We had no idea of what had really happened in the Ukraine at the end of April 1986. I remember that when the news broke, we were celebrating Queen's Day in the Netherlands (April 30th). I tuned into Radio Moscow and Radio Kiev, but they didn't give us much detail. I love the offhand way the announcer in Kiev says "and now sports". The programme also had contact with Pat Gowan, G3IOR a radio amateir in the UK who monitors and contacts Russian amateurs on a regular basis. He confirmed that amateurs in Kiev made no mention of the situation.

In other news, the Head of the Russian service of Radio Liberty, Oleg Tumanov turns up in Moscow denouncing the station. It seems he had been a KGB agent - at least according to the book that came out later.

Captain Midnight blocks HBO satellite signal in protest at the new rates being charged. It turns out later that this is a satellite engineer based in Florida. NDXE announces a date for buying the transmitter. KVOH has also hit some delays.  Len Scott of the English service of Radio Budapest talks about plans to have sponsored programmes. Andy Sennitt rounds off the show with a contribution from the WRTH office in Copenhagen.

I confess I don't understand the outburst on recent edition of the BBC Radio 4 programme "World at One" by John Tusa. He seems to think that a tiny piece of advertising on the Berlin relay on BBC World Service (where currently promos for programmes are slotted in) is somehow a threat to the editorial independence of the World Service.

John Tusa may be correct in that the Berlin relay won’t raise much of the 3 million pounds that BBC World Servce radio is trying to raise this year to offset the drastic budget reductions announced nearly a year ago. But for years, ads alongside BBC World Service radio output have been heard on many stations that partner with the external broadcaster. Some stations insert their own commercials at 29 and 59 minutes past the hour when London carries programme promos. That's common in Africa where the local stations need to generate revenue because they are not subsidized by the government. Infact these countries will probably never be able to finance the public service broadcast model that survives in parts of Europe, like the UK, Belgium and Germany.

But what's wrong here? Are the radio presenters and editors in London aware that this is happening? Even if they are, do the adverts have any bearing on the editorial decisions being made in Bush House - and later this year in Broadcasting House? No.

BBC World Service has always been looking for ways to supplement its income by charging some stations that can afford it. Stations in the US pay a fee to Public Radio International to rebroadcast programmes from BBC World Service. Companies can also sponsor these relays as PRI is happy to explain on it's website. Again, these activities don't have any bearing on the editorial content coming out of London.

Mind you, none of this is new at all. I recall a clip from the very same John Tusa broadcast by Media Network on January 22nd 1988 (yes almost 24 years ago) in which there were definite plans to make money out of content - he even quotes a figure of how much money they thought they could earn. The clip is short and can be downloaded below. Also note that this was the point at which cable systems in the Netherlands switched off their relays of BBC 648 kHz in favour of a satellite feed.

There are some interesting variations in order to squeeze in commercials. There has been a MW relay in Auckland, New Zealand of BBC World Service since the late 1990's. It is run by a local group of enthusiastic fans who have developed a clever system to raise money to cover their running costs. The automated system puts the feed on BBC WS into a buffer. They carry 2 minutes of ads at the top of every hour and then play back a slightly sped up version of that hour of programming from London squeezed into 58 minutes. Sounds fine to me. Lou Josephs in Washington DC reports that many small stations in the US use the same trick of time compression on satellite syndicated shows so that they can squeeze in local commercials. They call it a "cashbox". 

I am more concerned about the 15 breaches last year by their TV channel BBC World News of the BBC's editorial guidelines. This was reported by the BBC Trust back in November. BBC World News buy in programmes made by production companies who are making disguised PR rather than independent investigative journalism. Nobody seems to be checking that thoroughly enough. I will be curious to see the coverage of the Consumer Electronics Fair in Las Vegas this coming week by BBC World News programme "Click". This is one of the feature programmes that is happy to accept what the BBC terms as sponsorship. It will have to remain strictly editorial independent (i.e. completely opposite to shows like Channel 5's The Gadget Show). If it doesn't, I'm sure viewers will interpret that as breach of trust and that will spill over into their trust of BBC current affairs programmes and investigative documentaries in general. Don't forget you have a situation where BBC World Service radio also has a show called Click (formerly Digital Planet) which is not sponsored and which infact it is a completely different programme to its TV namesake. 

I personally see more potential with ads on their websites, especially if they make websites that mix general BBC entertainment content with the news output. They could be far more creative with their embedded player than resorting to the tedious pre-roll ads before every clip. There have been far too many cases recently where bank ads for HSBC have preceded another doom and gloom report by Robert Peston about banker salaries or the Euro crisis. Now that really is mixed messaging.

A "Jaws" style opening to this news edition of the programme. There's a report about Offshore Radio Stereo 531 from David Ward in Norwich. Paul Rusling says he is not involved! Buster Pearson has died. VOA English is now on MW. Africa Media News from Richard Ginbey (presented by Mike Bullen). Grove Enterprises has a new publication - The Listeners’ Handbook. Lou Josephs on the Whole Earth Catalogue. New Irish Bulletin Board. Radio Earth is back via Radio Milano International. NRC has a special test on mediumwave. News about the RX99PLL from Escom, we called Dutch engineer Eddie Visser (then in Denmark, now retired in Thailand). What’s going on in the countryside? There has been a break in to the bunker at Lopik. MN Satellite Technology report - the ECS-1 runs into problems.

A very early Media Network just a few months after being relaunched under a new name. The music from DX Juke Box has gone and we're starting to train the correspondents to write and present their own pieces. Richard Ginbey is the first to really compile features about broadcasting in Southern Africa, this time it focuses on Capital Radio 604 in the Transkei. There was also a scandal at VOA after some rather confusing statements by a politician on the station's real role. Robbert Boschart also explains the strange situation about broadcasting in Andorra, locked between Spain and France. You can hear that phone lines were kinda rough in 1981 in the calls to Andy Sennitt and Dan Robinson. Wish we had access Skype in those days. Wim van Amstel reports back on his trip to Oman.

This programme was broadcast just before Christmas as rumours started emerging that the Soviet Union was about to stop jamming Western broadcasters like the Voice of America. Richard Ginbey reports on what he could hear from a listening post in Johannesburg, South Africa. The EDXC convention was to be held in Helsinki 1987. We tested the Kenwood R-5000 communications receiver, Andy Sennitt reports from WRTH editorial office and John Campbell discussed how to contact clandestine radio stations. Pete Myers also looked at an automatic car starter launched in Japan in time for Christmas.

This programme looked at the launch of Cable One, a precursor to Sky Radio, started by two Dutch entrpreneurs and record producers. Although it launched, legal problems with the Dutch broadcasting law at the time put an end to the plans. Those were made up jingles by the way - Carl Josephs did the voice-over. The programme also included a piece by the late Dave Rosenthal on solar eclipses, Richard Ginbey has a nice crop of catches which sounds like it could have been recorded yesterday. We also managed to visit the Funkausstellung in Berlin thanks to Hans G Janssen and Wolfgang Schulz who wandered around on our behalf. DAT recorders were the talk of the show. John Campbell reports on novelty clandestine stations like Radio Duck. Mike Bird rounds off the show with propagation conditions. Work has started on the Radio Netherlands extension.

This programme starts with a report on the clandestine station, Radio Free Suriname which was backed by opposition groups in the Netherlands. The principal backer was the late Johnny Kamperveen, who's father Andre started ABC Radio in Paramaribo, but was killed in the December murders. Johnny later returned to Suriname to start the station in 1993 and passed away ten years later. There's also news of the sale of the ship Laser 558. The Admiralty says it will look at the buyer. John Campbell reports that shortwave conditions are improving, just in time to observe the Irish pirates. We also look at brief shortwave broadcasts from Hong Kong during the boat race and talk to Bob Grove about Monitoring Times and the Ten Tec 535. 

Europa TV was a rather disasterous attempt at pan-European satellite television by a group of ex-public service managers working in Hilversum. They underestimated the cultural differences across Europe, wasting a lot of money in the early part of the project. It started off as Olympus TV. The team seemed shocked when Olympus cameras of Japan took out a court injuction to stop them using the name (after all the logos, bumpers, jingles had been produced). They also realised the hard way that live voice-overs in feature programming doesn't work because languages vary in how long it takes to say the same thing. Very quickly dubbed as "Europeless TV". The exception was the music programme "Countdown" hosted by Adam Curry which became very popular in Southern Europe, especially Portugal. Veronica TV was able to get better acts to the Netherlands because of the European exposure the programme gave to international talent. But in general Europa TV was a perfect example of public broadcasters trying to be commercial entrpreneurs with license-fee money. 

The programme also reviews the popular Sangean ATS-803 shortwave radio, which was the Taiwanese company's answer to the Sony ICF2001D.

In the mid 1980's it was always extremely difficult to balance the programme bearing in mind the varying listener interests. Most of the feedback came from South Asia, North America, Europe and the Pacific, so compiling an edition to interest someone in Bombay as well as Boston was challenging. Following my trip to Victor Goonetilleke in 1985, we experimented with some special Asian editions of the programme which were only broadcast to Asia at 1430 UTC. They had very different content, focussing mainly on South Asia. The programmes brought mixed response. Some said they liked the fact that we highlighted issues affecting South-Asian listeners. But there was an equally strong lobby that said the reason for tuning in to a European station was to find out what new technologies were being used there. They thought we should not single out a particular area as being a special case.

In the end, we limited the number of special opt-out programmes, prefering to do "media safaris" to various regions of the world and making the programmes available to all target areas. 

In this edition we looked at the different approaches taken by foreign radio manufacturers in India. Philips set up Philips of India and made radios locally to match the buying power of that market. The Japanese, on the other hand, did not share their technology and would only build screw-driver assembly plants in India using components shipped from Japan. In the end, the Indian engineers had the last laugh. They quickly became the engineering entrpreneurs in the Middle East, South-East Asia and Silicon Valley leaving the Europeans very much in the shade. On later visits to Delhi it was obvious that operations like TV Today and NDTV didn't need any help from "developed countries". They were well ahead already. Only Indian state TV and radio remains firmly stuck in the 1960's, strangled by its own bureacracy. When was the last time you listened to All India Radio?