Diamond Jubilee of
Wick Radio GKR
following reprinted from the
summer 1980 issue of "Hello World"
A double anniversary for Jimmy Kay (right) at Wick Radio. With Viscount Thurso, principal guest at the jubilee celebrations.
It was three birthdays in one when Wick Radio, International Telecommunications' busiest medium-range coast station, marked its diamond jubilee in the spring.
Established during the First World War as a naval station, Wick Radio was taken over by the Post Office on April 25, 1920.
By what later proved to be an extraordinary coincidence, the station's longest-serving member of staff, Glaswegian Jimmy Kay, was born on the same date. Now maritime radio services field manager for Scotland, Jimmy has been at Wick for 33 years.
April 25 was also the birthday, in 1874, of the most famous name of all in radio - Marconi.
As Captain Christopher Wake-Walker, head of Maritime Radio Services Division, put it at a celebratory lunch in Wick: "Perhaps you can say Wick is a true child of the originator of radio."
The trail of coincidences went one step further. "I was struck by the various similarities between Wick and myself," said Captain Wake-Walker. "We were both born in the same year, and both in Scotland. The main difference between Wick and myself is that whereas I am retiring this year, Wick is going on, I hope, from strength to strength."
In 1920, morse code was the main method of communications and the station was using a spark transmitter among its primitive equipment. By 1923, it was handling some 58,000 paid words a year in radio telegrams. This was to rise to a peak of well over one million in about 1949, before declining to the present level of about 840,000.
Noe, by far the greatest number of calls goby radiotelephone and oil rigs and their support vessls have replaced fishing trawlers as the station's main customers. On a busy day, the station can handle nearly 500 radiotelephoen calls.
Recently it had handled communications in the cod war. Fishermen relied enormously on it and others stations like it, and it had been invaluable to North Sea oil.
"The Ekofisk disaster gave a reminder that we must have first-class communication all round our coast and particularly in this sort of area."
What of the future? The prospect of satellite communications and automatic VHf services made forecasting difficult, but if it could adapt to change, he was sure Wick had a long future ahead of it.
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