Once described as 'an unsung hero of shortwave' is it not unfair of me to say that more people will have heard of Radio Armadillo than who actually received the station. Whether that is due to the somewhat quirky appellation that would have enabled it to stand out amongst the usual suspects in free radio publications, and/or the notoriety attached to the station bordering on being an urban myth due to only being heard by a small listenership, I cannot conclusively say.
It was though a privilege to happen upon a Radio Armadillo broadcast. A poor response to broadcasts can if anything be a backhanded compliment to some free radio station operators; in a nutshell, those occupying more idiosyncratic terrain who do not subscribe, acquiesce, or limit themselves to formulaic utterances such as 'the next record is by' and canned identifications but instead lace their broadcasts with humour and a discursive taste in music and topics of conversation will not necessarily snare the attention of the average free radio adherent, especially those who demand a QSL card after hearing approximately 6 minutes of a broadcast whilst undertaking a 'bandscan'.
Those of a similar bent to Radio Armadillo, with whom I would bracket Radio Orion(latterly the Bogus Jobseeker and the Bogusman), Subterranean Sounds, and the Xenon Transmitting Company(XTC) would, if I may be so bold to say, have appreciated more letters(now emails) of greater depth and interest, even if this meant receiving fewer missives overall than they actually did. Indeed, even in my early days(approximately April 1991) of listening to free radio on shortwave, I myself was upbraided by Steve Midnight, the operator of Subterranean Sounds' predecessor Radio Confusion, for in effect begging for a QSL. I was bang to rights, but had heard the station so in my mind at least warranted the receipt of a verification for doing so, but putting myself in the station operator's shoes I can now completely understand his annoyance at the motivation of my letter, and no doubt at the time of those received from many other listeners.
If though Armadillo didn't get the recognition it deserved, if this is to be measured by the amount of contact the operator received, there was also an issue of the station being restricted to using low power. I would though say, without romanticizing free radio in general or any of its component parts, that this added to the station's mystic and lent greater credence to its fabled reputation. The same mien would not have been effectuated by, for example, the strains of heavy metal punctuated by extracts from the 1980's children's show Rainbow, or the musings of Kermit the Frog if Radio Armadillo was a powerhouse station that wiped out other operators 10 kHz either side.
Free radio stations were and are to this day restricted by local circumstances as to how much power their transmitters radiate. I would surmise that should the driving force of a station operator be to receive hundreds, maybe thousands of letters, then greater power will always facilitate this outcome, regardless of programme content. Quite simply, whatever the proportion of listeners who actually write in actually was/is, this will always be higher by dint of a commensurately larger audience. This greater quantity does though in no way equate to correlative quality; on the contrary, anything but.
I have no doubt that Radio Armadillo wanted more correspondence, if only at least in the early days of its existence to prove the transmitting equipment was in full working order and that the operator wasn't talking to himself. As the likes of Live Wire Radio's Bill Lewis will probably testify, broadcasting entertaining programmes coupled with outstanding technical values can in the end be a curse rather than a blessing, but where the line is crossed for being careful what you wish for, in the sense of the amount and quality of letters received, will always be different for each operator.
One of Radio Armadillo's defining qualities was the need to be different, not simply by playing devil's advocate as a counterpoint to so many other stations of the time, but through a genuine desire to step outside the tacitly-set boundaries of programming and where on the radio spectrum the station could be heard, and when. Broadcasting away from conventional weekend norms, in particular the 48-metre band on Sundays, would also reduce the size of listenership to those with whom the penny had dropped that free radio could at times be heard on shortwave during the week, people between employment, and still in education. These demographics would amount to fewer overall listeners, but ones with potentially more interesting things to say. There was undoubtedly method in Armadillo's 'madness' but where I am hypothesizing about the station's modus operandi and raison d’ê-tre, it might simply have been easier for the operator to broadcast on 6292 kHz on a Friday afternoon or 3947 kHz at 2 am than the usual, more common or garden times and days.
As is common with most of the free radio stations of the time, I cannot recall the last time I received Radio Armadillo. I am though convinced that we have not heard the last from "the Middle A" - a pet name(please note that Armadillo's do not make good pets) adapted from Radio Orion's self-styled "Big O" sobriquet-itself cribbed from Roy Orbison's album of the same name - and whilst the station is for the time being absent from the airwaves, the operator's involvement with the scene lives on in the form of being Bogusman's amanuensis.
Further information, zany and otherwise, can be found at the Radio Armadillo website - with an added bonus of continuous streaming of archived Bogusman broadcasts also kindly brought to us by a station that defied convention and exemplified within its programming a freedom of expression that didn't seek approval from the free radio cognoscenti, but which deserved far greater recognition than it ever received.
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