Coming to you live from Bangor

Bangor's student-led radio started off with a classic setup of pre-recorded programmes made in a studio somewhere, then taken on tape to a transmitter site where they could be played back. The regulations for licensed university radio stations at the time were extremely tight about stations not being audible outside a campus, and the high quality audio of FM was simply a no-no. For a university such as Bangor, physically integrated with the city, there was simply no purpose in applying for a licence as official ridicule would have been the response. You want to do what? But life had to go on, and so a more-or-less unattended transmitter site with a tape playback machine was the choice. It had many drawbacks, with maybe a lack of immediacy with the audience a prime factor. The advantages were physical distance from the radio authorities, which meant that studio equipment and precious record collections were largely protected from confiscation should officialdom intervene.

The step to using radio links between studio and transmitter site was simply transformational. It was live radio. What you said was what went out. There was no messing around with recording tapes and physically transporting them somewhere, with a bit of a risk for the person involved. The downside was the use of more sophisticated radio equipment with more to go wrong, but the advantages for presentation completely outweighed the disadvantages. And, because any authorities would be bound to track the public main transmitter (FM or AM) first, it kept the idea that the studio with its precious record collections and equipment would be safe. Or so the argument went.

One Friday morning in February 1976 this was put dramatically to the test. The studio was at a private house in William Street in lower Bangor, where a good friend had generously given up her bedroom for a week. By coincidence it was physically close to the university school for electronics in Dean Street, where some of us were still trying to keep a study programme together despite the allure of Rag Week activities. So on leaving the studio at the end of the breakfast programme at 10 in the morning, it was only a short walk to go to the lecture on solid state physics given by a popular lecturer and I made it more or less on time. The sea of portable radios and the cheer that greeted me entering the lecture theatre is not even the main point of this story.

We delved deep into semiconductor stuff, with even the lecturer sensing the spirit and suggesting his subject matter could help improve radio reception. And then, we heard it. First a distant throb of rotor blades, then much louder, we realised a helicopter was flying almost overhead. But it didn't just pass by. It circled, several times, almost directly over the building. Only after a few minutes did it go away.

There was a major RAF base at RAF Anglesey, and one person who was outside at the time identified the aircraft as an RAF helicopter. It didn't circle Dean Street as we first thought; it actually circled over William Street and the house holding the studio and radio link transmitter. What we thought would never happen had just occurred. The authorities had ignored the main and public FM transmitter and gone hunting the link. From the air that is particularly easy to do. And somehow they knew that there was a radio link involved, and that the main FM transmitter and studio were not at the same site. Was that a fortuitous discovery, or did the information leak out?

What to do? Our cover was blown, at least to the RAF. We had one critical piece of knowledge, that the RAF had an allocation for UHF radio technology, and our equipment was carefully trimmed to avoid harmonics falling in this allocation. But it's very difficult to reduce harmonic radiation to zero. We speculated - made an hypothesis, like good students - that the RAF had noticed this low-level radio activity and checked it out. We guessed that communication between the RAF about something that they were not really interested in, and the civilian Post Office would at best be slow. It was Friday - we had two and a bit days to go. And there was only half a day to go before the weekend, and who at the Post Office worked weekends? So we made a conscious decision to brazen it out, and kept BRBS on the air from the same location. And we were left alone.

Looking back, was that the right decision? I don't know. It put personal belongings at risk, and risked fines for the others in the house who were otherwise not involved. But we'd already had seven excellent, stimulating and fun-filled days and put out some superb radio presentation. To cut BRBS off in its prime would have been ever so painful. But I will never forget the day that we were hunted down by the full might of Britain's air force.

No apologies; this article was mainly written for the Techies out there. It describes how BRBS operated in 1975, and reveals some of its secrets.

Part of my attraction to the Bangor Engineering Department when doing A levels, like a significant percentage of undergraduates, was the activities and reputation of its Amateur Radio Society. This was well known throughout the UK back then.

I discovered Rag Radio, then known as the Gnome Service, back in autumn term 1972. With the aid of some colleagues, we identified it was coming from the Union building. I don't remember exactly how, but I progressively got more interested in what became BRBS over the following two years.

Starting with Medium Wave

There have been some comments about the performance of the 227 m medium wave service elsewhere on this website. The problem was the antenna. The wavelength of 227 m means the radio waves are very long. This causes a problem when trying to set up a low observability "covert" antenna somewhere. As busy engineering students, with a very full academic week, we also had very little time to come up with a temporary solution.

To meet these constraints, a half wave dipole antenna was used (113.5 m long). This ran along the roof of the Physics/Maths building not far from the Union. Not sure why it ended up there. This worked a bit, but the local ground wave signal in Bangor was much weaker than we had hoped. It was possibly because the roof of the building contained steel girders. Practical experience with these relatively long waves was limited in the team. To our surprise, we did get reception reports from London in the evenings. With a little more experience, post Bangor, the results were what you would expect with this type of low horizontal antenna. A dipole that is low in terms of wavelength will be quite lossy, and will radiate mostly upwards creating long distance sky wave radiation in the evenings.

The medium wave station received its program feed via a FM band link. Some "coherent multiple small cell" concepts for medium wave were considered for later years, with short vertical antennas, but were not implemented.

The Studio

The studio was located in Bryn Teg Terrace not far from the Union. Other people will have to comment on the audio equipment. The studio fed the FM and MW transmitters via a UHF wideband FM link. The stereo encoder was also at the studio. The link transmitter was designed so that it would not degrade the stereo signal. You also need a much stronger signal to decode stereo than mono FM. The link transmitter used a QQV03-10 valve in the output. (Yes we used valves back in those days. Although valves were no longer on the curriculum at Eng, they were readily available). This transmitter had an annoying habit of not starting first thing in the morning. One of our DJs, who was not part of the radio team, found a solution to this. Somehow he discovered that if he "stroked" the QQV03-10 valve, the transmitter would immediately start and worked correctly for the rest of the day!

The studio also had separate two way radio communications to talk to the engineering team when they were setting up the transmitters, the outside broadcast vehicle, and for conducting reception strength surveys. To avoid breakthrough interference with the studio audio equipment, the studio transceiver was located on the roof of the Union. It was connected to Bryn Teg via a long cable that was installed for the purpose. There was some fun and games setting that up!

The studio also had a wideband VHF link receiver to pick up the outside broadcast vehicle.

The Outside Broadcast Vehicle

The outside broadcast vehicle was hastily prepared before Rag week. It had a wide band FM link transmitter for broadcasting back to the studio audio mixer. It did not have a stereo capability, as it was intended to be used mostly for voice interviews and news reports from around Bangor. It also had a VHF transceiver for talk back to the studio while setting up.

The VHF FM broadcast band transmitter

Pictures of this transmitter appear in the story from John Simons. It together with its UHF link receiver was set up in the loft at St Mary's College. The coverage of the VHF FM band signal from this location was excellent, and with line of sight back to the studio across the Bangor valley, the UHF link worked very well. During station set up, talk back to the studio was provided by a Pye pocket phone 70, one of which can be seen in the studio at the far end of the table near the window in the picture from 1975 provided by John Simons. If you know what you are looking for you will see it.

The UHF link receiver and the FM band transmitter were specifically designed not to degrade the stereo signal. The FM band transmitter used a QQV06-40A valve in the output. This transmitter was commanded to power up by signals sent over the UHF link from the studio. Power up involved a big relay click, the start of a whirring noise from the cooling fans, and several bright lights illuminating on the front panel. The transmitter was unfortunately discovered by a caretaker several days into Rag week. With all the lights and fan noise, it must have looked and sounded like something from another planet had landed in the dark St Mary's loft!

BBC Bangor Reception Reports

The BBC Studio in Bangor took a listen to the station and gave us an engineering reception report. They confirmed that our stereo signal conformed to full BBC standards. This was quite a compliment! As reported elsewhere on this website, two DJs with their backs to camera were interviewed by the BBC for the early evening program on Wales Today. We are trying to get a copy of that footage.

The UCNW Bangor Amateur Radio Society

Radio expertise from some people also in the society made BRBS possible. The mysterious Jolly Roger, mentioned elsewhere, deserves recognition here too.

While the society has a lot of significant stories of its own, including setting up a station on the summit of Snowdon/Eryri, I will only give brief details of some of the things the society achieved.

The society was well known for winning all the Radio Society of Great Britain radio contests, because of a number of innovative techniques it used. It could communicate with 5 stations simultaneously. After a few years, the RSGB changed the contest rules to prevent the society winning all the time.

One of these contest events was recorded using 8 mm cine film, and can be found on YouTube. The light levels are lower than we would like. The performance of 8 mm cine film seems very poor to what we expect today, but those with a technical interest will understand what is going on. The film starts outside the engineering department in Bangor, which many will recognise, and ends up on a mountain a few miles north of Llangollen.

It's strange looking back on this 50 years later with all the technology we have today. The people in this film contributed to making our modern world possible.

The group involved in BRBS were largely undergrads from the Electronic Engineering department. We were either from the radio club or the group who set up sound and lights for concerts and discos. Obviously, it ran primarily during Rag week, but also during fresher's week. Our club radio shack was in the Engineering Building.

I recall one day there was a student building a stereo FM transmitter and he couldn't get it working. I took a look at the build and the circuit diagram and immediately noticed there was a diode in the wrong way. It was actually shown the wrong way on the diagram. Once we put the diode in the correct way and the transmitter worked. That was how I got recruited and took on the radio name of Chris Fields.

One day I was walking down the high street with a radio friend (could have been Commander Bear) using my ex-police VHF radio (Pye Pocketfone PF1) when we were approached by a plain clothed policeman to ask what I was doing. It just happened that I was standing outside a bank and he presumably thought we might be planning to rob it. We were asked to report to the police station for questioning. While we were there, our other radio friends got a message to our supervisor, Dr J David Last, Head of Radio-Navigation. We called him God, or simply JDL, and unfortunately he became SK(*) a few years ago when his private plane crashed in the Menai Strait. He was friends with the police sergeant at the station and phoned in to explain we were harmless and we were subsequently released.

The BRBS configuration was to have a studio at one location transmitting the signal on UHF to the VHF FM stereo transmitter at a 2nd location. There was also a MF AM relay at a 3rd location. The VHF and MF transmitters were placed in the attic of the student halls of residence. Generally, these remained in place unless we were spooked during the week. We kept a close eye on the Post Office (now BT) on the main A5. One day we saw the radio investigation van was seen parked, which caused us to move (this was mentioned in the history).

We loaded up the studio late at night into the Land Rover of James Stuart and moved to a friend's home on Anglesey Island near the Gazel Hotel. The location was far out of the city with a good take-off across the Menai Strait into Bangor. The UHF antenna was mounted high up on the balcony and our studio was in the basement with an access door out the back.

This worked for the remainder of RAG Week except for one night. It was well past midnight when we heard a car driving around the back of the building. We convinced ourselves this was the investigation van and shut down operations. Later we think this may have been student radio enthusiasts trying to locate the studio. The next morning there was no sign of the investigation van and we resumed operation.

(*) SK - silent key, an amateur radio term for saying someone has died.

The following are my personal memories from 1976-1979, a very enjoyable period of my life, when I was involved with Rag Radio whilst studying for a degree in Electronic Engineering at UCNW Bangor. My role was mainly technical, rather than being involved as a presenter, so the following memories contain a lot of technical detail, and will appeal mainly to engineers, etc.

When I arrived in Bangor in October 1976 I had no knowledge of the existence of a Rag radio station, although I was already a fan of Free Radio. I had spent a lot of time listening to Radio Caroline on medium wave whilst revising for my O-levels and A-levels. My decision to go to Bangor was mainly influenced by the knowledge that there was an active Amateur Radio society there, and by seeing some of the work being done in the field of radio navigation at the open day.

During Freshers week 1976 I joined the Amateur Radio Society and became an active member. I must confess, however, that the main activity of the Society, entering radio contests, was not really my cup of tea. I spent a lot of time in Rockets, the club shack, and joined the local net on 2m. I had a short-wave receiver in my room in Plas Gwyn and remember listening to some local pirate stations on top band.

It is likely that the first time I heard BRBS was in December 1976, at the end of the autumn term, and I was instantly hooked! I liked the music, the free spirit of the station, and the fact that I could identify certain presenters. My listening at that time was purely on medium wave, but I built my own FM tuner later in order to listen in stereo. Even now when I hear certain records my mind goes back to that time!

By the time BRBS came on the air for rag week 1977 I was well prepared. Myself and several others had a great time during the week locating the transmitters and identifying more of the presenters. I got to know James Stewart and John Collins quite well in the end! The technical information, given out by Dave Carter on station closedown, was of great interest and we wondered about the identity of the mysterious Jolly Roger!

My recruitment came sometime after rag week when myself, and several others who had shown interest, were called to a meeting by Dave Carter. It was explained to us that most of the BRBS technical staff, including Jolly Roger, would be leaving Bangor shortly and that new staff would be required if the station were to continue. The existing transmission equipment, much of it built by Jolly Roger, would also be departing and new equipment would need to be built. Some assistance could be provided to the new crew, in the form of circuit diagrams etc. for the existing gear. The new equipment required was as follows:

• Studio audio mixer
• Stereo coder to replace Jolly Roger's Stereo Gnome
• UHF link transmitter located at the studio
• UHF link receiver located at the FM transmitter site
• VHF/FM transmitter
• AM medium wave transmitter, re-broadcasting the VHF signal via an associated FM receiver.

The responsibility for constructing this equipment was divided between several of us and I was volunteered to produce the VHF transmitter and UHF link equipment. A period of intense activity was therefore started, with regular meetings being held in a basement flat in Upper Bangor. I started gathering useful parts, a lot of which were very kindly donated by radio amateur friends from the Chester area.

As luck would have it Wireless World for April 1977 carried the first article on the design of a broadcast stereo coder, by Trevor Brook of Surrey Electronics. PCBs were available and these were acquired and assembled by a member of the team. Getting the design to work became a bit of a group effort and I remember long sessions in Rockets working on this. The design included a 19 kHz crystal oscillator, and we had problems getting this to start reliably. My young ears came in very useful at the time, as I could actually sense when the crystal was oscillating!

The VHF transmitter was built during the summer of 1977 at my parents' house in Chester. This gave about 60 W output on 96.1 MHz, and I remember testing this using a 100 W light bulb as a dummy load. The transmitter was based around a surplus chassis which already included the QQV06-40A valve PA stage and the necessary high-voltage power supplies. This had originally been part of the Lancashire Constabulary radio system. No consideration was given to health and safety and the transmitter chassis was totally open, allowing easy access to the anode supply of about 1 kV!

Apart from the valve PA stage the rest of the transmitter was solid-state, being based around a multiplier/driver board from a Pye Westminster radio-telephone. The frequency was governed by a free running FET oscillator running at about 16 MHz, similar to the Jolly Roger design, with modulation provided by a varicap diode. A sequencing circuit was built using CMOS logic to control the remote start-up and shut-down of the transmitter, based on the presence of the UHF link signal.

A solid-state UHF link transmitter was also constructed, based on a Pye Pocketfone transmitter board driving a modular PA stage. This gave an output power in the order of 3-5 W into a TV Yagi antenna. The frequency was around 470 MHz and was again governed by a free-running FET oscillator with varicap modulation.

For expedience a pre-existing UHF link receiver was obtained, which had been built by a previous BRBS engineer. This was a die-cast box containing a UHF TV tuner and associated IF stages. Considerable work was required in order to get the FM demodulator in this box as linear as possible, in order to pass the full stereo multiplex signal. For this an HP sweep generator, borrowed from the UCNW engineering department, came in very handy.

Preparations for rag week 1978 continued during the Autumn and BRBS appeared on the air on 11th December 1977 to mark the end of term. This is believed to be the last time that the Jolly Roger transmitter was used, at least in Bangor.

Final tweaks were made over the Christmas holidays, and we were finally ready for rag week in February 1978. Everything worked OK, but this proved to be an exciting week with the studio being moved twice, as has been documented elsewhere.

For the start of the week the VHF transmitter was installed in the attic of the Reichel Annex building on Friddoedd Road, where a friendly resident had gained access in an interesting manner. The door leading to the attic could be opened from behind the staircase by removing a stair! Both the VHF antenna and UHF link antenna were installed inside the attic, making for an invisible installation. The site was only a short distance from the first studio on Holyhead Road and so the UHF link worked fine.

Unfortunately, the transmitter site was discovered part way through the week by a member of staff, and the transmitter was re-installed in a room in Neuadd Reichel. By this time the studio had been moved to Anglesey and the link had a line-of-sight path across the Menai Strait. A VHF antenna on the roof of Reichel was used, giving excellent coverage. The transmitter at that time had a fan to cool the valve PA and the occupant of the room, James Stewart, complained of the noise keeping him awake! I also believe that a visiting official from the Student's Union came close to touching the exposed high voltage of the PA!

Following our experiences with moving the large heavy VHF transmitter around, and our concerns about health and safety, the decision was made to move to a completely solid-state design before BRBS appeared again. This was undertaken over the summer holidays in 1978.

The re-designed transmitter used a BLW60 transistor in a class-C design lifted straight from the Mullard data book, and gave about 30W output. The driver board and oscillator from the valve transmitter were re-used, and the whole thing fitted in a relatively small aluminium box. A large heat-sink was used and no cooling fan was required.

The transmitter now required a source of 12V DC at several amps, rather than the previous high voltage. For this a large linear power-supply was used, which had previously been part of an early Leo computer installation. A new idea was now tried and BRBS took to the air in Fresher's Week for the first time. This was the start of my final year in Bangor. I have little memory of this operation, apart from squatting at a house in Rachub as my College accommodation was not ready. Suffice to say that everything worked OK, including the new VHF transmitter.

The station next came on the air for Rag Week in February 1979, when it seemed to be breaking records for popularity. The BRBS pigeon hole in the Student's Union filled up with requests, and had to be emptied, at a great rate of knots and things seemed to be going very well.

A highlight of rag week was when James Stewart and I were taken for a flight in a light aircraft piloted by our final-year project supervisor, the late Prof. David Last. We took off from Mona and did a circuit of Anglesey, passing over Bangor and Caernarfon. As we passed over Bangor our pilot tuned the aircraft's ADF receiver to the BRBS medium wave frequency and took great delight in exclaiming it's in line with the wing now! as we passed St Mary's College. We couldn't tell him at the time but he had the location quite correct!

Unfortunately Rag Week operation was brought to an early conclusion when a Post Office Radio Investigations van, or Enemy Land Vehicle, was spotted outside the Telephone Exchange on Deiniol Road. Station staff managed to ascertain that our transmissions were under investigation, and the decision was made to close down early. This was a big disappointment, given the station's popularity at the time.

My final involvement with BRBS was in June 1979 when the station came on the air for a Summer Special, after our final exams. For this broadcast we had the luxury of two studios, located in a house near St Mary's College on Bangor Mountain. The UHF link had a clear path across the valley to the VHF transmitter, which was located in a house on College Road.

A new innovation tried at this time was a live outside broadcast from the Student's Union building, where James Stewart and John Collins were presenting a road show. A low-power transmitter, operating in VHF Band II, was used as an uplink. Audio from the disco console was piped through a window to a car outside, where the transmitter was located. This worked well and the studio were able to have a live on-air conversation with the DJs in the Student's Union. I remember the sense of euphoria when we realised what had been achieved!

It was during this summer broadcast that I finally took the plunge and presented a programme of my own. The Commander Bear Show was on the air between 4am and 6am one morning! I must have had at least one listener as an off-air recording still exists! It doesn't sound as bad as I expected, and I can't fault the choice of music!

Shortly after this I graduated and left Bangor, moving on to a career in electronics design. As far as I can remember the transmission equipment I built was passed on to the next generation and used for BRBS in the 1980s. Hopefully someone will continue the story.

Stereo coder article alternative download.

Radiofax radio material (Trevor Brook).