History of Angel Radio - part 2

This whole new audience boosted
the team's confidence and they began
regular Saturday and Sunday
broadcasts on short wave from 10am to
5pm. These broadcasts, you will recall,
were all being carried out without a
broadcast licence. The programmes,
which proved very popular with the
Continental audience, were not proving
so popular with the Radio Comm-
unications Agency, who were at this
very moment driving around in their
detector vans tracing the pirate radio
signals back to that small flat in
Clanfield.
The Raid
............ and so, one Sunday in 1994 at about midday we were visited by 3 officers from the DTI (Department of Trade and Industry) Radiocommunications Unit and 5 police officers. Evidently the shop next door to our flat had problems on his telephone line and had called an engineer who had decided it was interference of an illicit nature and reported it to the DTI.
The officers disconnected all of the transmission and studio equipment and confiscated it along with our entire record collection.
During the following couple of weeks we received so many good wishes from our many listeners that we decided to get back on air as soon as possible. Just four weeks later we were back. As the shortwave transmitter had been the cause of the interference that led to our raid we decided to only run an FM transmitter locally in future. So that we could still be heard by our many listeners overseas we recorded special programmes and had them relayed by several shortwave pirates, including Free Radio London, a station in Kent, one on Guernsey and a station in Luton. This meant that on some Sundays listeners could tune to any one of up to 5 Angel Radio broadcasts, each one different from the rest.
Our FM broadcasts took to the air on Friday evenings and went through to Monday morning. We included programmes from many ex-deejays from Jam FM in Portsmouth.
In 1995 we were invited onto a Portsmouth RSL station called Radio Victory to discuss pirate radio. The following weekend we were raided once again by officers from the DTI Radiocommunications Unit and police.
It was interesting to note that the local beat-bobby actually stood up for us against the DTI and argued that we were providing a community service. Never the less our equipment was confiscated again.
During the programme about pirate radio on Radio Victory we were joined by Tracy Mullins from the Radio Authority, who told us about RSLs (Restricted Service Licenses) and offered assistance in applying for one so that we could broadcast legally, albeit only for 28 days.
  TO BE CONTINUED

A rare photograph of Martin Kirby at the controls of short wave pirate station 'Freesound'. Circa 1980s