Photo by Ben Koorengevel
Many thanks to SWLing Post contributor, Bill Hemphill (WD9EQD), who writes:
I’ve just finished reading “Sealand’s Caretakers”. Very fascinating.
In the article, they give a link to an article “This excerpt describes the fallout that came from a gang of international scam artists bootlegging Sealand passports.”
This article is titled: “The Plot Against the Principality of Sealand” and is hosted on narratively.com.
It’s another fascinating article about Sealand and well worth the read.
Narratively.com is a very interesting site with lots of well written articles. In perusing the site, I came across an article about Deke Duncan who ran Radio 77 from a backyard shed for an audience of one.
At the end of the article, you can listen to the “Radio 77” episode of Snap Judgement by Jeff Maysh.
BBC did a piece on it in 1974:
It’s a great story about someone’s love of radio.
For even more detail about Deke, check out this article.
Thank you so much for sharing this, Bill!
Of course, the platform taken over as Sealand was used in 1965 for pirate broadcasting, it being enough outside the limit at the time to be able to avoid UK radio regulations. The BBC had a monopoly, but others wanted a variety of music.
The April 7, 1966 episode of “Danger Man” (maybe Secret Agent in the US), “Not So Jolly Roger”, was about a pirate radio station on one of those platfirms, and it was also transmitting secrets to a submarine. Drake, ie Patrick McGoohan, was undercover at the station to stop tye espionage.
That’s the only episode of the series that I remember, I think from the first time it aired in Canada, but maybe a somewhat later rerun.