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LOGS / NEWS - NOVEMBER 2014 A site mainly dedicated to Mediumwave Dxing |
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REMEMBERING
THE WINTER OF 79, AS TOM ROBINSON USED TO SAY ( I suspect I shall add to this section in the coming days, but let me start the section by explaining a little about what these links are all about. There have been some other recordings from 1979 came up recently on the web, mainly from Radio Caroline from the Mi Amigo. I thought I would include my own recordings here from that winter, some 35 years ago!! First I have to apologise in advance for the bad quality. I was using receivers that had weird effects when using narrow bandwidth setting, making the receiver sound desensitised. (Grundig sat 3400) I was also a young pain in the backside myself for constantly fiddling with the receiver, always trying to get it a little better, but in the end made the recordings often so annoying to listen to. Especially when the reception is fine. Why did I not just leave it alone if the tape was running. Why did I often switch to narrow bandwidth when the wide selection sounded so much better!!! Well we can't go back and switch that switch now!! I was only 16 in those days. How many young fellas of 16 will sit listening to their sw / mw radio at nights nowadays?? And at that time I was using a fairly poor old ITT cassette recorder. A mono contraption that was not the best. It had no pause button, which gives that "crashing into the recording" kind of a noise that is throughout the airchecks, but half the time, that crashing in included a word or two, so I left it all in!! Amazing though it may seem now, when you think about it, you are listening to the noise of the MW and the SW band from 35 years ago, including the noise of the interference!! So with the equipment, cheap tapes, and young age that couldn't tell good audio from a tin of baked beans, to have any listenable recordings from this time 35 years ago is I suppose a bonus. Some are a little muffled and bassy because of the equipment used at the time, and some, like BIG C R was muffled and rough anyway!! SSB was not the best on the Grundig I had by that time, the 3400 as mentioned above. But many folks had no SSB and used domestic portables back in them days. I was always envious of the large studio reel to reels that some hi fi buffs had back then. And the NRD receivers you saw in the magazines. In fact at that time I still never had my first proper cassette deck, and wouldn't have until mid 1980, when the audio quality of my tapes took a serious step up. But by that time, there were no more transmissions from the Mi Amigo. ======================================================
RADIO CAROLINE AIRCHECKS - THE PANTOMIME HORSE, IS COMING: So who remembers THE PANTOMIME HORSE?? LOL.... Radio Caroline around October 1979 began to make cryptic comments eg "The pantomime horse" is coming.. etc. Apparently it was a bit of a standing joke with the guys on board. Four of the djs at the time were going to dress up as pantomime horses and go to a Caroline Roadshow, and take the trousers off Robbie Day on the stage....lol... At least that is an exact quote I received at the time from someone I was corresponding with.... But it seems they were all talk and no troosers..LOL... Anyway, hilarity aside, listen on the clips to George Wood of Sweden Calling DXers suggesting it was some kind of a coded message!!!! There are also a few recordings that came via AW about 6 years ago or something, to put up on line. This is me just getting around to it!!! They are of Caroline September 1979 when the 50kw transmitter was being used, and what a difference it made to fringe listeners like us up here in Scotland. Much of the recordings uploaded today need indexed in the main dx archive pages as well. This will be done soon.
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RADIO CAROLINE AIRCHECKS AND UPDATES - THE WINTER OF 1979:
OTHER RECORDINGS FROM THE WINTER OF 1979: Below are some SW and MW stations heard around the Christmas period, 1979, here in Scotland.
SW PIRATES:
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THE 13 DAYS OF CHRISTMAS (REPEAT ENTRY FROM OCTOBER PAGE AS IT IS RELEVANT) Anyone who was a Caroline listener in the late 70's and to be more exact Christmas 1979, will remember these two little songs made by the guys on board. These are made up from a MW recording, so quality isn't 100%, and I think the thirteen days of Christmas was given too much echo or something....... So incase you can't make it out, here is what I hear for each day, listed below. Maybe not 100% with Steven Bishop??
1st A half a dozen very noisy Dutch!! 2nd Merry Captain Harris 3rd Randy Kees Burrel 4th Our very own Chicago 5th Tom Hardy with his boring punk rock (YEEEUUUK...LOL) 6th "Hello John" I'm Busby 7th Saucy Stuart Russel 8th "Good Afternoon" Stevie Gordon 9th Hippy Tom Anderson 10th Little Nick Richards 11th Fatty Steven Bishop 12th Mike in the night 13th A man called Roy 5593716
Now who can remember all of these names??? I know that I personally know them all very well. Buzby, Stuart Russel, Tom Anderson and Steven Bishop are all still involved in Radio Caroline as she is today. Nick, Stevie and Chicago all go to the conventions. I was just listening to Roy Masters the other night on a remote tuner, when I was on the Perseus in Ma. I was looking, and found a toth from the 1240 stn WBAS that I heard here on 14th. I had a tune around, and came across Roy on 950. He was calling the leaders scum and generally sounded in very good form. But wait. This man was born in 1928 and is 86 years old!! Not a bad voice for 86, and sharp as a razor!!!! But who does not recognise the rest of the above names? I know most people I know will have heard none of the above names. Why would they if they listened to BBC or ILR crud in the 70's. I was told only recently about some insignificant ILR presenter from London that had done something or other, and a link was posted to me from a news service. I had never heard of this character. Why would I? He may be important to someone, but not to me I'm afraid. My interest in ILR is nil. Always has been. I don't even think I would know many if any of the names on the local ILR stations up this way come to think of it. But ask me of the guys that were on the Mi Amigo, or the Ross, or some of the Irish pirates in the 80's and the names I was familiar with way back 30 odd years ago in the 80's are probably still etched in my head. Amazing. ======================================================
I was listening by chance to a download of a recording of Bob Noakes on Radio Seagull 1602, from August when they were on the Radio Ship Jenny Bayton. Bob of course was on the original Radio Seagull / Caroline / Northsea off the Dutch coast back in 1973 and 74 and wrote the book, Last of the Pirates, which is an excellent read. But my ears pricked up when he told the tale of an Irish DJ he once knew called Danny Hughes. And a very amusing tale it was as well.... Listen to the clip below.
Now if I were a gambling man, I would say that has to be the same fella that started up Radio Leinster in 1981, and became Dublin's kinda easy listening station up until 1983. I just missed a sale on ebay of one of his demo records, but found a few other sites making reference to his production, including some ropey audio tracks. See below. I had no idea Danny was a musician, though I did know that he may have been caught up in the Stardust Night Club disaster in Dublin on 14th February 1981. (That news reported by Captain Cooke on Radio Dublin at the time) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stardust_fire In fact Christy Moore, well known Irish folk singer wrote a song on the subject in 1985 and was apparantley subsequently prosecuted and the song banned!! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wcizhnIU2lI
(Not my own recording, but via Gerard in Dublin. Mine has a het that needs filtered out)
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NEW OLD CALL FOR 1510 BOSTON - WMEX: Good to see an old call coming back to 1510, but the toth ann does not really make it easy in a bad signal situation. I still ask myself what the WUFC call really is sometimes when I heard it. You can never mistake the ID for WWKB, or WINS for example, but some ids are not produced to be plain and in your face. Why I don't have a clue, as they are commercial and therefore promoting their call letters at every opportunity can only be healthy. But anyway, who cares really. It's not as though it is going to become a real radio station again. Most of these AM talk stations seem to carry all the network / satellite shows, and ID only a few times an hour. Long gone are the days when stations had an identity.
YOUTUBE DOWNLOAD TOOL: I use this handy tool to download or convert to mp3 anything I want to save from youtube. There are plenty others of course. Such a handy tool.
It really has been a poor show, but decided to try Latin antenna today, and find a few signals. 750 ss
0400 18/11
It really has been a poor show recently. Nothing worth while to report here, and when these conditions come around, I kinda lose interest and drift back to the archives and try and find some interesting old recordings. In fact I am in the process of finding some recordings that I will be uploading shortly, from way back in 1979. =============================================================
AOMEI ONE KEY RECOVERY - ANOTHER SUPERB PC RECOVERY TOOL: I don't remember the site I was on that led me the other night to the above superb little piece of Freeware, called AOMEI ONE KEY RECOVERY. It is really fast and simple to use. What does it do?? Well if you use a PC that has a hidden partition to put the machine back to factory default / out the box, you will realise what a superb and handy tool that really is. Many use a single F10 or Alt and F10, or F9, F8 etc key to access the hidden partition. All manufacturers use different hot keys. AOEMI use the letter A. It is the easiest way out of a machine that has become so slow due to constant use on the web and users clicking here and clicking there and all the so called free offers of the day!! Or even just for a tired install of Windows that you recon was once faster and smoother, and more reliable. But as PC geeks will know, this factory restore method of recovery is destructive, and wipes all the files from the drive. That is a good thing, and is such a good reason for working from a removable hard drive for your personal files eg photos and documents, music etc. Therefore nothing is lost when you make your restore. And you don't have to spend hours searching and double searching for personal files left on the C drive. I prefer a full destructive restore than a "keep your files" type restore. It cleans out the machine. But what if your machine has no hidden partition, and you rely on a complete windows CD re install to repair a slow machine. That's fine of course, but you may still be tweaking to your liking a couple of hours later, once you reinstall all the little software gizmos you use every day, and set user preferences to all those. A pal was telling me the other day about catching the small grandkids tapping away merrily at his keyboard and ending up having random scrips running and generally wrecking his fresh WIN 7 install, that took him ages to tweek to his liking. I still chuckle when picturing that!!! I told him about AOMEI after the event..LOL.. These hidden partitions can be finished in 10 minutes or maybe a little longer, depends on the size of the hidden partition. Have you ever searched to see what PC ANGEL is and if you can get a copy?? This was used in some possibly Gateway e machines I seem to recall. I could never find a copy. But I always liked the idea of being able to create a hidden partition, for easy restore, but I never found the software to do it. But now I have, and it is freeware. What is so special about AOMEI (apart from trying to learn to spell it correctly) compared to for example Acronis disk image. Well Acronis is superb at cloning a hard disk, and for all the price hard drives are these days, it may be a good idea to make a clone of your main drive once you have it running in tip top condition, and all the personal tweaks and preferences are all set. You can even create the clone to a USB drive. Remember the C drive / software drive need only be 10 gig or so maybe?? Less in many cases. So you can use that old 40g drive in the old pc from the loft!! With AOMEI though, you can create the back up on a hidden partition as well. That can be used to recover your own personal factory restore, except in times of trouble when the hard drive physically dies. Then it is time to use the separate cloned 40g disk that is stored away somewhere. I have tried a test drive with WIN 7 as well as with WIN XP. With XP, despite the claim that it works for all versions of windows, from XP onwards, 32 or 64 bit, etc, you still have to download an extra windows file for XP. The link to the download pops up after your first attempt to create the recovery partition with XP. This was not required for WIN7. The windows automated installation kit (WAIK) is a hefty 1.7 gig download. And that doesn't install without first installing MSXML 6, which is part of the download, and at the bottom left of the install screen. The WAIK has a foolproof install window that takes you through the process, with no issues noted here. After that, it works as well for XP as it does for WIN7. BUT if you have a factory restore partition already built into your PC, do you need this?? Well, not always, but some of these so called new machines take longer to uninstall all the shiteware and trial versions of crap that the manufacturers have decided they want to impose on you, than the actual windows restore. (Even though you paid for a new version of Windows in the price!!!) So wouldn't it be handy to have a system recovery partition to take you back to your own personal copy of windows, with all the software and preferences set to your liking. I think so. AOMEI is the answer, or at least one of the answers. In my case, getting rid of all the crap flashing lights and bringing the operating system back as best as I can to look like windows 2000 or something, instead of all the fading menus and moving babyish icon options. In the links below there is also a link from the download crew to a Partition manager piece of freeware also from AOMEI. I have at present not tried it out, though I installed it for a look, and at first glance it seems as though it could make partitioning a drive simple and logical, though many other pieces of partitioning software are very good as well. I noticed that when installing Windows 7 after XP had been installed on the drive, and backed up as a recovery partition, the "A" key at boot up option was also wiped. But the partition was still there, and an install of the AOEMI software allowed access to the partition via the software. So it worked just fine. It also worked fine with the AOMEI boot CD that you can make. So there is another little piece of software for the collection of useful tools.
http://www.pcadvisor.co.uk/downloads/3330038/aomei-onekey-recovery-100/ http://aomei-onekey-recovery.findmysoft.com/ http://www.backup-utility.com/aomei-backupper-for-windows7.html http://www.downloadcrew.co.uk/article/32512-aomei_onekey_recovery
MW DXING - A FEW LATIN LOGS FROM TODAY AND YESTERDAY:
570 Radio
Nac Columbia 570 0359 6/11
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