Roger Howe, Pirate radio engineers will contested by his lazy daughter

[shorty]

Just seen this news piece on yahoo about Roger Howe taken from the Telegraph.

https://uk.yahoo.com/news/lazy-daughter ... 50769.html

[radionortheast]

So did bw sell stuff to pirates, I got the impression they didn’t do that, there were reviews of their exciters along side veronica on an early website that I used to look at. https://radio.xtreamlab.net/bc-ware-lcd-pll.html looked like it was at the output frequency.

[Persona Non Grata]

So did bw sell stuff to pirates

Lots of Irish pirates used BW gear. They may have avoided knowingly supplying UK pirates though in order to avoid legal trouble.

[radionortheast]

I’m sure read something along time, think it was y2k pirates forum, so long ago i’m not sure. I didn’t know money could be made out of these kinds of things, I suppose theres quite a mark up, cost of making a transmitter afew 100, sell for few 1,000’s

[shorty]

I remember BW receiving an hefty fine for supplying equipment to pirate stations after raids in the West Midlands and Eire, it was something like an £100k or £150k.

After this case they stopped selling the exciter transmitter modules in the UK, then someone in the far east started selling exciter boards on ebay that looked to be the same as the BW modules.

[Albert H]

So did bw sell stuff to pirates

Lots of Irish pirates used BW gear. They may have avoided knowingly supplying UK pirates though in order to avoid legal trouble.

....... rather unsuccessfully. Roger and Scott were successfully prosecuted by the RIS when some BW-marked gear was found in use by several London (and other UK) land-based pirates. Roger always used to hate dealing with the "Hackney 'mitter men", and tried to avoid it, but their money was as good as anyone else's!

[Albert H]

I've just remembered something else from the 80s.....

We'd found that there was a cheaply available RF power transistor (available from several surplus component shops) that were capable of around the magic 100 Watts at 28 - 30V supply. They were little stud-mount devices - roughly equivalent to a BLY94 - marked "587BLY". The dealers all though that these were HF devices, but I found that they'd go well at Band II. It turned out that they were made for aircraft transmitters! Everyone - Pyers, Myers, Roger, Me, bought these things by the hundreds - usually for around £3 each though I managed to get 2000 of them for about £1 each!

I also had a source of the ideal driver transistor for them - the 2N3375, My standard PA for a long while used a 2N3866 driving a 2N3375 then into the 587BLY. If it was powered at 29V, it needed about 100mW of drive from the exciter to give 100W at the hot end!

The 2N3375s I got (for pennies each) were generally difficult to find (thou I got lucky!), and Roger used to come over to my house to buy a bagful of them from me at least once a week for months!

The last time I saw Roger was at his BW workshop at Hackbridge. We chatted about audio processing (as I recall) and went off for lunch together. He told me about the deals that he was doing with "Eastern European buyers". Subsequently, there were rumours that he had a falling-out with one of these foreign buyers.......