Coast
Radio Stations
OBAN
RADIO
GNE
Content researched by
Bob Dixon
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Oban Radio's roll was principally to provide communications
to the North West coastline of Scotland. This it achieved with difficulty. The vast size
of the area to be covered and the ruggedness of the coastal terrain have always made the
West Coast a difficult communications area. But Oban's signals sometimes got into places
they weren't supposed to go!
A CAPTAIN'S LIFE IS SAVED
While monitoring the distress frequency of 2182kHz one day, the Radio Officer's could here
a vessel making repeated calls to various Coast Radio Stations without response. There was
no distress or urgency element to the calls but, as time went, the voice of of the ship's
operator grew more and more agitated. Oban Radio eventually called the ship and asked if
they could help in any way. It turned out that the vessel was berthed at Buncrana in the
Irish Republic and a member of the crew had gone berserk and, weilding a large fire axe,
was baying for the Captain's life. The Captain had locked himself in the wheelhouse and,
while the madman hacked away at the door with his axe, the Captain was frantically trying
to obtain help via his ship's radio. Oban Radio, with the assistance of Malinhead Radio,
made immediate contact with the local Garda station and very soon help was on hand.
PINCHING OTHER STATION'S TRAFFIC
giving good service to the Paddle Steamer Waverley
 During
the course of a routine watch, the staff at Oban could here P.S. Waverley
calling Northforeland Radio without any success. On one call the Captain,
perhaps doubting the functioning of one of the crystals on his SP Radio
R105 receiver, was heard to say "listening 1848" - a frequency
shared with Oban. When there was no evidence of successful communication,
Oban made a tentative enquiry as to whether the Waverley could
receive them - "LOUD AND CLEAR" came the answer FROM THE ENGLISH
CHANNEL! There followed a very successful link-call with a resulting
very happy ship's Master.
COMMUNCATIONS ACROSS THE ATLANTIC
One evening a call was received from a Scottish fishing vessel off the Butt of Lewis who
wanted, and received, a link-call to his home. After the very successful call the skipper
gave the GNE officer his position and told him that this was the last communication he
would be able to have because he was on his way across the Atlantic to a fisheries
exhibition in Canada. Having established that the vessel was not equipped with HF radio,
and therefore could not communicate with the long-range station Portishead Radio, Oban Radio told the skipper to set up his
radio equipment on the same frequencies at 0200 each day and they would be listening and
would give him a link call back home. "Would that work" enquired the skipper. It
did and the vessel maintained his daily reporting-in until it's safe arrival at the
destination port.
QSL FROM AWARARU
In the course of a routine morning at GNE, the telex machine chattered into life. Not an
unusual event at a Coast Radio Station, but in this instance the message was unusual in
that it came from Awararu Radio (callsign ZLB). "Hello OM", it said, "just
to let you know that we heard you working your distress traffic last night on 2181 - you
were communicating with a French trawler at the time. Nicely done and nice to hear
you." Nice to get a compliment from a fellow Coast Station - but what was really
unusual about this one is that Awararu radio was in NEW ZEALAND!
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