A BRIEF HISTORYOF ANGEL RADIO

Many people who have recently started listening to our unique nostalgia programmes will be surprised to learn the truth about the origins of Angel Radio ........... but here goes -

Part 1 - The Pirate Days

Angel Radio began broadcasting in August 1993 from a small flat in the Hampshire village of Clanfield. In those days the Angel team consisted of just Tony and his wife Lorna. The original idea was to start a radio station which was very different from all the other stations on the dial. Angel FM, as it was then known, was to be a community station playing music unheard elsewhere. They bought a transmitter which had previously been used by a local bus company to keep in touch with their drivers. This was converted by Tony to transmit on 105.2 MHz, a clear channel on the radio dial. No effort was made to seek a broadcast licence. They just switched on and began broadcasting 3 hours of programmes each Sunday afternoon.

One of the first broad

casts wasn't actually

transmitted from the

flat.

The 3 hours of prog

-rammes were recorded

at the flat and put onto

cassette tape.

Then the tape recorder,

transmitter and antenna

were loaded into a

3-wheeled Reliant Robin

and the car was driven

to the B & Q store in

Havant. Once in the

B & Q car park the tape

player was connected to

the transmitter, which in

turn was connected to

the antenna.  

Unfortunately the antenna was about 12 feet high and looked ludicrous bolted to

the roof of an old 3 wheel car. We attracted so much attention from staff and

customers of B & Q that we decided never to do a broadcast from a car park again.

A few weeks into the broadcasts Tony received a letter from a listener offering to present programmes. This listener was Martin Kirby. Martin had been running his own pirate radio station, which had recently closed down, and was looking for another station as an outlet for his talents. Tony wrote back and said he would be pleased to give him a programme slot. With Martin's programme filling extra time on Angel FM the broadcasts began to stretch to 5 hours each Sunday.

Although the transmitter being used to broadcast the signal locally on FM was only low power (10 watts) and the transmitter site was surrounded by hills, the Angel Radio signal was picked up clearly as far away as Fareham.

Just before Christmas 1993 Martin brought in the old transmitter he originally used for his station and suggested we connect it up and do a special Christmas Day broadcast on Short Wave. So a 'longwire' aerial was put up by Tony, the transmitter was connected, and at 10am on Christmas morning Tony, Lorna and Martin did their first short wave broadcast to Europe, on a frequency of 6200KHz, using the name Angel International. Their success was almost instantaneous with telephone calls coming in from the Midlands, Scotland, Ireland, France, Germany and Italy. A week later their post-bag showed that the signal had travelled much further than expected, with letters also coming from Spain, Russia, Austria and Sweden.