Swinging Radio England

Its representation was by a company formed earlier in the year to represent in Europe the ABC radio and television stations of the United States.

Don Pierson delegated transmitter and antenna work to the LTV-Continental Electronics (CEMCO) company in Dallas, Texas, as a turn-key operation.

When Pierson began to run out of time getting the twin stations on the air due to difficulty in getting financial underwriters, he revised his plans.

At that time, some stations in the US were using this method to program both easy listening and top forty formats because they required fewer staff, which in turn kept expense to a minimum.

Among other suggestions by Bill Carr had been the erection of a 200-foot mast to which the transmitter signals would be shunt-fed to the top using a similar but higher placed method to the Wonderful Radio London ship station.

On board ship at dock in Miami, CEMCO installed a second mast attached to the original to support a third outstretched triangular boom.

At the end of that boom was a heavy insulator that hung down to provide attachment for a large swinging cable that stretched down to the transmitters below deck.

He was advised by Tom Danaher, who had designed the mast for Wonderful Radio London which Bill Carr had used for his antenna work, that the triangular boom of the CEMCO structure would fail due to heavy stress on it by the swinging shunt-fed cable.

The Collins Radio board had been delivered at the last minute and was being wired at sea by Rick Crandall, one of the first hired by Pierson to program the stations.

When engineers enabled Britain Radio to begin broadcasting at the same time as SRE, it was because they had lowered the power of its transmitter and used a new but inferior frequency (1322 kHz/227 m).

In turn Rendall introduced Radiovision Broadcasts International, (RBI), formed in January 1966 as a subsidiary of Pearl & Dean whose reputation had been established by selling space on British cinema screens.

The creation of RBI had been triggered by the intention of the ABC radio and television networks in the United States to expand the sale of their program and broadcasting interests in Britain and Europe.

By late September 1966, Pierson was no longer involved in day-to-day operations and CEO William Vick had named Britain Radio's program chief, Jack Curtiss of San Francisco, general manager of both stations.

The move was to avoid the British Government's impending "Marine Broadcast Offences" law that would outlaw pirate operations in the United Kingdom.

This was followed by the PAMS jingles, which resulted in their being copied, edited and rebroadcast by rival Radio Caroline South on their ship anchored close by the Olga Patricia.

Meanwhile, Radio England countered this by acquiring a new set of jingles from a smaller company, Spot Productions, and requiring that all their DJs talk over them to prevent them from being copied and reused.

O'Quinn, who had been a disc jockey at WFUN, borrowed every kind of format he was familiar with in Georgia and Florida, to create a hybrid sound only ever heard in Europe.

While British and Continental European teenagers were excited the station failed to pull in enough to interest advertisers and this coupled with technical problems gave SRE a short life.

Rick Randall has mused that perhaps Pierson had been right and that more polish, control and saving of expenses would have been achieved had Swinging Radio England been automated.

By 1965, Richard Hope-Weston who was born in Oxford, England in 1940, had arrived at KHJ in Los Angeles from KOL in Seattle where he had been broadcasting under the name of Rick West.

When Vance received notice that he was likely to be drafted into the U.S. army he returned to the U.K. and by January 1966 was broadcasting on Radio Caroline South with a pronounced transatlantic accent to demonstrate to British listeners his American roots.

(See External Links below for examples of Vance on KHJ as a British boss jock, and on Radio Caroline South as a transatlantic disc jockey.)

Swinging Radio England was billed on its letterhead as "World's Most Powerful", a slogan used extensively by LTV-Continental Electronics in its brochures to describe many of its high-power company transmission applications for the Voice of America and U.S. Navy.

Continental Electronics intended to provide Pierson with two 50,000-watt transmitters using a common mast to support two antennas and a combining system that could create one offshore station with 100,000 watts.

Radio Northsea International was theoretically capable of broadcasting with 105,000 watts of power on MW (with additional SW and FM frequencies).

At any rate, by 1973 the ship had been sold and converted to a menhaden vessel and was named the Earl J. Conrad Junior operating for what is now the Omega Protein company.