It all started with a quite common interest in pirates: listening, sending reports, getting QSL’s and among those – diagrams on different transmitters. Was it really so simple to build a transmitter? Well, Allan Ball had to try that some day.
All the electronic components was collected into a box, but the real ambition to start building was never discovered, not until 1985, when the first home-build Tx stood there ready to be tested.
Well, the signal reached around 30 km on the quite odd frequency 5918 kHz, with heavy QRM from Radio Moscow. This test program included mostly non-stop music and unidentified parts from tapes, like a promo tape for BBC! Technically speaking was the transmitter no masterpiece – two tubes who feeded a half-wave antenna, set up between a flagstaff and an old tree, about 200 volt on the anode, an old guitar-amplifier running for 17 watts as the driver! 5 Watts perhaps, probably not more!
Why the name Radio King? Well, then we have to go back a few years. Together with a few friends, Allan Ball recorded a program that was to be relayed via another pirate. The name was taken from Mel Brooks song “It’s Good to be a King”, and this one later became the sign-on melody for Radio King.Back to 1985. Allan Ball got in contact with SOS – Sound of Sweden, who was planning their 10-years anniversary, and was looking for someone that could relay them. Sure, of course could Allan relay SoS via his “microwatts-tx”, (the show was also going in relay via the old Radio Delmare, so SoS was not totally dependent on Mr Ball). In return, Mr Ball got SoS old 6275-crystal, and the possibility to use the Dedemsvaart-address one year for free. The 16th of November 1985 was King testing with the new 6275 (the same px as the very first one!) crystal and the day after was the relay of The Sound of Sweden.
Allan Ball got quite surprised when he saw in a DX-magazine that his signal had been heard around 200 km away! During spring 1986 a few more shows were produced and the 12th of January 86 came the first reports, 13 of them, from Sweden, Finland, Germany and DDR. Later only five more reports was sent into the station. The most fare away listener was located in Guernsey!
Radio King also relayed some programs from German Canzoni Radio. After 1986 no more show was produced and Radio King went into the FR-silence. Any ambition to play some kind of music or “Fight For Free Radio” was never around, Radio King was just for fun and to find out how fare the signal could go.
The music was mostly “oldies”, Swedish and Danish music and some more like: Bruce Springsteen, Gasolin, Prince, Shu-bi-dua, Genesis, Peps and Siv Malmqvist.