Special thanks to Ray Robinson and Jeff White for sharing the Wavescan script of Part 2, discussing radio in Sweden.
Radio from Sweden - Part 2
Jeff: Last week, Ray Robinson began a two-part look at the history of radio broadcasting in the northern European country of Sweden. So here to continue once again is Ray from Los Angeles.
Ray: Thanks, Jeff. You may remember that back in November in our short series on the history of radio jingles, I mentioned the Swedish offshore station Radio Nord, which was the first to use PAMS-style jingles in Europe. Following the success of offshore radio in Denmark and The Netherlands, Radio Nord was setup by Jack Kotschak in 1960, with a 10 kW medium wave transmitter on board a ship called the MV Bon Jour. The station broadcast very successfully outside the Stockholm archipelago in the Baltic Sea for 17 months from 21st February 1961 until 30th June 1962 on a frequency of 602 kHz, announced as 495 metres.
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| Radio Nord |
In its short life, Radio Nord experienced both disaster and success. It survived ice, storms, threats of seizure, and technical difficulties that face a shipborne station.
It was eventually closed down by government legislation, after having built up a huge following within Sweden, with an audience of 24% of the adult population! Not only was Radio Nord a pioneer of radio in Sweden, it was also one of the pioneers of offshore radio in Europe and, to a large extent, provided the inspiration for the radio ships which later anchored off the British and Dutch coasts. Indeed, the ship itself, the MV Bon Jour, was renamed the MV Mi Amigo and was famously used by Radios Atlanta and Caroline from 1964 to 1980.
In July 1962, largely as a result of the success of Radio Nord, a new pop music channel called P3 (or Program 3) was officially inaugurated, although at that time it only covered part of the country.
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| Radio Syd |
But Radio Nord wasn’t the only offshore station in Sweden. While Radio Nord was still on air in March 1962, a second station, Radio Syd (owned by Mrs. Britt Wadner) was launched using the ship MV Cheeta which she had acquired from the Danish station Radio Mercur. Radio Syd broadcast on various FM frequencies from the Öresund Sound between Malmö, Sweden, and Copenhagen, Denmark, and continued after the new Nordic anti-pirate law came into effect on 1st August 1962. By March 1964, a poll showed that Radio Syd then had more listeners in the Malmö area than all three Swedish Radio networks combined. Mrs. Wadner was prosecuted and fined several times, as were a number of the companies that advertised on Radio Syd. She even spent one month in prison, although under Swedish law, she was permitted to continue operating her business from her jail cell – the operation of Radio Syd!
In October 1964, the MV Cheeta sank after a particularly rough storm, but undeterred, Mrs. Wadner acquired a new ship which she called the MV Cheeta II, and was quickly back on the air again. In fact, in 1965 she even made some test television transmissions on UHF. In January 1966, the station was forced to leave its anchorage by bad weather, and the ship was leased to Radio Caroline for three months as a replacement for the MV Mi Amigo which had run aground and had to be taken to Amsterdam for a refit. But in April 1966, a more severe anti-radio piracy law went into effect in Sweden, and Radio Syd never returned to the Öresund. In fact in late 1967, the MV Cheeta II headed south, first to the Canary Islands, and then onwards to the port of Bathurst in the West African country of The Gambia, where she was used as a restaurant and nightclub. And interestingly, Radio Syd did go on the air again as a licensed station in Bathurst (now known as Banjul), from 7th May 1970, on 908 kHz, 329 metres. Here’s a clip of Radio Syd in Bathurst in 1971:
Mrs. Britt Wadner died at her home in Sweden in March 1987, and the operation in The Gambia was then managed by her daughter and son-in-law. The station moved on land, and the ship itself sank in Banjul harbor in the early 1990’s. The station did eventually move to an FM frequency, but the last entry for the station in the WRTH is in 2006.
In 1977 the Swedish P3 network introduced regional programming from 24 FM stations around the country, and stereo broadcasts became the standard in Sweden for the first time. 15 more stations were added in 1979. Independent commercial radio finally became legal in Sweden in March 1993, more than 30 years after the government monopoly had first been broken by Radio Nord.
The best-known high-powered medium wave station in Sweden was located at Solvesborg, which used a power of 600 kW on 1179 kHz, 254 metres. From the 60's to the 80's during the evenings, it relayed the Foreign Service of Radio Sweden for Europe, including one of the best-known entertainment shows on international radio - the Radio Sweden Saturday Show - presented by Dr. Roger Wallis, Sydney Coulson and Australian Kim Loughran, known as 'Kangaroo Kim'. Here's a clip of Roger with guest former Radio Caroline DJ Dave Lee Travis on Saturday 16th September 1967:
The English language programs came at the end of each evening’s transmissions, at 11pm UK time, 6pm Eastern. The first half hour of the Saturday Show was carried globally on both shortwave and medium wave, but then it continued for a further 60 minutes on medium wave only for Europe. It was quite zany at times and liked to poke fun at itself in a way that was later imitated by Media Network on Radio Netherlands.
On Sundays, the same team also presented a show called ‘The Pops’ which showcased the best in home-grown Scandinavian pop music at the time.
And, we should remember too the long-running DX program from Radio Sweden, "Sweden Calling DXers", which was broadcast on Tuesday evenings. Do you remember the way that show opened?
Sweden Calling DXers began with Arne Skoog in February 1948 as a guide for DXers and SWL’s, and it depended entirely on the logging contributions of its listeners. As an incentive, if you contributed an item, the station would send you the printed script for six weeks. I had a whole stack of them! Versions of the show were broadcast in several European languages such as German, not just English. The show was taken over by the American George Wood in 1978, the name was changed to MediaScan a few years later, and the program ended in 2001.
Domestically, on longwave, as in many other countries of Europe, there were three high-powered stations to blanket the country and reach Swedish-speaking communities in Finland and elsewhere. These were located at Motala, Lulea and Gothenberg. In 1962, the longwave service at Motala was transferred to a new location at nearby Orlunda. However, Sweden abandoned use of longwave broadcasting in 1991, and the Motala building was then turned into a radio museum, where the original longwave transmitter can be seen on display.
Eventually, over the years, more than 100 medium wave stations had been established throughout Sweden, mostly with quite low power, though about half a dozen were described as high power stations. Most of these were closed in favor of FM and DAB broadcasting in the 1990’s and early 2000’s.
Sweden then finally closed its two shortwave stations, Horby and Karlsborg, and the one remaining medium wave station at Solvesborg on 1179 kHz, on Saturday 30th October 2010. Nationwide coverage on radio in Sweden is now obtained solely with several networks of FM stations and DAB multiplexes totaling anywhere up to 2,000 mostly lower power transmitters.
There were two other radio stations of note in Sweden. A large communication station known as Goteborg Radio traces its earliest origins back to the year 1905. This station was progressively located at four different sites over the years, and it has been well known under the callsigns SAG and SAB.
The other interesting station is the old spark wireless station at Grimeton which was inaugurated in the 1920's by King Gustav V. The old long-wave Alexanderson alternator is still functional, and it is placed on the air once each year under the callsign SAQ.
Radio Sweden was a prolific verifier of reception reports and we are aware of at least 50 different designs for their QSL cards. Likewise, many QSL cards have been issued for the old longwave transmitter SAQ, and for Goteborg Radio SAG and SAB.
Back to you, Jeff.
Jeff: Thanks, Ray. Next week, Ray will tackle a topic which I don't think has ever been covered in Wavescan before - the history of broadcasting in the tiny British Overseas Territory of Gibraltar.