Radio Delmare

In early 1977 a few enthusiasts decided to restore a Dutch radioship on the high seas, about 3 years after Veronica and RNI went off the air. A lot of work went into getting money on the table for this project and with a very low budget, in May 1977 they bought MV "Aegir." They worked to make it sea worthy and broadcast ready. Unfortunately the first drawback came much too early, on Friday June 23, 1978, people from the Dutch RCD (Radio Control Office) and police boarded the ship. The father of one of the crew members did not want to see his son going on this adventure and notified the official authorities.

Preemptive raid

For a year and a half, they managed to keep their project secret - even the free radio society insiders knew nothing about it. Had everything gone as planned and they would have managed to pass customs, then the first broadcast from the station, called Weekend Muziek Radio, would have been on air on Monday the 26th of June 1978. Because of the raid was this no longer possible; with a truck they removed all their possessions: AM and FM-transmitters, the whole studio line-up, thousands of records, record- and tape archive, books, diagrams etc.

International waters

The damage was about €20,000, but the ship was not confiscated and so they used it to go out immediately into the open sea. Food, oil and everything else we needed was still on board, so they could hold it out for some time.

In early July they went into the harbour of Maassluis (near Rotterdam) with the name of the ship changed to "Flip". Two weeks later they went into the town Hendrik-Ido-Ambacht, where the anchor chain was pulled on-board. Through the Zeelandbrug (Sealandbridge) they went, on July 16, to Oostende (Belgium) where a week later the transmitters were brought on board. This was recorded by a camera crew from Veronica TV who showed this operation in their television program called "Info".

Among the equipment that was brought onboard in Oostende were 2 Marconi transmitters which came from the Belgium army, 3 kW power each. Though, when bringing them on board, parts such as the endtubes got a little damaged. This was the cause of why the first broadcasts didn't work out so well. It was only a possible to pull a few hundred Watts out of them, but nevertheless, because of the advertisers they had to go onto the air and so it was decided to get going with it. The studio-equipment contained 2 Revox A77 reelrecorders, 4 FTM-spotmasters, 2 Thorens turntables, 2 AKG-microphones and a mixer with multi channels.

Broadcasting

They changed the station's name from Radio Nordzee International to "Radio Delmare". It was never called "Weekend Music Radio" as the Press had dubbed the project up until then. For their theme tune they choose "The Eve Of The War" by Jeff Wayne.

Despite the miserable power they received a rather big audience. Over 2000 listener reports were sent to them. This showed that they could not only be heard in coastal areas around the Netherlands and Belgium but also further into these countries. Even reports from England were sent.

For the first few days the modulation was very poor but, due to some hard work from the station, they were able to improve it after a few days. The rest of the test broadcasts went, given the circumstances, rather well. During those first days they aired old program tapes from Radio Caroline and some non-stop music programs. These were done live but did not contain much speech. The disc jockey for the first hour was Rene de Leeuw who quickly became bored from all the non-stop music. He wanted to produce speech based programs having endured the daily non-stop music for 7 hours in a row each day.

External links

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