Twiddling The Dial

Do you remember the days of twiddling the dial on your radio, attempting to tune into that distant medium wave station that’s being drowned out by another station on an adjacent frequency. Physically picking up the radio and slowly turning it round attempting to gain better reception often had the desired affect.

It appears that those days of twiddling the dial have all but gone with the advent of the digital devices now on the market. Does anyone still listen to medium wave radio, better known in latter years as AM radio, and if you were a twiddler did you prefer to refer to the wavelength or frequency of your favourite station, in others words did you say Radio 1 was on 247 metres or 1214 kilohertz. And the ultimate question to find out if you’re a radio junkie of the older era, which radio station was referred to as ‘The Station of the Stars’?

The quality of the transmissions on good old medium wave might not have been as clear as the technically advanced DAB and Internet based stations of today, but there was a certain excitement about searching along the dial. BBC Radios 1 and 2 opened each morning with the wonderful sound of George Martin’s, ‘Theme One’ breaking the silence of the past three hours, an announcer (maybe Colin Berry or Tom Edwards or Pete Brady) welcomed us to the day and the chimes of Big Ben marking the hour of 5 o’clock just could not be beaten and gave you the feeling of having started the day right.

It may sound unbelievable but I’d love for just one day go back to a listening day in say the early 1970s, perhaps tune to Radio 1 on 247 metres, get to about 4 o’clock in the afternoon and hear the call sign trumpets of Radio Tirana in Albania interfering with the Radio 1 signal. What a terrible sound that was, you youngsters of today don’t know what we had to go through in those days to get our fix of pop music.

And what about the famous Radio Luxembourg fade. Listening to your favourite song of the day and the station would just fade away, hence Radio Caroline’s first song when they came on air in 1964, was the Rolling Stones, ‘Not Fade Away’, very apt title.

The heyday of medium wave AM radio may be over, but the digital age brings new excitement to this radio junkie with the advent of Internet Radio. Who would ever have imagined practically the whole of the BBC output is now available for 4 weeks after broadcast, so the chances of missing something important is just about nil. And the number of radio stations around the world that now stream their transmissions over the internet must be in the thousands. Just about very genre is catered for to suit any and every taste.

One of my most treasured possessions is my Internet Radio, where it’s possible to listen to just about any radio station from around the world at the flick of a switch, and it’s crystal clear without a trace of interference. I used to listen to Radio Caroline in the 1970s, broadcasting from a rusty ship in the North Sea, now she’s on land and still broadcasting great music.

So what was that station that was the ‘Station of the Stars’? That was Radio Luxembourg, that broadcast hits of the day for English speaking listeners between the years 1933-1991, with a break during the World War Two years, firstly on long wave AM radio then from 1951 on medium wave AM radio.

Posted with Blogsy