I co owned & broadcast on Swinging Radio England in the 70's on 227MW/1324KC's paid the price when Mr Hawkins & Co raided the ba**ards!!!!!

You are probably thinking of Eric Gotts he did the raids in the London area. Michael Hawkins operated out of the GPO HQ (it was the General Post Office that regulated broadcasting in the 70's) at Colchester. A typical land based pirate basically we broadcast Sunday mornings and Monday evenings from around 1971 until we got raided in June 1976. Initially we were on FM but after a few months we got hold of a MW TX I think it operated at about 30 watts into a shunt fed 1/4 length slung via insulators between the trees in my mates back garden the studio was in the house. We always knew there was a risk broadcasting live & often talked about going mobile but we never did. We used the original PAMS Swinging Radio England Jingles from 2 cassette recorders, had 3 turntables, mic and a mixer + power amp into the mains powered valve tx unit. It was myself using the name Dave Ross and a guy called Dave Rogers plus another mate called Alan Edwards present at the time of the raid. You will know Dave Rogers better as Roger Dee of Big L & Roger Davis of Radio Seagull & Britain Radio SW. Sundays was a fast moving Top 40 format like the original station although on a Monday night we also had another dj called Terry ? who did an album based progressive rock show similar to what you would hear on Seagull/Caroline nowadays, Dave Rogers & myself did Monday shows in the normal format.

Basically we were only raided after another DJ Mike Edmonds decided to put an article in one of the local newspapers and on hearing about the article the GPO were obliged to raid us. They knew all about us but left us alone as we were isolated in Norfolk and not interferring with anything. Mike Edmonds was sacked once the others saw the article and was not part of the raid.

SRE got about 20 miles radius in north norfolk. That basically is my involvement after the raid & court case I spent the next 21 years on Hospital Radio Norwich before doing about 15 RSL's for 4 different stations and in recent years internet radio with R45 & 80's & More.

The antenna wasn't brilliant but of course people would put up with anoraky AM signals in those days just to hear a Top 40 station. BBC Radio 1 was on 247m/1215 AM in those days and there signal wasn't good in our area. For around 10 miles our signal was stronger than R1 in the direction away from Norwich. Frequency was very clear daytime but did get heterodyne problems after dark Monday evenings so we often did a crystal change to 1333 I believe could have been the other way I can't remember now.