Radio Stella, Weekend Music Radio, and lost archives

A serious drawback when compiling this blog has been the lack of a physical archive to accompany station-specific posts, as well as to give readers some visual respite from my rambling style. 

Sadly, my collection of free radio news sheets, stickers, logbooks, and QSL cards left the building long ago; the aforementioned were no match for my now fully developed minimalist tendencies. 

There are of course some excellent online depositories of free radio paraphernalia, amongst them being the Will Phillips and Tom Read websites, but the lack of a personal stash of free radio ephemera to add flesh to the bones has perhaps made this blog less user friendly than it might be.

However, within the palaeolithic layer of forgotten odds and ends I have recently unearthed a few photographs sent to me by several free radio giants of the 1990s - namely Bill Lewis and Radio Stella's Jock Wilson. I thought the latter to be particularly pertinent, what with Jock's association with Weekend Music Radio's Jack Russel and how both, along with the likes of Live Wire Bill, would periodically head to the Republic of Ireland to maintain Radio Stella's transmitters, which were I believe located in close proximity of those used by Radio Fax and Reflections Europe. 

Why is this pertinent? Well, the recent spate of broadcasts by someone believed to be located in Eire of back in the day Weekend Music Radio shows, some from as long ago as 2014 and perhaps even earlier, has piqued the interest of those who fondly recall WMR as one of the defining stations of the decade. It is unclear why these archive shows are now rearing their head but far from being a new occurrence, such transmissions started over twenty years ago. Whether the person responsible then and now are one and the same is a mystery in itself, but we can tentatively assume that it is. Whoever is behind these unofficial relays certainly has some serious wattage to draw upon. 

Age has wearied the above photograph, sent by Jock Wilson in 1992, but there are several points of interest within it. Transmitters for 7 and 11 MHz are pictured, which broadcasted Stella's pre-recorded programmes in tandem. 3 and 6 MHz would also be used. 

Close to the top left of the snap is the calling card of the mysterious engineers who installed the equipment - Bodgit and Scarper from somewhere in Scotland! The sticker to the lower centre will be very familiar to many in the UK and Ireland who listened to Atlantic 252 on longwave during the 1990s, whilst an early iteration of a Tango drinks can is visible top centre. 

I hope Jock and his accompanying coterie of shadowy radio engineers do not object to this free radio laid bare-type photograph being put out into the public domain. After thirty one years I would hope that such material is now declassified, but what a fine example of the pre-digital era of broadcasting in its purest free radio form!

The few other photo QSL-type pictures I have unearthed are from Live Wire Radio, one specifically of the station's studio used in the latter years of its presence on shortwave and the 1.6 MHz mediumwave band popular with Dutch hobbyists. If you are reading this Bill, perhaps you could let me know if it is OK to use this photograph to accompany a future blog post. 

In the early 1990s one would never have imagined the overwhelming impact digitisation and the internet would have on our lives, but then neither could we have predicted the terminal demise of physical photographs. Proof writ large, once more, how much life has changed in the last thirty years.