W.P.G.C Radio
After not doing my own station for a year or two but getting involved with the then WCR (now WR International). I was not happy with having to conform to some one else's idea of a radio format. I had my own ideas and I needed my own transmitter to do it.
So in the October of 1988 a new transmitter was ordered from the Radio Veronica team, It arrived at the beginning of November and pre-tuned to my desired frequency of 105.5 Mhz. Wow ! this little baby did work well, the sound was nice and clear with just the right amount of bass and treble. This was it I needed another station name, Radio Mi Amigo could not be used again, the jingles now sounded dated and besides I wanted to have a fresh station with a fresh name. After listening to many jingle packs It was decided to use an American station name (mainly because I liked the jingles) and W.P.G.C radio was born.
This is the studio used for W.P.G.C. It is very basic but it did the job, In view are the two Memorex record decks, two cassette decks for jingles, and a small 4 channel mixer. All in all the station sounded fairly good and as you can see all this was set up in the attic at my parents house.
One thing was certain recorded programs were not going to happen, I wanted the station to have live broadcasts. Live always sounds better than a recorded program. Theses photos were taken during the Christmas period of 1988. All the jingles were on separate cassettes and were racked in cases on top of the cassette player.
Here is a shot of my self (Dave Jones) in action during the Christmas period in 1988, Looks like I'm getting another jingle ready. One thing is for sure those headphones have long been thrown in the bin, Between you and me Paul Kay broke them in mid 1989.
Not a lot really happened with W.P.G.C the station in its self only lasted for a period of 2 years, Transmissions were most Sundays and every bank holiday. It was good fun over night we would run Sky Radio via satellite (Astra had not long been in service and Sky Radio was new to us), and we would take the news from IRN via satellite. W.P.G.C was the first free station to use Satellite radio for news in our part of the UK, It was great at first we could not wait for the top of the hour to arrive so that we could say "It is now ? O'clock and time to go Via satellite to London for this hours news". Well you have to understand until then we never had a true news service. As you can see in the last photo (taken in March 1989) the studio had a new feature, This came in the form of a CD player. Now as the mixer was only a four channel mixer and we now had five bits of equipment, doing your program took some thinking about. If you wanted to play a CD you had to unplug the leads from one of the record decks and replace them with the leads from the Cd player, and Vice versa if you wanted to use the record deck after the Cd player. If I remember correctly this situation lasted for a good 6 months.
As you can imagine to get a good signal all around town the FM aerial had to be in a good high site and this was afforded by the use of a link kit. The photo here shows the two aerials at the transmitter site, these were mounted on a wooden pole and erected on a hill. If you knew where to look these could be seen from the road as you drove past the hill. It is obvious to tell which aerial did what due to the size and mounting of them, but for those who do not know. The lower aerial was used to receive the signal from the studio on a very high FM/Vhf frequency, don't ask me why but the link aerials were half wave jobs which made them very large and the thought of cutting them to 1/4 wave aerials did not occurs to me at the time. The top aerial is the one used for the 105.5 frequency and this one was a 1/4 wave aerial and mounted vertically for omni directional transmissions.
Whilst W.P.G.C was still on air the station that called it's self WCR had a name change to WR. Dave England (radio name) approached me and suggested that rather than having two FM pirate stations on air why not merge the two together and have one really good station. With the stations working together there would be a larger number of station members and a better variety of programs.
This was a true statement, But still I had different thoughts. Here I was running my own little station I had the say on what went to air and the thought of going back and having to consider some one else's point of view was not what I really wanted. Any way after a few beers errrr I mean meetings this Dave England I decided that the two station could merge, WR and WPGC were to become one under the name WR "The Hot FM".
There is more to come and also all about the move to Short wave. in the next installment until then please browse around our site.
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