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Carl Mitchell on land. |
Carl Mitchell, the weird beard. |
Carl Mitchell. |
The deck of the Mi Amigo. |
One of Caroline's tenders, the Offshore 1. |
The studio mixing desk and cartridge machines. |
Bud Ballou in the studio, bottle of Heineken close at hand! |
The crew eating a meal. |
The aerial mast. |
The mast. |
MORRIS'S MI AMIGO MEMORIES - 2The senior radio engineer amongst us was Don Richardson, who had previously worked for
Voice of America and was now consequently on a Chinese death list. Don was a Scientologist and met his wife, Nan, when she was a senior colleague of L Ron
Hubbard in London. Nan told me that she would be assisting LRH at his lectures and, behind the lecturer's bench, she would look down and see his feet
hovering two inches above the ground! Don was an ethereal fellow who would demonstrate to us his E-meter, a Scientology invention devised to probe
into people's present and previous lives. Don was a most amiable and easy-going person who had the uncanny knack of being totally not findable
anywhere on the ship at times. During the first week of that part of Radio Caroline's life which commenced on August 14th 1967, the transmitter exploded
in a shower of sparks. (I saw it happen.) Don joined us a week later and set about coupling together the two spare 10kW transmitters which had
hitherto been idle, and kept us on the air pending the arrival of a new transmitter 50kW output valve a few weeks later from Continental Electronics in the
States. Thereupon, he coupled the two 10kW units with the restored 50kW transmitter, increasing our output to a nominal 70kW. The resulting signal, consisting
of a distorted carrier wave resulted in our being heard on every part of the medium waveband on every simple transistor radio, toaster and kettle in the
locality!
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