I had been listening to the shortwave bands for almost a year before one Sunday morning stumbling upon several of what I came to know as free radio 'pirate' stations, a curiosity initially piqued as to what the other band on my National Panasonic 1822 receiver, cassette player included, offered what conventional FM(VHF) and Medium Wave(MW) did not.
There was no frustration which today a lack of a digital tuner would inevitably precipitate; quite simply, I had a rough idea where on the dial the likes of BRT of Belgium, now VRT, Radio Romania International, and the Voice of America(VOA) could be found, so to 'point and shoot' would normally reap the intended dividends. Even with such rudimentary listening equipment, used at this point without a long wire aerial to complement the built-in, as standard telescopic antenna, it was possible to hear stations from all over the world, with whom contact would include the receipt of the at-the-time much coveted QSL card, proof in itself of reception and a trade off with the broadcaster who sought information as to how well, or otherwise, their signal was being received not only by the intended audience, but those who tuned in from far greater a distance away.
I do not recall what motivated me to tune around 6.2 MHz - the 48-metre band - that Sunday morning in early October, 1990. Perhaps I was killing time before the weekly Happy Station Show was broadcast by Radio Netherlands - something at the time which had become a fixture of my listening. As these transmissions from Hilversum were aired on the 5.9 MHz area of the band, it starts to make sense that this gap of approximately 300 kHz would represent at most a couple of millimetres on the dial of my modest listening equipment.
It was therefore a mere nudge of the dial between conventional, dare I say legal broadcasters, and those who were anything but the traditional, formulaic stations I had until this point become accustomed to on the shortwave spectrum. Perhaps part of the attraction was that national broadcasters with big budgets and multi-lingual programming were inadvertently coexisting cheek by jowl with pirate stations operating out of bedrooms, perhaps while the rest of the family were out of the house, and used what to the uninitiated were obscure mail drops by whose location would not give the operators' game away.
That morning yielded three stations: Ozone Radio International from the Republic of Ireland, and the English-based duo Live Wire Radio and Radio 48. Greatly impressed with Live Wire's quality of signal and music, along with the presentation-style of someone I soon knew as Bill Lewis, I jotted down the mailing address and was surprised and delighted in equal measure to receive less than a week later a letter, sticker, and QSL card in the mail. I can only guess at what Bill and other station operators of the time made of a 14-year-old's rather gauche letters, but the novelty of not only hearing these mysterious English-speaking voices but to also be able to communicate with them soon got me hooked. Little could I have known that thirty years later, I would have enough memories of the 1990's shortwave free radio scene to justify creating a writing project dedicated to them.
And so it began. The pattern of Sundays that usually ran along the lines of lie-ins and visiting grandparents had been semi-permanently punctuated by this new strand of my radio-listening hobby. Disappearing upstairs from the lunch table to check 6 MHz became a common occurrence, as too would sneakily listening to receivers in relatives' houses on Sunday afternoons, much to the bewilderment and at times chagrin of my nearest and dearest. Perhaps perturbed that I was listening to and communicating with those who were technically breaking the law, it eventually became apparent to my family that young teenagers often involve themselves in far more damaging pursuits than enjoying album tracks not heard on legal stations constrained by playlists, and listening to QSO's which were often as entertaining, if not more so, as the music programmes themselves.
It took me a while to realize that there was more to free radio on shortwave than just listening on Sunday mornings to 6 MHz, but as a grounding to the scene of the time it was the ideal starting point. As I eventually learned, broadcasting on the Sabbath was in many ways a tradition, but also a means to an end for operators otherwise constrained by personal and local, neighbourhood circumstances. For those equally as interested in reaching as great a number of listeners as possible as to the technical side of broadcasting it was the obvious time to transmit, but atmospheric conditions and avoiding detection would also precipitate the choice of time of day, or night, when some operators would be active, and on which bands they would use. These nuances would all become apparent to me in time, but the early days of regularly hearing, for example, Radio Orangutan on 6206 kHz, and Radio Orion in its usual 6290 kHz berth were what I assumed to be the extent of what shortwave free radio had to offer.
The Sunday scene was though the tip of the iceberg, merely an aperitif to not only the wider extent of free radio at the time, but to what it has subsequently become. To a callow youth whose appetite for alternative broadcasting had by this time been whetted the limitations of only listening on a Sunday morning hadn't yet dawned upon me, until realizing that I had missed out on several broadcasts at other times by stations I had come to regard as favourites.
This is a very raw, perhaps unremarkable start to what I hope will become a series of posts over the days and weeks ahead detailing the era I regard as a golden one for UK free radio on shortwave. There will be those who will argue that any or all of the previous three decades to the 90's were more worthy of that epithet, but I can only comment upon what I heard in the context from 1990 to the present day, and the significant effect free radio had on my teenage years, even into my mid-twenties.
My blog will therefore not serve as a history of UK free radio on shortwave during the 1990's, but my experiences of it. There were stations that existed but whose broadcasts I never heard, as there were those who I was aware of and on occasion did listen to but who will not be written about in this blog, but will be acknowledged by name. I am not seeking to simply detail an A-Z of what the UK scene consisted of from 1990 to the turn of the millennium, but to chronicle what I heard, enjoyed, and greatly miss to this day. There is no other brief or guideline as to how this blog will take shape, but it promises to be for me a fascinating meander down memory lane, and one that I hope you will find interesting and enjoyable, too.
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