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 « « « to the previous page to the next page » » » to the "Monitor Originals" index page ... or ... to the Monitor Magazine home page