My antenna was also an L off the chimney (discarded old house mains wiring, actually woven through our old VHF TV aerial) down to an insulator to a wooden mast at the end of the garden.
Respect for your half-KW !! And great move with the VHF-FM bug!
In 1968 maybe, I heard a 300W (announced) station from Herts, clearly on my portable, from my then-location in Hersham village (at the SW edge of the London conurbation — the grey stuff on an OS map of that time). On hearing that from so far away, on a portable, my heart beat a little faster as I imagined serious landbased pirates would start doing that, and thinking "Ok, this could work!". Expected broadly similar (though likely intermittent) operations to the offshore stations would blossom up (as later happened in Ireland).
Grievous that there was so little flexibility in licensing and enforcement here, and that practically lug-able amounts of car batteries weren't up to sustaining the associated power demand "in the field". As it was, from my location, regular listening to those we were blessed with, typically running tens of Watts (except over the Xmas "grace period", at least initially tolerated), required my same inverted-L antenna. Huge respect to those who "filled the gap" as best they could.
FWIW: Someone (at a recent Caroline public meeting) suggested my door-basher was likely the infamous remit-exceeding Gotts.
