TRAVELLING THE WORLD FROM THE FRONT ROOM WITH VEF, MY RUSSIAN SHORT WAVE FRIEND

BRIAN OGLE recalls the days when a USSR built transistor radio opened new horizons and even brought a gift from Chairman Mao

I’VE always had a passion for travel, but as a teenager I travelled the world without leaving the comfort of the family living room.

It was all thanks to a piece of old USSR technology, a Russian short wave radio that was way ahead of its time, and certainly well ahead of anything that was on shelves of local electrical shops.
I spotted an advertisement in a magazine, for a Russian ‘VEF’ transistor radio boasting medium and long wave, and eight short wave bands able to “pick up thousands of transmissions and stations from all over the world” – at least that’s what the advert from a Surrey company, Headquarter and General Supplies, (H&G) said.

The advertisement pictured at the top of this article appeared 54 years ago in August 1966 in the British magazine Practical Electronics, but I’m sure that’s not where I would have noticed it.
Anyway, the advert claimed the price was reduced from 29 and a half guineas (I can’t even work what that is any more) but had been slashed to ten pounds nineteen and sixpence with an extra 4s 6d for post and packing. I remember I couldn’t manage the asking price with my pocket money in one go, so opted to pay the £3 deposit and 18 fortnightly payments of 11s 11d!

However, that was one of the best bargains in my entire life, it opened up a new world to me, quite literally – as I searched the wave bands in the wee small hours every night, tilting the three-foot long telescopic aerial at different angles to pick up English language broadcasts from stations like the Voice of the Andes in Quito, Ecuador, or Radio Peking and Radio Moscow and a host of other Iron Curtain countries churning out propaganda to anyone who would listen in the West, or particularly anyone like me who had invested in one of their VEF short wave radios.
Apparently my ‘Russian’ radio was actually it was built in Riga, Latvia, and was one of the first shortwave transistor portables. The advert from Headquarter and General Supplies shown above proclaims “another gold for Russia,” and that “the impossible has been done” with an 8 band radio for “hardly more than the cost of an ordinary single wave cheap transistor!”

As far as I can gather the radio was a VEF Spīdola from one of two Latvian manufacturers, Valsts Elektrotehniskā Fabrika (hence the VEF name) and Radiotehnika, both of Riga, which was of course in the old USSR in those days. The sets were produced primarily for the Soviet Union and Eastern Bloc, but some were exported to Western Europe, and that’s where mine came from, via Headquarter and General Supplies in Surrey.
Apparently the set’s name means “shining” and is the name of a beautiful witch in a Latvian myth. Anyway, my VEF shortwave radio not only broadened my knowledge of the world – very soon there wasn’t a capital city with a radio station I couldn’t identify and pinpoint on a map, but very soon I was responding to calls from the stations asking listeners to write in if they had received their English language programmes.
Not only did they reply with a postcard confirming me as listener many of them put me on the mailing list for Christmas, and sometimes New Year cards, as well. I was the envy of all my school friends with my Iron Curtain friend which brought me contacts, letters and postcards, and even political propaganda material, from all over the world.
I remember Radio Moscow and Radio Peking were especially keen in wooing this young listener in far off Northern Ireland, UK, at a time of Cold War tensions and intrigue.
Radio Peking particularly bombarded me with communist propaganda and on one occasion the postman knocked on the door with a huge parcel of reading material, most of it in English, but a lot of it in Mandarin, along with my very own signed copy of Chairman Mao’s Little Red Book!

Actually the countries who were in the old Soviet Union at the time were particularly active with their English language broadcasts and especially receptive to reports of their broadcasts in English and delighted to make contact with listeners in the UK.
I recall many of the names…. Eastern European stations like Radio Prague, Radio Bucharest, Radio Budapest and Radio Vilnius were regular guests in my living room as well as the likes of Voice of America, an African religious channel called ELWA in Monrovia, Liberia, and Scandinavian stations like Radio Norway. Many of the stations had their own distinctive call signs at the start of their programme or indeed to signal the time, some of them like Radio Prague with a sort of trumpet voluntary version of Big Ben striking the hour.
I can’t remember what happened to my VEF Spidola Russian radio, but it served me well for many, many years, and not only helped me with my geography and knowledge of the world, but gave me the passion to visit some of the places I heard broadcasting all those years ago……