THE HISTORY
OF ANGEL RADIO
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THE EVOLUTION OF ANGEL RADIO
Tony Smith, founder and manager of Angel Radio – Your Nostalgia Station.
Angel Radio was began in mid-1993 by Tony Smith and has had several launches since then in different guises. The Station started as a Pirate Station on 105.4MHz and known as Angel FM. At its debut, the staff consisted of Tony along with Lorna and Martin Kirby.
Tony standing behind Lorna and Martin Kirby
At Christmas 1993, the Station also switched on a powerful shortwave transmitter on 6.200MHz and its name was changed to Angel International.
At this time, Pirate Radio Stations were against the law and risked being shutdown by the Police. However, between 1993 and 1996, the Station was fortunate enough to only be raided twice by the authorities. During this time, Angel International’s unique programming had become very popular with listeners and even with the local police force since the station’s canteen radio was tuned to the Station!
In 1996, following the second raid, Angel International was informed by the Radio Authority, which is now part of The Office of Communication, (Ofcom), that the Station could broadcast legally for a 28-day period twice yearly. As a result, in 1997 Tony launched the first legal broadcast of Angel FM.
In 1998, Havant Borough Council invited Tony to provide a short-term Radio Station to cover its arts festival and launch Angel FM under the name of Havant Festival Radio.
Later, in 1999, Tony was next asked by Portsmouth City Council to provide a short-term Radio Station for older people. As a result of this request, Tony changed the Station’s name from Angel FM to Angel Radio, which he felt was more fitting for an older audience and it made its on-air debut in February 1999. This marked the first time that the Station played only Vintage Records introduced by only older Presenters, which today are its Hallmarks.
As this format proved extremely popular, Tony decided to offer another similar broadcast six months later in August 1999 from the Isle of Wight, just across The Solent from Portsmouth. This 28-day broadcast proved to be equally as popular, which encouraged Tony to launch Angel Radio Isle of Wight in 2000 on the island’s cable network. The Cable Radio Licence allowed the Station to offer on-air service permanently on a cable provider 24-hours-a-day-seven-days-a-week.
While reading the finer points of the regulations of the 28-day twice a year short-term Licence, Tony noticed a loophole! He noted that broadcasting appeared to be restricted as coming from ‘your studio‘ ……. so Tony et al built several studios in different places (in Havant, London, Portsmouth and the Isle of Wight), and with this, Angel Radio was on-air with its format of Vintage Records and older Presenters many more times over the following 2-years. During every broadcast, listeners were urged to write to the Radio Authority and tell them that Angel Radio should be on-air all day and every day, and not just for 28-days at a time.
By February 2002, following a lot of campaigning and hard work, the Station was granted a trial licence by the Radio Authority to broadcast on 101.1MHz FM from the Station’s studios in Havant. Fourteen other Radio Stations were similarly granted licences, as part of the Access Radio pilot in order to test the feasibility and viability of a small community group running a full-time Radio Station. The trial at Angel Radio ran for 4-years and proved successful, and as usual, was very popular with listeners. Eventually, following the positive results of the pilot, Community Radio Licences were introduced in the UK.
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ANGEL RADIO ……
A COMMUNITY RADIO STATION
Tony says that the Angel Radio format consists of normal conversational older people playing Vintage Records, rather than slick Deejays playing the same few modern records like most other radio stations. He adds that Angel Radio’s main aims are to raise older listener’s self-esteem and general wellbeing by providing nostalgic entertainment, relevant information, friendly memory-jogging chat, and mental & physical stimulation through the Station’s daily programming. We provide an average of 30% speech and 70% music every day. Another of our original aims was to reach as many older people as possible with our programmes.
From 2002 to 2010, Tony says that the Station only broadcast locally on 101.1 FM with a 25 Watt transmitter. In 2010, it began broadcasting on a regional Digital Audio Broadcast (DAB) network of transmitters covering West Sussex, Hampshire and the Isle of Wight. The cost of this expansion in coverage proved expensive and almost bankrupted the Station, but the huge rise in the number of listeners resulted in an increase in donations, which has enabled Angel Radio to continue to remain on DAB for the past eleven years.
In 2014, Tony decided to try to expand the Station’s FM coverage by bidding for the licence of the local commercial radio radio station. Unfortunately Angel Radio’s bid proved unsuccessful, however Ofcom was sufficiently impressed by the application that the authority offered the Station another spare FM frequency at 89.3MHz. This gave Angel a much higher FM transmitter power and also allowed its transmitter to be placed on top of the same hill as the commercial station that it had tried to take over, thereby giving the Station everything that it had hoped for.
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In 2015, Tony undertook another trial for Ofcom. This time it was to test the feasibility and viability of a small community group running their own DAB Multiplex.
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DAB allows the efficient grouping together of a number of radio services into what is known as a Multiplex, which can then be broadcast using an individual frequency from a transmitter. By the use of a DAB radio, listeners are able to identify each of the individual radio services and so listen to them at their leisure.
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Angel Radio’s trial Multiplex broadcasts twenty-eight radio stations to the Portsmouth and Gosport area. These stations pay an annual fee to Angel Radio and have allowed the Station to expand its coverage even further to London, Glasgow, Brighton, Birmingham, Bristol, Cambridge, Aldershot, Woking and Norwich. During 2021, Tony hopes to expand coverage further to include Salisbury, the Channel Islands, Sheffield, Rotherham, Tyne & Wear, South Shields and Inverclyde.
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As of May 2021, Angel Radio’s FM coverage is about a twenty-mile radius from its transmitter, which includes Portsmouth, Gosport, Hayling Island, Emsworth and the surrounding areas. However, recently Ofcom been has granted a quadrupling of the Station’s transmitter power , which now allows coverage to Chichester. Tony says that they are awaiting permission for the siting of our new transmission antennas.
Area covered by Angel Radio
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ANGEL RADIO PRESENTERS
The majority of the Presenters are 60 years of age and over. However, Angel Radio does encourage intergenerational work and each year the Station gives two or three younger people aged 14 to 16 the opportunity to work there.
Audrey worked at Angel Radio for five years and sadly passed away at the age of 94
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TONY SMITH
Tony is a Cockney having been born in 1954 at the Poplar Hospital in the East End of London. During his childhood, he spent a lot of time with his grandmother listening to her 78 rpm records on a wind-up gramophone. This was the beginning of his love for old music. Tony left school at the age of 15 with no exam passes and became an apprentice electrician in London,
After a few years Tony moved to Lincolnshire and worked as an electrician on RAF Conningsby. After a couple of years he got bored with this and began doing Pavement Art (chalk drawings on the sidewalk). Tony quickly found that he could earn the same amount of money in two days as he had in a week as an electrician.
Inn 1999 Tony decided to move to Hampshire where he worked for a number of years as an Art & Design Technician in a college. He continued this until 2002 when he gave it up to work at Angel Radio full-time, which he continues to do today.
In 2012, Tony suffered a stroke that rendered him very visually impaired, but fortunately for listeners, this has not stopped him running Angel Radio.
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Recently, Angel Radio has taken over the empty Romanian Food Store adjacent to the studios. Tony plans to expand the Station into this area and build new studios together with a sales area and a meeting place for listeners.
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Hi, thank you for a nice informative article about Angel Radio.
May I ask, who is the Tony Moss, whom you speak of in the opening paragraph?
Thank you
I apologise – evidently I got your name wrong.
Very sorry about that.
Regards.
Charles
I am in Bignor Memorial Hospital at the moment
and messing about with the radio dial chanced
upon Angel Radio. What a fantastic station.
All the music is terrific and the presenters are
quit knowledgable in their subjects
Thanks for visiting my website and for listening to Angel Radio.