RADIO TIMES 7: Radio Centurion Closing Down ...

Another cold snap in March 2014 with flurries of snow early this morning, and a chance to conclude this series of rambling radio memories.  Or should I say “sign off?”  There will be further chapters but they will be found on the “55555” blog and only occasionally linked here.  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.  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 minutes 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.

Radio Times 6: On Air.

The name of the station came as a result of Classics homework one evening - an essay on the structure of the Roman Army.  The transmitter was tuned to 100 Mhz so the title Radio Centurion came to mind.  And a banner was painted with this name to staple to the wall of the new "studio." The need to put together bits of equipment required more space so I moved upstairs to the second floor of the house. (In U.S. parlance that would be the third floor!) What had been a playroom was now to be a broadcast studio.  And the vary fact that the antenna was repositioned some twenty feet higher would surely have some benefit.

Equipment?  It was all rather basic with the exception of the record deck.  I had saved enough money to buy a quality deck and one day my father drove me to a big discount store in Birmingham to pick up a Garrard SP25 Mark IV, not a bad piece of kit for its day.  (See above.) The family reel-to-reel had been commandeered with its microphone, and a birthday present of a PYE cassette recorder completed the list.

For the next few months Radio Centurion would attempt to broadcast twice a week - each recorded show being half an hour in length. The first would go out on a Saturday late afternoon (times did vary!) and the second mid-evening on Sunday.  Now with such simple equipment half an hour of programming took at least an hour and a half to create. Sometimes more. This was done during the week and I have a strong suspicion that my school work suffered a little!

What did we play?  It was a mainly progressive rock music interspersed with jazz, on account that I had found a tall pile of jazz albums in a church sale one weekend.

Who listened?  Apart from the school friends who lived in north Worcester I have absolutely no idea. A few members of the church youth club said that they did from time to time.  And a few parents would nod their approval.  But there was one group of listeners in particular who would really make a difference.

RADIO TIMES 5: Hoisting the Jolly Roger

Finding electronic components to build an FM transmitter, slightly more powerful and more stable than the one borrowed, was easy.  This was the early 1970s. A time when it was still possible to find television and radio repair shops in most towns.  (Yes, people repaired televisions and radios!)  It was simply a matter of drawing up a shopping list of needed components and handing it to the man behind the counter who always wore glasses and a brown cotton work coat.  (Why did they always wear brown work coats?) He would say something like, "Be ready for you in about an hour." And an hour later a satisfied customer would leave clutching a paper bag filled with resistors, capacitors, transistors and many more goodies.

My local electronic supplier was Jack Porter.  His corner shop stood on the corner of College Street facing the magnificent Worcester Cathedral.  I would pass this way at least twice a day to and fro-ing from school. A dark and dingy shop.  So dark that on some cloudy days it was often impossible to see if Jack was in there at all.  His shelves and back rooms of cardboard boxes were an electronic cornucopia, and he boasted that not only were his prices the lowest in the city but also that he could match and supply any valve (U.S. tube) for any radio dating back to the Second World War.  I wonder what happened to old Jack Porter?  His shop closed many years ago and has been many things since.  Its latest incarnation is an estate agency.  (U.S.  Real estate office.)

Building the transmitter took but a few hours one weekend, but it had to sit on a shelf for another week before I found time to run some initial tests.  I enlisted the help of a school friend called John Buchanan who lived just around the corner.  (I wonder what happened to him also.)  We connected the transmitter to a reel-to-reel tape recorder onto which was loaded a tape of Dvorak's New World Symphony.  A ten foot length of coaxial cable connected the unit to a four foot telescopic antenna - which in turn was mounted atop an old fishing rod and fastened to the corner of the balcony outside my bedroom window.  The battery was connected, the tape was running, and we got on our bikes.

Each with a transistor radio the plan was to test the radius of the transmitter which was tuned to broadcast on 100 Mhz.  John would ride south and I would ride north, noting the signal strength every few hundred yards.  The reception to the north petered out after less than half a mile, but southwards the music was still audible a mile and a half down the road.

Back at the house I realized that I was now in control of a real, working radio station.  We celebrated with a bottle of orange pop and a packet of Jaffa Cakes!  But there were so many questions running through my mind.  What would the station be called?  When would it broadcast?  And what would it broadcast?

Where Jack Porter's once stood.

RADIO TIMES 4: Viva la revolution!

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. For this purpose only.

He said yes.

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. 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…

(To be continued)

RADIO TIMES 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, 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!