Jim, above, mentions RTE Radio 1 on 567 wiping out The Communicator where he was living. My own experience is similar but a bit different. I was based in Belfast City at the time. At nights, on Skywave The Communicator bombed in, at times, with a truly powerful signal but suffered from the Luxembourg effect. For every three minutes of powerful signal, we had to go through about five minutes of fade. Obviously, I would only listen out of curiosity and the repetitive playlist was not for me.

But what is really interesting is that during the day, I would not expect anything from the North Sea due to the distance and the Irish station. I was wrong. One afternoon (mid July 1984 I think) I was listening to RTE, when I could hear some interference on the frequency. I first assumed that it was one of the many Irish pirates deciding to play silly beggars and put out a signal to deliberately interfere with Raidio Eireann, simply just to annoy them.

So to find out who it was, I turned my radio around to null out Donnybrook and try and pull in these rapscallions.

You're all probably well ahead of me. The interfering station was none other than Laser 558. It seems that the combination of expert transmitter design coupled with the low frequency and maybe a bit of sea path meant that in middle of Summer with the sun high in the sky and no prospect of Skywave, the signal from the North Sea was making the journey and being received on a very cheap low quality AM radio. Very very anorak signal, certainly not attractive to the casual listener, but to an anorak like myself, one heck of a catch.

By the way, was there any truth to the story I once heard that during the broadcast of an All Ireland cup final, Laser lowered its signal just enough so that the Irish community could listen to the match and then put it back up again afterwards. Or was that just transmitter maintenance?