Media Network Vintage Vault 2018-2019

Great to find a specialist book like Audio Audio by Jonathan Hill after 15 years - and just a few pounds more than when it was published in 1995. This was a follow-up book to the popular book Radio Radio which is illustrated below. This Media Network programme kicks off by interviewing the author and asking him what's the fascinating of Vintage audio. The programme also includes news of changes at BBC Monitoring from Chis Greenway as well as developments in the Spanish service of Radio Netherlands. The jamming situation has changed in Asia - we have a report from Victor Goonetilleke. And the programme concludes with a profile of Radio TV Hong Kong. 

There were major changes going on at AFN Europe at the start of the 1990's. That explains why I revisited the station even though we'd done an extensive profile on them just two years before. Sadly I understand that the great voice of AFN Europe in this documentary, Bob Harlan, is no longer with us. He passed away in Jacksonville, Florida in 2003 aged 77. Youtube has . You also can hear the voice of Paul van Dyke. I do admire the get up and go attitude that I found at AFN Shape and AFN Frankfurt. Their mission was clear - and they sounded dedicated to that mission. 

This show starts with callers to the Radio Netherlands answerline concerned about changes to Radio Netherlands' European service. A caller from Germany recommends looking for a UN Radio programme to verify Radio Bhutan. A feature on buying a second-hand shortwave radio follows, plus a conversation with the late Bob Tomalski on the introduction of no less than 3 new audio formats. Remember Mini Disc? It doesn't seem like 19 years ago does it?  The programme also features an interview with the new boss of Radio Vilnius who told us the inside story on what happened when Soviet troops raided the station the year before and how they broadcast from the blind institute not knowing if their voices were being heard. I find that sign-on music they used continues to haunt me. We also hear about the plans for a special ham radio station to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Voice of America. K3EKA is the station based in the VOA HQ in Washington DC.  

This programme was aired a few days after Radio Luxembourg's English service signed off from the highpower mediumwave channel of 1440 kHz, better known as the Great 208 (208 metres). The farewall show went on well into the night and contained some great stories of the English service in Luxy. The mediumwave transmitter in Marnbach is still there - I passed by on a trip to Luxembourg in the car a few years back. RTL German and China Radio International have used it since.  I find it interesting that nearly 20 decades after this programme was made, Holland still has a mediumwave service. They have reduced the power to keep the coverage down to just the Netherlands and I am sure there must come a day when Radio 5 from the public network vacates 747 kHz. This programme also contains an illustrated interview with Richard Jackson about the decision by the Thai government to terminate the licences of 5 radio channels in the hope of raising the commercial revenue of the government station Radio Thailand. 

This programme turned out to have a different ending than was originally planned. During the recording session on a Wednesday afternoon came the tragic news that long-time contributor to the programme, Richard Ginbey, had been killed in a car accident. Richard was a true broadcast professional working on several stations in Southern Africa. He also spent some time in New Zealand it seems, as several Dxers in the Pacific recall him as a DJ there in the 1970's. He also ran his own media show on Radio Portugal in the days when it was known as the Voice of the West and had a shortwave service in English. The programme, called Radio Safari, even issued its own QSL cards signed by Richard. This programme simply broke the news of his passing. There were tributes in several subsequent programmes. Other items in this programme include Radio Netherlands' single sideband tests to North America, changes at Radio Finland (interview with Juhani Niinstoe), a profile of VNG - the time signal station in Australia, Paul Ballst

I see that v is back on the Voice of Russia, reminiscing with colleagues about the days of Radio Moscow World Service. They have a (search for "from Moscow with Love"). Richard Measham of BBC Monitoring explains how time changes in Russia have affected the complex external broadcast schedule (curiously time changes are back in the news as Russia has decided to adopt permanent summer time in 2011).  In this programme Vasily explains about Radio Ala, a station which played which popped up on shortwave having hired transmission facilities formerly used by Soviet jammers. It was fascinating while it lasted. There's also an interval signal contest as compensation for Jim Cutler's Impossible Contest which we put out in April 1992. We played three interval signals at once, one of them backwards. But it didn't fool the dedicated listeners. I made the photo on a wet but fascinating day in Moscow. Incredible to see where those programmes were made.

This programme contains an interview with the late Joseph Mark Costello III, the founder of WRNO shortwave in New Orleans. He passed away from complications from diabetes in late April 1997 at the young age of 56. His first job after college was at a small radio station in DeRidder, where he became chief announcer. It was, Mr. Costello later said, the only time that he worked for a company he didn't own. In 1967, the son of Algiers grocery-store owners mortgaged his parents' rental property to help raise $25,000 to build WRNO, a pioneer FM stereo rock-music outlet that became one of the city's most listened-to and profitable radio stations. It was a risk. But Mr. Costello said in a 1982 interview, he never was worried. "I didn't know it would be successful," he said, "but I knew I could always make money at something. It's easy. You just don't spend more money than you make." When he couldn't hire a disc jockey, he acted as the station's announcer, too. Even long after Joe Costello became a millionaire with f

This was a regular edition of Media Network in the summer of 1986. We review the Grundig Satellit 400 shortwave receiver made in Portugal from German designs. Roger Broadbent explains about AM stereo and the challenges it faces. We look at the growth of English language radio in Paris - stations are now carryingVOA Europe. Arthur Cushen's tips include recordings of the internal shortwave services of ABC in Australia in Tennant Creek. I personally remember this programme not for its content but for the panic before broadcast. We used an Apple IIe to write the script and the power supply short circuited a few hours before the recording. Luckily some of the segments had already been recorded but the main script was hastily rewritten before we went to air.

About 90 minutes drive east of Amsterdam towards the German border you’ll come to the city of Apeldoorn. If you turn south-east and drive along the Apeldoornse Kanaal you’ll soon come to the village of Eerbeek. In the summer it is still full of campers, people of walking or cycling holidays. The village has a railway station and parked in the siding in the summer of 1995 were two strange looking coaches. They used to ride around in the days of the German Democratic Republic. Now they’re home to a new satellite station called Radio London. Peter Jansen is the director and sitting inside the carriage I asked him to explain the name. The music on the new Radio London though is very different. It is world music. Look at the countries that have a beach looking out onto the Atlantic ocean and you have some idea of the music now being broadcast..world music from Africa and Latin America, reggae, rhythm and blues, and album tracks from the years 1965 to 85. The station later changed its name to Q Radio and moved from

This show kicks off with the news that ICRC (Red Cross) reorganises in Geneva. Has Lowe Electronics missed the boat with the lack of passband tuning? Roy Sangren of Radio Scandinavia does another test. I think he has a world record in test transmissions. We then ran a feature on the Internet for Shortwave Radio Listeners. We chatted with Media Network contributor about his vision of what could happen next. He was spot on. The problem in those days was the speed. 28.8 kb/sec dial-up modem was the standard. We talk to one station experimenting with 8 kb/sec audio. The commercialization of the Internet could be its downfall! Jim was spot on 16 years ago about how VOIP would develop. We also talked to Vasily Strelnikov, formerly of Radio Moscow World Service and then of Radio 7. He explains how stations are migrating to the “new” FM band. BBC WS used to have English on an AM station in Moscow.   

This programme looked at the activitiee of Press Now in former Yugoslavia and its work to support independent media in Bosnia. In other news Veronica Radio says they will commence test transmissions of their new Newsradio AM station as of September 18th. Look for low power tests between 5 and 17hrs UTC consisting of news bulletins, weather and traffic reports. The Dutch Transmitting Company, NOZEMA expects the delivery of the permanent transmitter in October so that by the middle of next month the station will move to 24 hr operation. The tests on 1395 will also determine whether the expected interference problems with Radio Tirana which uses that channel in the evening are serious enough to warrant a frequency change to another part of the medium.  There have been problems in the Caribbean with very bad weather and this has affected the island of Antigua, home to the BBC’s relay station for the region. Geoff Spells is a senior engineer for the BBC’s schedule and frequency management unit and he is on the lin

We visit the Radio Documentary Festival in Amsterdam “Boundless Sound”. More than 100 documentaries from all over the world were played and more than 400 people turned up to hear them, not bad when you realise that it was boiling hot outside. There were some great arguments for theatre of the mind from producers who made documentaries in Bosnia during the war. Radio doesn’t try to simplify the situation – it celebrates its complexity. Somehow it is easier to remember great radio programmes than TV shows. Across Europe at the moment several laboratories are working to try and squeeze more audio into a smaller space without hearing the difference. Philips DCC digital compact cassette and the Sony Minidisk system are examples of this. In fact the system doesn’t record everything the microphone picks up but only what the ear will detect when the recording is played back. If a loud noise masks a quieter one, then the quiet sound isn’t recorded. Of course its important that there are international standards for t

This edition marked the start of Radio Netherlands presence on the World-Wide Web (21st April 1995) after three years of experimenting with MCI-Mail and participation in bulletin board systems like FIDONET. As Director of Programmes at the time, I remember suggesting as the URL to the head of IT at the time. We chat with Esmail Amid-Hozour, head of Grundig North America. I think you would be hard put to find someone who has more enthusiasm for AM broadcasting, and shortwave in particular. He was very clever in putting shortwave portables in airline catalogues and Sharper Image. There’s also a visit to the BBC World Service shop in Bush House (long since gone) and a report on Lowe receivers designed and made in Matlock, Derbyshire. Still love those long URLs. I suppose we really covered the birth of Adam Curry’s love affair with the web, well before podcasting. Then it was called metaverse.com and you could download software to listen to radio stations, like a station in Melbourne, Florida. These days Adam’s

I co-hosted the show with Victor Goonetilleke who was passing through Hilversum on his way back to Sri Lanka. With recent discussion in January 2011 about funding of the BBC World Service, this flashback to a conference in September 1995 is rather topical. Sam Younger was the Managing Director of BBC World Service in 1995 and he questioned whether it is desirable for public broadcasters to work with commercial operations, especially in television. He predicted that the growth of international TV would have a major impact on radio transmissions. He also warned against certain types of sponsored programmes. The programme also contains the voice of the late Pete Myers who explains the reason for ending the run of the Happy Station programme. A nice cup of tea was one of the standard tunes that recurred in the Happy Station programme hosted by Eddy Startz, first on PCJ in 1928, and after the war when broadcasting resumed, Happy Station was a station within the station, Radio Netherlands. Last Sunday saw the last

This programme was made just after Radio Vlaanderen Internationaal celebrated its official 50th anniversary with a great listener get together in Brussels and a visit to the shortwave transmitting centre in Wavre. What a great celebration it was of Belgian external radio broadcasting. As we looked back in the archives we discovered Belgium has been active on shortwave for much longer than 50 years. Jacque van der Sichel, then director of RVI, has researched into the history and explains that Belgium’s appearance on the dial actually goes back 58 years. Just before the German invasion, the Belgian National Radio had been planning to upgrade the facilities in Ruiselede to improve reception of its programmes in other parts of the world. In fact, with war in Europe, the new high power facilities were moved to Africa, in the Belgian colony of Congo, now Zaire. Frans Vossen, media producer at the English department of Radio Vlaanderen Internationaal takes up the story. It's a shame that nothing seems to be left on

In this edition: Chris Greenway of BBC Monitoring reports on RFE-RL moves from Munich to Prague. Paul Rusling has an idea for a longwave radio station from the Isle of Man (Atlantic 252 for grown-ups) and Wolf Harranth reports on plans to revive a radio station in Lichtenstein. In other news here in Holland the PTT, quote media and the De Telegraaf newspaper have launched internet access for the general public. You pay 20 dollars a month for 6 hrs access. Meanwhile in London the BBC is in talks with Compuserve with the view to providing news and information to customers of this American online news provider. And in Israel, English programmes on shortwave are being cutback again as from July 1st. But the 19 hrs UTC transmission is being restored to a full half hour. However the feature programmes will not come back because Israel radio is closing its English features department at the end of June 1995. This week European Digital Radio changed its name to Radio E, ready for a test DAB launch in late August.

I remember this edition of the programme well because we had one of only ten prototypes made of the Baygen Clockwork Wireless. I bought it in South Africa from the factory. This is rare because it's in grey and the first model issued to the public was actually in black. The spring inside is actually the same spring used in a car safety-belt. Other news from the script... We also had some e-mail recently asking about "real audio" which was featured at the Towards 2000 interview. This was the way to get live audio from a radio station not through the airwaves but by using an Internet connection and a 14.4 modem. The quality achieved is telephone quality at best, but it appears things are improving. So let’s pick up the satellite telephone and cross to Lou Josephs in Boston, USA who has an update on Real Audio. The BBC World Service transmitter in Hong Kong, which broadcast news of the Tiananmen Square massacre in Mandarin to China, is to be dismantled before the Chinese authorites take over the colony in 1997.

This was one of the first shows to also be broadcast on mediumwave via the 1440 kHz Radio Luxembourg transmitter. These are some of the items mentioned in the programme. Sony Corporation is celebrating its 50th anniversary at the moment. This is reflected in major efforts to get MiniDisc going, major campaigns to boost the switch to 16 by 9 format televisions, plus home entertainment enhancements such as Prologic. As far as shortwave receivers is concerned Sony continues to invest in the travel market. The latest offering is a portable receiver called the ICF-SW-40 which combines digital tuning with the feel of an analogue tuning knob. We looked at the growth of Sky Radio, and Dutch consumer electronics companies are reporting a growth in the sales of the 16 by 9 letterbox format television sets. Most of it is in the top end of the market amongst the larger screen TV. The Dutch Facilities company NOB, which follows the market reports that about 100,000 wide-screen TVs will be sold in the course of 1996. The

I met the late Harold Robin a couple of times at his home in Tunbridge Wells, UK. He was a brilliant Foreign Office engineer who built the wartime Aspidistra transmitter famous for its clandestine work out of Crowborough. Have a listen to the programmes Wartime Deception on this site and you'll see what I mean. Although his work during the war is well documented in books like "The Black Game"by Ellic Howe, I think we managed to capture the other stories from later in his life. For instance, how he invented the "Picolo" modulation system as used by the diplomatic service to communicate text over shortwave between embassies. He also built the BBC Overseas relay station in Oman, and the external service of UAE Radio from Dubai. This edition, recorded after Christmas in 1995, looked at the story of the British response to the declaration of independence by Ian Smith in, what was then, Rhodesia. Harold talks about setting up a mediumwave transmitter in a matter of weeks in the town of Francistown, in the , now cal

Most of this week' s edition of Media Network was narrated from the island of Barbados in the sunny Caribbean. It contains quite a lot off off-air recordings made by plugging a Sony ICF2010 into the professional Walkman WDM6 that I used to carry everywhere (and still own, although there are better recorders now with Flash memory). I think this programme is a good example of armchair radio listening, taking you to places on the dial you wouldn't normally visit. Its pure theatre of the mind. I just love those long URL's. Forgive us. 15 years ago, URL's were still new to us.