Here is s in this episode: Hello, it is January 2023 and I’m playing around in the Media Network archive vault which sits on my hard drive and beckons me to explore forgotten files when I have a moment to spare. In November 2019, a faithful Dutch MN listener Max van Arnhem contacted me with a request. He had about 19 reel to reel tapes from fellow radio enthusiast Maarten van Delft which he could not digitize because he didn’t have a recorder anymore. As it happens, I just restored a Studer Revox B77 to full working order and so I have the right equipment to digitize many formats. A few weeks later I stopped by his house to pick up the tapes. Now in the 1970’s and 80’s several of us interested in international broadcasting collected the sign-on and sign-offs of radio stations from around the world. Whilst it was easy to make an off-air tape of a far-off station, there was no guarantee you could hear it just by tuning in the right frequency. In fact the hobby of Dxing, was a popular pastime in some countries where you’d scan the dial looking for a weak station, trying to identify which one it was from an announcement, often given at the top of the hour. The problem is that it would often fade out at just the moment when they gave the station ID. In the early 1970’s Maarten van Delft would sometimes play some very clear recordings on Radio Nederland’s DX Juke box programme. And as a fellow jingle and ID collector, I often wondered how he got those tapes. I used to send small reels of tapes and cassettes to the stations in the hope they would share a recording. Some Eastern European stations did, most didn’t. Maarten’s secret is that he travelled extensively in South America and Asia and he took his blank reel of tape to the station’s studio and asked them politely to add a recording to his collection. Those tapes went into a box and those were the tapes I picked up in 2019. Fast forward to 2023 and it's time to listen what was on those on those tapes. Today, we’ll select tape D, marked as Brazil, Argentina and uruguay . Sit back and imagine listening to a shortwave radio with remarkably clear reception. It would have sounded like this…… I wonder if you recognised any of those famous Brazilian radio stations and spotted a few odd ones out. Maybe you heard them on your own radio. My thanks to Maarten van Delft for sharing these recordings and for helping us radio enthusiasts. The problem we have with radio Receivers is that they have no memory. The radio may still work, but it won’t tune in to the station as it sounded 40 or 50 years ago. For that, we need to thank those with a tape recorder. If you’d like to hear more, then remember media network does have an email address. Drop me a line with your ideas. It is . And Maarten did make a list of the stations you heard today, which I will post in the Media Network vintage vault.
