Apologies to those who see this post twice but due to the balkanisation of the “adults” and “all ages” forums caused by funders demands and EU rules I thought it worth reposting this in case those who are younger and cannot get on .org (or who work in places where it may not be advisable) can also see the pics.

The decks and mixer are modern (I decided to finally get some newer vinyl equipment) – unfortunately not real Technics but the middle range Reloop direct drive clone,which has a motor nearly as strong as the real thing. Don’t buy the cheapest models of these, they are nearly as bad as the first Soundlab direct drives (even the belt drives were better!)

The LED signal lamp is a modern mock up of the signalling system we had on the first pirate radio station I DJ’d on in 1990; the bell push for this was not where you’d expect it to be, but hidden at the bottom of a letter box (you had to know where it was), although it used an old style glow lamp and a 4.5V battery type 126 (near impossible to find nowadays but then widely used for door bells).

Every DJ would press it 3 times to signal to whoever was in the studio (a room in a big tower block in SE London) that they had arrived; a bell would either go unheard due to the noise from monitor LS or get broadcast if a microphone was turned up ( a security risk) – so if there was a load of knocking at the door you’d turn off all the electric to the decks, mixer and Band I TX very quickly, haul in the big antenna on the balcony (about 3m of copper and steel) and the TX and hide those somewhere

the DTI Radiocommunications Agency (Communications Ministry, now known as Ofcom) can only have you arrested if they can prove in Court the transmitter was operating at the time they got into the building. They did not have Rohde & Schwarz hand held trackers back then, what they did have weighed 20 kilos and few DTI men wanted to haul that 15 floors up a tower block as the lifts were usually defective (it didn’t have storage capabilities anyway; I think they had to take a picture of it with a old fashioned SLR camera and a time/date/ display in the background)

Its not illegal to listen to loud music [even now its only a civil nuisance if someone complains] nor to have an unlicensed transmitter that isn’t switched on (you’d tell them and the bobbies it was your mates Dad’s/uncles “CB/amateur radio equipment” the older men had forgot was there apologise for making a noise (as if that was what brought the cops along) and hope they believed you.