Edward Sandle on Navigation
Lisa: Could you talk to me a bit about the technology involved in the communications?
Well, it was … when I went there it was nearly all with the Morse key [makes a tapping noise] which is one of these, and we used to listen on the frequency, the distress frequency was 2182 kilocycles, or KHz as they call it now and we used to keep a watch on there and also keep a watch on Channel 16 VHF, and we used to keep a watch on those frequencies, and if anyone was in trouble, we would hear them and we would stop any other working and just concentrate on … if they were in our area we would coordinate it, otherwise if it was nearer another Station they would have heard about it and they would take over the coordination of it and we would tell everyone else to shut up.
When the Coast Guard came in more, they took over coordination and eventually we dropped out of the picture and we just became a communication only, just passing telegrams and phone calls.
Most of our work was telegrams and phone calls and that was from the old days when people sent telegrams and also mostly VHF work was telephone calls. We did do telephone calls on medium wave as well, but less of that, although when we were at our prime in Niton Radio, we had five people on at one time, all very busy with a whole list of waiting ships, waiting to be dealt with. It got very busy.