Dave wrote:
Caroline were interested in getting a licence for 225KHz, should be
interesting from a ship......
Ah! An ideal candidate for a CFA!
Talking of which, what ever happened to the "definitive" tests which were
scheduled for a CFA system last year as arranged by NTL (?) and witnessed by
a team of independent consultant engineers? Did they take place and were the
results ever published?
But if I were Radio Caroline and I had a license for 225kHz, I certainly
wouldn't want to put the station back onto a ship irrespective of how
sentimental it may appear. Remember the definition for a boat - "Something
which makes a hole in water into which you pour money!" The only
justification for retaining the station on a ship would be as part of a
"Heritage Site" - perhaps run by the National Trust or English Heritage.
After all the better run Radio Pirate Ships - namely Radio Caroline and
Radio London - did have a very profound effect on the direction of
Broadcasting within this country.
I also wonder how commercially viable a re-incarnated Radio Caroline would
be - given the quantity of independent stations now on the air. They would
be competing in what is now a fairly saturated market, and some of the
stations already on the air don't seem to be doing that well financially.
The thing that I find so paradoxical about the Caroline story is that Rowan
O'Reilly started Caroline because he couldn't get Luxembourg to play the
records of Georgie Fame (?), for whom he was an agent, as Luxembourg's
English Service airtime was fully booked by Decca Records and HMV
Records(?). The popularity of Caroline and the other Radio Pirate Ships
were eventually instrumental in the creation of all day Top 40 stations,
such as Radio 1 and then the ILR stations, and it was these that no doubt
brought about the demise of Luxembourg's English Service.
So you could say that Rowan O'Reilly got his (Ross) Revenge!
David G4FTC
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