The first New Zealand ship to which
the callsign VLP was allocated was the SS Manapouri. This ship was built by Dumbarton in Scotland
in 1882, and it was named in honor of Manapouri,
a small town at the southern end of the South Island of New Zealand.
The SS Manapouri was sold to the
Moller Line in Shanghai China in 1925, though the callsign VLP was initially
retained during that era in the change of ownership. This ship went through a subsequent change of
names, from Manapouri to Lindsay Moller to Fook Hong to Tai Poo Sek. The ship was sunk during a United States bombing air raid in the Mekong Delta towards
the end of the Pacific War, in January 1945.
The second ship belonging to the
Union Steamship Company of New Zealand to receive the callsign VLP was the SS
Kurow that was launched in England in 1910.
This ship was also named after a small town in the South Island of New
Zealand. The Kurow took over the
callsign VLP in 1924 when the previous ship, the Manapouri relinquished the
callsign under Chinese ownership.
The SS Kurow was likewise sold in
1933 to the Moller Line in Shanghai and it was renamed the Mabel Moller. Two years later, on September 18, 1935, this
ship was wrecked off the coast of Sakhalin Island, north of Japan, while
traveling under ballast.
The SS Kurow also relinquished the
callsign VLP under Chinese ownership, and it was then applied to an international
wireless communication service at the AWA shortwave station located at Pennant
Hills on the edge of suburban Sydney in Australia. The callsign VLP was applied to the shortwave
communication service with New Zealand which was licensed for transmission in
the 35 or 36 metre bands (8 MHz) in 1931.
This usage of the callsign VLP was not applied to a specific
transmitter, but rather it was applied to a specific frequency in the
Australian communication service to New
Zealand.
The next usage of the callsign VLP
is a real enigma! Over a period of seven
years, the authoritative
American radio publication known as the White Radio Log carried an entry in
every issue in which VLP3 in Sydney Australia on 11850 kHz was listed. The first listing of VLP3 11850 kHz in the
White Radio Log is for November 1940, and the last listing is found in the
issue for October 1946.
This regular long term listing of a
shortwave broadcasting service from Sydney Australia does not appear to be a
misprint, though no other frequency is listed under this callsign. It should also be noted that no other radio
publication anywhere in the world carried a listing for a shortwave program
service from Sydney Australia under the callsign VLP; and there are no
monitoring comments in radio magazines of that era that draw attention to the
callsign VLP3 on 11850 kHz; not as a misprint, nor as a legitimate callsign
service.
There are two very different
possibilities for the seven years of listings for VLP3 in the White Radio
Log. Back then, it was a common habit
for some radio publications to borrow listings from another radio publication
without giving due credit. To counter
this problem, an accepted authoritative publication would sometimes list a
spurious entry so that if bulk entries were pirated without credit by another
publication, the inadvertent inclusion of a spurious entry would reveal this
dishonest practice.
The only other possibility for the
long term inclusion of VLP3 on 11850 kHz in the White Radio Log was that this
was a genuine entry that the editors had obtained from their own legitimate
sources. If the callsign VLP3 was a genuine
entry, then there was only one shortwave service in the Sydney area that could
carry this programming, and that was of course the aforementioned AWA station
in Pennant Hills.
Many other radio publications during
that same era did list VLR9 in Melbourne (Lyndhurst) on 11850 kHz. At that stage, the original old low powered
VK3LR-VLR transmitter was ailing. It had
been reworked two or three times, and its signal was raspy to say the
least.
However back then, Australia
desperately needed all of its few available shortwave transmitters, including
the ailing 2 kW VLR. If VLR should fail,
what could take its place?
Perhaps
the entry for VLP3 in Sydney on 11850 kHz provides us with a clue. Maybe the Australian government (which owned
a 51% share of AWA) had made a quiet arrangement with AWA to provide a fillin
on behalf of the ABC if the unreliable VLR should fail.
So, what is the real answer? Was the seven year entry for VLP3 simply a
pretense to prevent piracy of information?
Or was it an unannounced backup procedure for AWA to provide a fillin if
VLR should fail? I guess we will never
know for sure, but we would suggest that the real hidden purpose for VLP3 was
for any available AWA shortwave transmitter to take over from VLR9 should it
fail.
During the 1990s, the VLP callsign
was applied to the transmissions from Radio Australia Darwin out on lonely and
isolated Cox Peninsula in the Northern Territory. The
line callsign VLP, or at times just P, identified a program service from
the Radio Australia studios in Melbourne up to a 250 kW transmitter at their
Darwin relay station. Many Form Letter
QSLs were issued by Radio Australia verifying the callsign VLP, and likewise
many QSL cards were issued verifying the transmitter callsign VLP during the
1990s.
