I used to listen to Laser 558 in the 80s, It was a great radio station. When it closed I went back to Caroline.How great it would be if Radio Caroline was given a licence to broadcast from the fully restored Ross Revenge on AM with a decent bit of power - Not 1 Watt. We all want to hear it !!
You were right Simon - Mainly broadcast from land now but occasionally from the Ross Revenge radio ship linked to the transmitter site at Orfordness - Suffolk - UK. Cheers !
Can anyone help me out here please? when I used to listen to laser 558 back in the 80's, I seem to remember that at the end of the transmission when they closed down every night, they played the same "signing off" song. I have an idea what that sonf was fro memory but after research it is impossible I must be wrong. was it laser, or another station like Luxembourg 208 that used the same signing off song, anyone out there remember better than me ?
The transmitter on board was probably capable of 50 kW (50 kilowatts) - certainly not '50 thousand kilowatts'! But I am not sure that in practice it was ever operated at more than about 20 kW. Its strong signal strength was at least in part due to its low frequency (558 kHz) which gave very good ground wave propagation into both the UK and the near continent. The propagation would have been particularly good over sea water, hence from its position the signal reached well into the Thames Estuary area and even across to Norway. The fact that its aerial system was mainly a horizontal wire, so that the electric vector was horizontally polarised, may have also helped. Also, it was on a channel clear of other high power operators, since 558 kHz was supposed to be reserved for low power transmitters in Europe.
