Any old promotor drivers around

Hi Brian, I had a Blaupunkt short wave radio fitted in my M.A.N. 16.280 and at the moment I can’t remember if it was short wave/ a.m. or short wave/ f. m. but I will never forget listening to Radio Tirana “The Voice Of Albania” in some off the beaten track village usually in Yugoslavia. I say usually because I could also pick it up in Romania just past Sibiu on the top of the hill where the restaurant was.
If you remember Radio Tirana was on the same wave length (or near enough) as The B.B.C. World Service and if you were high up on a mountain somewhere on a clear night usually in the winter you could pick up the B.B.C. signal. Just before the B.B.C. World News came on at 8 p.m. you would hear the faint sound of a trumpet which played about eight notes and then went quite for about ten seconds. I have a feeling that anybody who heard this sound might still remember it like I did, as soon as you mentioned Radio Tirana.
These trumpet notes usually started around 7.50 p.m. and gradually increased in volume until around 8 p.m. eventually blocking out the signal from the B.B.C. When they stopped a voice said in English “ You are listening to Radio Tirana, the voice of Albania. We are transmitting on radio frequencies (blah, blah, blah) and here is summary of today’s world news”.
Sometimes you would be lucky if you could still manage to hear the B.B.C. headlines in the back ground but by now the signal from Albania was much stronger and so you had no choice except to try and search for a signal from Radio Free Europe, switch off or listen to the propaganda that was being spewed out from Tirana.
One news headline from there in the early eighties is one that I shall never forget and went something like this.
Mr (so and so) from the United Nations today made a statement on how good life is for all the people in Albania. A United Nations survey has shown that compared to the United Kingdom, where there is only one tractor for every 28,500 of it’s people, Albania now has one tractor for every 1,000 citizens.
In 1985 my uncle died and at the funeral I was talking to my cousins son who worked for British Telecom as a radio technician at Portishead Radio near Bristol. I happened to mention to him about Radio Tirana and he knew all about that trumpet sound and said that it was a jamming signal. I also asked him why I could pick up the B.B.C. quite clearly in places like Izmir, Adana and sometimes in Greece but couldn’t get it places like Ankara, Istanbul and Bulgaria and he told me that the signal was probably coming from the B.B.C. relay transmitter in Cyprus.
So there ya go Brian, another almost forgotten memory from Yugoslavia, until you mentioned it. :smiley: