MONITOR SPRING ISSUE 1972       - Page Seven -

      Alex McKenna of the Free Radio Campaign, Roz Barber and others. I often wonder what 
      happened to Chris Cross, Alex Dee, Phil Jay, Ed Moreno, Paul Elvey, Phil Perkins and 
      other members of the Radio City crew.
           My feelings regarding the Marine and Broadcasting (Offences) Bill can best be 
      summarized by quoting an article which appeared in the Economist, July 30, 1966:

                 The bill to put down the "pop pirates" was published Thursday. 
              It has a ripe cartload of needless rubbish. The unlicensed commercial 
              broadcasting stations around Britain's coasts give a good deal of 
              harmless pleasure and do very little practical harm.

           Although I understand licenced commercial radio will be operative in Britain 
      in approximately a year, the magnetic popularity, charm and excitement of the 
      "pirates" belong to another time, and remain as historical symbols of popular 
      freedom. The return of commercial radio will not recapture the excitement created 
      by the daring of the "pirates", but serve to witness that governmental decree 
      cannot stifle the will of the people living in a democracy".

                                                    SIGNED: RICK MICHAELS Jan 7 1972

      *The vessel. involved was the trawler, 'Cornucopia' from Leigh on Sea, Essex.

      For a technical assessment of the station, we contacted engineer Phil Perkins, who
      was with City from April 5th 1965 until the final close-down on February 8th 1967.

          "When I first joined Radio City, the one and only engineer was Don Witts. 
      Although he was good at his job, which was in the Record Centre, Whitstable as a TV 
      engineer, his knowledge of the RF side was not very great. He was helped at that
      time by Dick Dickson who was engineer/DJ. Between them they had managed to get the 
      station on the air, but the studio equipt and the Tx were somewhat lacking in 
      finesse, putting it mildly. The rig consisted of an old ex-Navy Tx on 299 and a 
      TR50XM on 188. The 188 channel was badly chosen as it was right at the bottom of the
      medium wave, in the same place as the start of RNI. Complaints were received from 
      the Coastguards about interference and by then it had been decided that the 188 
      broadcasting would be reduced to low power with a small ant just to comply with the 
      contracts for religious broadcasts. (These were from 6-7 pm). The 188 rig was 
      virtually unmodified except for the modulator - this was because the original mod 
      valve was a dual tetrode which was very hard to obtain. Note that this rig was 
      VFO controlled and frequency measuring gear was very poor on the station. The 
      main 299 tx was also VFO - in fact this was very noticeable at that time as when
      conditions improved in the early evening the resultant hetrodyne was most annoying. 
      Don had explained to Reg Calvert that the other stations on 1034 Khz were drifting! 
      This had to be remedied as soon as possible, but as I was the new boy and Don had 
      been there from the start, Reg was more inclined to believe Don. At last we came 
      to an agreement that we would retain the VFO facility for the time being until I 
      could prove that the Xtal control was the only way to operate, in the correct manner. 
      There was one of those funny grey wavemeters on the station, with an 180 degree 
      dial and the tuning lock - you may know the one I mean but time has erased it from
      my memory. Anyway it was not in the BC221 class but it did have a facility where 
      you could put any known crystal in it and use that as a local standard,
      Time was very short and there was no time for ordering a cut crystal so my
      first period off the station was spent in the shack in Wycombe grinding a 1 Mhz 
      rock to 1034 Khz. Many days later the job was done and I returned to City complete 
      with my home made standard. That evening it was put into the wavemeter and the 
      final zeroing was done after City closed down. We now had a standard that would 
      only drift up and down a few Hz during the day. I took control of the hourly netting
      (more frequent at night time) and the result was a breakthrough for City. Reg was 
      able to hear the stn much later than ever before and so were many other people. 
      This convinced Reg that we needed to bring the station up to scratch on the technical 
      side but unfortunately caused a difficult relationship between myself and Don, 
      (i.e. "Knowall" comes on the towers and outdoes me immediately!!").
           I had a foothold now but the object of power increase and other improvements 
      was not going to prove easy because so much rubbish had already been purchased for 
      Don's experiments.
           The rig had a pair of 813s in the PA at that time and the mod was from a Geloso 
      amp. After a long hard battle we managed to improve the efficiency of that rig but 
      it was the biggest lash-up you could imagine. In the meantime, on the advice of Don



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