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enactments......BNP members were furious at publication of the list.....Party spokesman Simon Darby said it was 'malevolent and spiteful' and
amounted to theft."
So was this an intel undertaking unfolding before our very eyes It may be significant that a couple of weeks earlier the BNP had had
a surprise victory in a local council by-election up in Lincolnshire, winning what had until then been a safe Labour seat in what has become
an area of high East European migration.
Short Wave Radio News:- and now for something completely different, Saint Helena on the air; the good folks on the island of Saint Helena,
way down there in the South Atlantic Ocean, did one of their extremely rare short wave broadcasts using their single sideband transmitter on
Saturday 15-November. I didn't see a mention of the forthcoming event in any of the radio magazines, but it was carried as an item on the
GB2RS Radio Society of Great Britain news broadcast on the previous Sunday so I made a note to check it out on the 15th. The start of
transmission time was stated as 2100 UTC on a frequency of 11,092.5 kHz. The signal was not too strong - in fact it was downright weak
for most of the time - I think the frequency may have been a bit too high for the distance into our part of the world in the darkness of
mid-November. I hadn't realised Saint Helena was quite so far to the south until I looked it up on the map; it is roughly on the same line of
latitude which passes through La Paz in Bolivia and Lusaka in Zambia. Lots of music, including "Scotland the Brave" played on the
bagpipes at around 2138z - try tuning-in bagpipe music being transmitted in single sideband; it takes some doing to get it exactly right! and
the signal peaked up just a little bit to give reasonable reception of, "Let it be" by the Beatles shortly after.
TalkSport Radio - a distinct improvement! George Galloway MP continues his Friday and Saturday evenings "Mother of all Talk Shows" on
TalkSport Radio, as sensible and as grown-up as the phone-in format gets. I especially like his various turns of phrase, such as, "So you'll
be down at the recruiting office in the morning to pick up your rifle and tin hat, will you", in reply to some idiot who thinks we should
invade Iran/Syria/Zimbabwe - or wherever - and "A lie is half way round the world before the truth has got it's boots on", to the clown who
calls in with some unlikely scenario. And the management of TalkSport Radio are to be congratulated for finaly getting rid of their offensive
weekday morning presenter, a character by the name of John Gaunt. I hadn't listened to TalkSport as a bit of background radio in the late
morning for quite a while because of the obnoxious style of presentation, a typical riposte from Gaunt on being outsmarted by a caller was,
"Well, I drive a top of the range Jaguar, so that means I'm more intelligent than you." Yeah, right! I happened to tune in to TalkSport one
morning a couple of weeks ago and found another presenter doing the show. A bit of research came up with the welcome news that Gaunt's
contract had been terminated following complaints after he had called some Local Government Jack-in-Office he had been interviewing a
"Nazi pig". The irony being that on this one occasion he probably got it just about right!
And from other sources we present…… with some duplication from above, but from different sources………
This is an important newscast from the BBC which we reproduce here for those without PC capabilities
How BBC man scooped invasion news
By Laurie Margolis
BBC News
http://newsvote.bbc.co.uk/mpapps/pagetools/print/news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/6514011.stm
Amateur broadcasts:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/player/nol/newsid_6510000/newsid_6518100/6518193.stmbw=bb&mp=wm&news=1&ms3=6&ms_javascript=true&bbcws=2
Walk down London's Portland Place, heading south from Regent's Park towards Regent Street,and you come to a kink in the wide road.
Immediately ahead of you is the plush Langham Hotel, very expensive and also one of the most haunted buildings in London.
To your left, BBC Radio's headquarters at Broadcasting House. This busy location, on the northern edge of London's West End, was the focus of the way
the story of the Falklands invasion unfolded exactly 25 years ago.
Back in 1982 I was a BBC journalist and also an amateur radio operator - I still am. That means I have a call-sign - G3UML - and some expertise in longdistance
short-wave communications.
At the very end of March, 1982, I was working on the Golan Heights, hearing on the BBC World Service a bizarre story about Argentine scrap metal
merchants taking over the British dependency of South Georgia.
Invasion claim
I returned to London on the morning on 2 April, and went into Broadcasting House to work on a documentary. I was met by scenes of near panic in the
radio newsroom.
The Argentines were claiming to have invaded and taken over the Falkland Islands, the 2,000-strong British colony off the south-eastern tip of South
America.
The newsroom had Argentine claims, but nothing else apart from a laconic message from the Cable and Wireless station on the Falklands - "we have a lot
of new friends".
At that time the Langham Hotel was a dreary BBC office block and, in a dusty, junk-filled attic room - number 701 - the BBC's own amateur radio club
had a shortwave transceiver. With a big aerial on the roof, it worked pretty well.
My senior editors wondered if there was any way I could contact the Falklands through amateur radio. Nothing else was working. It seemed a possibility.
The remote nature of the islands meant that radio was important, and for the small population there were a lot of radio amateurs down there.
'A true scoop'
So I took up a vigil in room 701, listening carefully across the 14, 21 and 28 megahertz bands for anything from VP8 - the international call-sign prefix for
the islands.
And about six hours later, I struck gold. On 21.205 megahertz at 1600 London time, that rather distinctive accent, a bit West Country - a Falkland Islander.
And what a story he had to tell - a true scoop, an exclusive of the greatest magnitude.
The voice was that of Bob McLeod, and he lived in the settlement of Goose Green on East Falkland. His call-sign, I realised, was VP8LP but he was
anxious that it shouldn't be used. I have much of what he said that day recorded on an old-fashioned audio cassette.
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