Media Network Vintage Vault 2018-2019

In 1986 I attended an ANARC convention and gave a slide show about European and Asian radio. I dragged two Kodak Caroussel projectors across the Atlantic and a device that synchronised them with an audio from a cassette. I must have been mad. I remember having to take two suitcases. In fact, the tape lasted longer than the projectors. It is really radio with pictures, a sort of early Slideshare I'd say. Give us 22 minutes, we'll give you the world, or at least the world as we saw it in 1986. Never broadcast as far as I can remember. Mike Bird free.

This programme covers three media wars going on in the middle of 1999. One was in Kosovo, there was increased tension in the Koreas (nothing has changed) and problems in the Solomon Islands.There's also an interview with Jerry Berg who wrote an excellent book on the early days of shortwave broadcasting. In June 1999, one of the Radio Netherlands transmitters began carrying a daily programme of just under 2 hours produced by the journalists of Radio 21. If you've been following our coverage of the media situation in Kosovo, you may recall that Radio 21 was a Web-only radio station based in Pristina, serving the Albanian community. In the disputed waters off the coast of Korea, north and south Korean naval vessels became involved in yet another incident in which two North Korean ships were sunk. The political tension between north and South Korea has of course been high ever since the Korean war, and the airwaves of that region are full of propaganda from both sides.

In 1998 I had the chance to go to Shanghai to take part in an Asian Broadcasting Union meeting. Frankly, the topics for discussion were mind numbing - political more than practical. But it gave me a great opportunity to tour some of the radio stations in the city and keep a kind of audio diary. We experimented with sending files over the web - and it didn't sound too bad. Certainly good enough for shortwave. Remember that China is roughly the same size as the United States, except it has 5 times the population. ABU meetings have a reputation of doing things on a grand scale, in-fact a scale of grandeur that has long since died out in Europe. And because many of the stations have government connections, including this year's hosts, the Radio and TV of the Peoples' Republic of China, there's an official reception desk waiting behind passport control. A young girl in a white jacket spots my briefcase with the Radio Netherlands sticker. Yes, I am Mr Marks, but for the next few days, I'm better kno

Looking back through old radio magazines of about 25 years ago, you see some very strange articles. Speakers at international radio conferences like ANARC and the European DX Council proudly talked about short-wave turning to single-sideband by the year 2015 and that satellites would not play a significant role before the end of the century. They seemed to have totally misjudged the competition from commercial TV broadcasters like CNN, or the growing demand from the consumer for better quality audio and more choice. Another denial, this time from BBC World Service. They were reacting to an article in the Sunday Times of London which claimed on the 26th September that BBC’s external service is about to shut some language services. (history is repeating itself in 2010). BBC’s German service, which has just celebrated 60 years on the air, was supposedly to close together with transmissions to Nepal, Portuguese speaking Africa, Slovakia and Hungary. BBC told us that a decision on how to bridge a 5.7 million poun

I remember this edition of Media Network because it had a superb story from China as part of the Memory of the Millennium. The author explained how radio had been a friend and foe in his life, especially to his father. It is only when you visit other countries where listening to foreign radio stations is discouraged that you realise the risks people took in the past, and (in some countries like Burma) risks that they still take today. This edition also contains a chat with the late Bob Tomalski on recordable DVD's (what a standards mess that was) and we hear from a listener in the UK who believes the BBC is trying to do too much. This edition was recorded at a time when BBC German was amongst a number of language sections threatened with closure. We also did film reviews: Henry Stokes writes from Green Bay Wisconsin. I remember in the dim distant past, Media Network ran a series of features about Motion Picture musings, a sort of film review section where the idea was to spotlight films that

Diana Janssen sent the following postcard on her holiday which we published on the web, asking you to identify where she'd been. I thought it was Albania. Others suggested Ukraine. No-one got this one right. But there was some more offshore news as Radio 10 celebrated an anniversary and Merlin Communications started to broadcast other programmes than the BBC out of Orfordness, Suffolk. We also spoke with Mike Kelly, who had refitted VOA's Master Control and had now started a satellite business. BVN-TV was later broadcast to North America through Kelly's system.

A news programme reporting on a remarkable number of closedowns and mysteries. You can see that several stations are starting to play with the web, though no-one is really sure about what they are doing. Radio Netherlands tests 7130 from an undisclosed location, the Nozema Christmas Tree, Radio Luxemburg ends shortwave analogue broadcasts, Victor Goonetilleke reports on protests to VOA transmitter site in Chilaw, Ethiopia being heard again, RIAS switched off shortwave, DW expands Nauen near Berlin, Austria pulls the plug on medium, Pete Costello launches a links lists. The URL's were so new we thought http:// was important enough to mention on the air :-). REE joins the web, alongside RTE in Ireland. Bethany gets a new life in Ohio. Chris Greenway at BBC Monitoring, reports on a longwave transmitter from Oslo remains on the air. Estonian radio puts mediumwave back on the air and Georgia has LW plans too. The show closes with Mike Bird’s propagation survey.

Today’s radio feature says bravo for bakelite, an early form of plastic which brought radio to the people. When radios were first manufactured in the first twenty years of this century, they looked more like an experiment in a physics laboratory than something which was designed to entertain. Then some firms started using a thermosetting phenol formaldehyde resin for their cases, formed from an elimination reaction of phenol with formaldehyde, usually with a wood flour filler. It was developed in 1907–1909 by Belgian chemist Dr. Leo Baekeland. Wikipedia has more here. In this programme, broadcast on the Queens Day holiday in 1998, we visit the home of Willem Bos who has scoured the flea markets in the Netherlands is search of his passion for bakelite. Thanks too to Scott MacLeod Liddle for his terrific photo on Flickr.

First broadcast in 1984, this programme looks in some detail at a mystery that took decades to solve. Light and radio waves travel 7 times around the world in one second. So how can you explain some echoes noted on early shortwave broadcasts from PCJ, sometimes of several seconds? Did the ionosphere have a memory? Was the sun part of the equation? Unashamedly specialist this one. But we got good response from those interested in the technical aspects of shortwave radio.

Buenos Aires is a truly amazing city, a mixture of Paris, Madrid and London all rolled into one. The Brits built the communications infrastructure in the country during the first part of the last century. That explains the UK style phone and postboxes. Each time I have visited, I have dropped by at the studios of Argentine National Radio tucked away in the heart of the city. I found the tour to be fascinating because although it is very old, it seems to work. One floor houses the external service and in this edition of Media Network, broadcast in February 2000, we compiled a portrait of the English service of RAE as it was then. They are still on the air in English, with a broadcast to Europe at 3 PM (BA time - 18 hrs UTC) on 9690 and 15345 kHz. Actually, I listen on a Pure Evoke wifi radio and get much better reception. The website hides a lot of the history of what's going on. The city oozes music, poetry, dance, and mystery. I can spend hours wandering around, soaking it up. Having followed the Falklands-M

At one time, Radio Canada International hosted some very interesting discussions on the future of international broadcasting. If you're interested in what stations thought would have happened by now, this edition of Media Network may prove interesting. In fact the future turned out to be very different, partly because stations didn't do enough to measure and grow their audiences. There is also another edition avaiilable recorded in Ottawa two years earlier. Search under the uploads in October 2010 for Cutty Sark.

This wireless show came from Wales when the Radio Academy decided to hold its annual conference in the Welsh capital. I remember flying over with Dan-Air in what must have been an ancient Hawker Siddeley aircraft which had incandescent lights in the cockpit. It was like a flying underground train - and the flight from Amsterdam took two hours. But I digress. This show was really a commentary on the state of UK radio at the start of the new Millennium. What concerns me is that 11 years later a lot of what is discussed here is only just happening. Nice to rediscover the old recordings of Kenny Everett at the Beeb. The programme also features interviews with Howard Rose, then editor of the Radio Magazine, and Quentin Howard talking about DAB.

There are still hundreds of clandestine radio stations operating in the world. Some are part of psychological warfare campaigns organised by the military. Others are exile voices intended to overthrow the government of another country. Some of them use FM and can only be heard a few kilometres from the transmitter. Others use short-wave (although there numbers are dwindling in 2010), and thanks to the way the ionosphere works, these clandestine operations can be heard well outside the region. Such was the case throughout the 1980s in Central America. But when the conflict is over, the voices disappear. Sometimes it is possible to find and interview those who were responsible. And that was the purpose of this occasional series. It was 1981 when Radio Venceremos appeared on the air waves in El Salvador. The station’s first broadcast on the 10th of January coincided with the beginning of the war in that Central American nation. Many Salvadorians had felt for some time that the only way to break t

This is the complete edition of a documentary called Truth Shall Prevail, the engaging story of Radio Prague in 1945 and 1968. I discovered a rather large set of recordings in Dutch archives in 1988 because, it seems, there was an agricultural conference going on in Prague at the time when the Russians invaded in August 1968. I have also managed to do a video interview with Peter Skala, the frequency manager of Radio Prague and the founder of the Radio Prague Monitor Club. He is just fascinating. He confirmed that many of the educated guesses we made at the time in 1988 were correct. If you're interested in more of this, check out the interviews I made with Wolf Harranth, former DX editor at the ORF in Vienna. He followed those eventful days very closely, being so close to the Czechoslovak border.

A safari to South Africa at the start of the Millennium, including an interview towards the end with the father of community radio, Zane Ibrahim (photo). I think what he says about radio in South Africa still applies a decade later. The programme contains a lot of historical stuff about the early days of Radio 702 from the late Frits Greveling who presented DX Juke Box before going back to South Africa in 1980. An interesting show, but absolutely no Vuvuzelas

This programme examines the boarding of Radio New York International , which broadcast from a radio ship anchored in international waters just off Jones Beach, Long Island New York in 1987 and 1988. I seem to recall that the authorities said one of the reasons for the boarding was that it is illegal to broadcast from a ship. Except that the Voice of America did exactly that off the coast of Greece in the 1950's. The "Courier 410" was fitted out with 150 kW diesel generators by RCA and transmitters designed to put a shortwave signal out via a tethered balloon. The good old Interwebs has plenty of photos here and here. - nothing like that when we made the programme. From 7th September 1952 till May 1964 the USCGC Courier broadcast Voice of America programs in 16 languages to Communist bloc countries in Eastern Europe and the Middle East, transmitting these programs 10 hours each day. During these tense years, USCGC Courier, operating as a sea station, was constantly alert to crisis, with the abi

This show looks at vintage radio copies. And following a tip from Tony Barratt we recall how Harold Robin chose a transmitter site in Oman from a plane and Bob Tomalski ponders why certain Japanese companies see a future for tape. If you're interested in shortwave transmitter sites, I highly recommend joining the transmitter group that has plotted all these sites on Google Earth. Masirah is Oman's largest island, located some 15 km from the coast of Al Wusta in Central Oman, just south of the Wahiba Sands and east of Bar Al Hikman. It has an hour-glass shape with a width varying between 6 and 18 km. It is a real a Desert Island, with a rocky east coast facing the strong northwestern winds and a protected western coast with large bays and muddy sabkha's (salt-flats). The main income is from the fishery (a vivid trade with the Emirates) and the military base in the North. The BBC Eastern Relay station is still visible on Google Maps. The only account of the island in English that I have seen can

Don't let the opening music mislead you. This show contains another indepth safari, this time in the form of an in-depth interview with Janet Anderson. She used to work for Radio Netherlands in the late 1990's before moving to Dar Es Salaam, Tanzania. Its strange listening to this programme now because I have just visited Tanzania and other parts of East Africa myself to compare the changes in the media scene. The phone companies have developed much faster than the broadcasters. I drove by the Tanzania Broadcasting Corporation HQ and was astonished to find them building a new extension for digital terrestrial television broadcasts. This is strange because the commercial competition is on satellite, so it seems to be a rather expensive way of reaching such a huge country. If you'd like to see video of that trip, then leave a message below. This edition also look at the state of the Freeplay Clockwork Radio, four years after launch and the late Bob Tomalski had news about a trick being played by

It has gone rather quiet media wise in Angola, though since this programme was made the country has had to do a lot to recover from decades of civil war. Oil money is flowing again - but Angola remains low in the country list of press freedom. In 1999, a colleague in the Portuguese dept of Radio Netherlands left to do extensive training in the region and we interviewed him on his return. It was a chance to dip into the Richard Ginbey collection of rare African radio recordings. Between 1998-2000, we did a lot of Safaris on the programme and I've found it fascinating to revisit these shows after just over a decade. What amazes me is how international broadcasting has virtual stood still since 2000, stuck in a time warp with nothing but future plans.

August seemed to be the month when we frequently looked at off-shore radio. This edition was crafted together with a big contribution from Nic Newman, at that time working for Radio Netherlands before going on to do great things at the BBC's Interactive Departments. Nic went out to the ship on one of the boats - pretty brave since we had some pretty dreadful storms in the summer of 1985. He talks to the DJ's on Laser 558 including , now a political commentator living in the UK. The show also looked at communications with the Space Shuttle and there are tuning tips from Arthur Cushen, Victor Goonetilleke and Sarath Weerakoon. I know that off-shore radio editions seem to score as some of the highest in the download figures, so let's see what this one does. Enjoy.