Edward Sandle on Communication

Lisa: Can you just describe the equipment that you used in detail?

Well, in detail we had what we called bays in the Radio Station. In the old one we had two receivers and then there would be … the actual transmitters weren’t in the Station itself.

We keyed the Station transmitters from the Station remotely. We had some down at Blackgang.

There was a group of aerials, I think there are still some there, some aerials there, that was one Station and then we had the receiving aerials round the Station itself, and then the VHF was up on St Boniface, so we had lots of wires, cables if you like, connecting us to all these various sites. 

We used to tune the transmitters remotely from our Station but when we went up to the new Station, we then had quite a complicated looking bay, you might have seen photographs. We were surrounded by several receivers and several switches, switching from one receiver to another and then switching from the Telephone Exchange we could make several phone calls at once from that position and so we had quite a lot of switches and knobs and things.

It looked quite complicated but you weren’t using all of it at any one time so although it looked complicated, we knew what we were doing and so it wasn’t quite as difficult as it looked.