@DeezNuts 527868 wrote:
That’s awesome – I never knew you DJ’d on pirate radio, how long did you do that for?
I really like some of the early hardcore, can really tell how it evolved into jungle/drum and bass.
For a short while in the 1990s in London and also on Direction FM in Reading which was linked to the OOOPS sound system.
During the mid 90s there was a boom in pirates who were ironically using surplus ex-Emergency Services radio equipment, as the cops and public services in the UK were until the 1990s allocated to the top of the FM broadcast band as the UK only agreed to allocate 87.5 – 100 MHz (many other nations in Europe apart from France wanted to use the whole band for broadcasting).
So the Police were actually around 100-102 MHz and could be heard on a normal radio receiver for many years (the Government warned you not to listen to them :laugh_at:) In the South of the UK they were moved away in the 1980s to 150 MHz but the public services such as water, gas and electricity and the buses were still on Band II at around 105-108 MHz which was by then an annoyance as by and large most pirates actually wanted to get community radio licenses but couldn’t get frequency allocations.
however when the cops hauled out all the old radios from their vehicles they were sold as surplus electronics and many engineers bought them up mostly to convert for amateur radio work but a fair few got used for pirate stations 😉
It took until the 1990s to clear all the other users out of the broadcast band (as Thatcho’s govt didn’t want to have to shell out for new radios for the public services) and license community radio stations which was why the UK (and nations near to it) had so many pirates. (Because of the way radio transmissions work they can get into other countries so our screwing up of Band II meant other nations couldn’t use the top end for broadcasting either for many years..)
