio signal simultaneously.  The owner, the older brother of a classmate of mine, was producing short programmes on reel to reel tape and cassette to be broadcast every Sunday in the neighboring town of Malvern.  With careful tuning the transmitter range was about one mile.  Looking at the circuitry and design I knew that I could copy it and even improve upon it.  Later that day I asked if I may borrow the transmitter for a couple of days during the week.

He said yes.

Decisions, decisions...

It's a major snowstorm, and we could wake up to over six inches accumulation of snow over ice.  The "going" will be difficult tomorrow morning, if not hazardous.  No one in their right mind ought to be battling to get out of their house or driveway before the situation is safer.  So worship has been cancelled tomorrow morning.

It's odd, but every time I have to make this decision, and after I have done so (with the stalwart collaboration of the two churchwardens) I feel a strange mixture of relief, guilt and anxiety.  Relief that the decision has been made; guilt that the decision of a few will be imposed on the desire of some, letting them down as it were; and anxiety that we will open our eyes in the morning to see a mere inch of melting snow and warm sunshine.

But we do our best.  And I'm sure that the Almighty understands that.  We're in a deep snowdrift if he doesn't...

In the Bleak Mid Winter

It is mid-February in a part of the world that used to celebrate Washington’s birthday (George, that is, not Denzel) but now loudly and mindlessly announces its latest sales on something called Presidents’ Day weekend.  And there’s snow on the ground.  Actually there has been snow on the ground for a few weeks, the bottom layer of which has been compacted into ice that seems tougher than steel.  And yesterday more white insult was added to frozen injury to the tune of seven inches.  A brief lull of thawing rain but that turned back into snow overnight.

These are days when I run my fingers along the spines of many angling books on the shelves and wonder how long it will be before the ponds and streams will thaw and the fish start feeding again.  And when I can semi-comfortably stand on a bank and throw a line into these waters.

It will be a while longer I think.  Another storm is forecast for late tomorrow.  

Early Radio Memories (3)

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!

Early Radio Memories (2)

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…

(To be continued)

Early Radio Memories (1)

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, and 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!

(Also posted on the sister blog: 55555.)