kootwijk

I remember driving to Radio Kootwijk for the final farewell of Scheveningen Radio on shortwave. It was ironic because the satellite video link broke down during the ceremony. This was the first show in 1999.

This programme starts with the news about Chris Carey was caught in New Zealand connected with pirate decoders. There's a rather ironic item about public service broadcasting. Steve Whitt generated a nice response about earthing rods. Feb 1st was a landmark day in the end of Morse Code for maritime use. We talked about a Atlantic Hop experiment using Morse Code and involving the old Kootwijk shortwave site in Holland. We also looked at why Radio Luxembourg is still remembered, even though its been off the air for years. Shaun Tilley talked to us from Swansea. He argues that Luxy hasn't really been replaced. There are also the results of the Christmas contest to guess how many hits we had on RNW.nl in 1998. Alan J Knapp got my 1999 copy of the WRTH.

Flashback to a news show in January 1999 when the capture of Chris Carey in New Zealand were the radio headlines and Lou Josephs explained how Command Audio was planning to bring Internet radio to the home. We explain the difference between UTC and GMT and the leap second. It seems that some of the Millennium countdown clocks are running too slow. We also talked to Swatch who had a strange idea to make the time metric with the Swatch Beat! We review the World Radio TV Handbook for 1999. Deutsche Welle's monitoring station has collected and published a CD of interval signals, including a number from Southern Africa. Brian Clarke talks about the rescue of the BBC World Service on mediumwave in Auckland. The station had an ingenious system of delaying the feed from London and speeding it up slightly, so as to squeeze in some commercials each hour. And the station with a strange name from Azerbaijan. Harald Kuhl reports about a new Peace Station in Ecuador. Jonathan also reported on a short revival of Kootwijk Radio on the ham bands as part of bit of fun following the closure of facility for maritime communications.

In this programme we tell the fascinating story of the Kootwijk transmitter built in the centre of the Netherlands on the heathland. In the early 1920's the main goal of the station was to maintain contact with Indonesia, then called the Dutch East Indies. It was pretty amazing bearing in mind they were using the wrong frequency band because the existence of short-wave radio was as yet unknown. The listening site in Eemnes mentioned in the programme is still there, although I believe the station is part of the monitoring network used by the military. The original airing of this programme was on March 3rd 1988. We went back at the end of the Millennium for the close of the station - those shows have yet to be re-released. It was a great story to make, even though its about a "utility" station not a broadcaster. In fact, the same place was used for a short period after the Second World War for longwave broadcasts.