Mike Mahon was a huge fan of Radio Nova. Whilst still in school he made several pilgrimages to the station before it closed, by which time he himself had left school and was pursuing communications academically, which was just as Energy 103 was starting to hit its stride.
So when he, along with the rest of his classmates, was tasked with finding a company willing to take him on for one day a week for work experience, Mike had his eyes set on only one workplace.
So he made a trip to 144 Upper Leeson Street, met with Sybil Fennell and found himself working every Thursday as part of the team at Energy 103.
He threw himself into all the odd jobs that needed doing, from making tea to blanking carts for re-use.
The biggest challenge in those first few weeks was getting to grips with the rather extensive record library.
Mike was eager to learn how everything worked, and did so with guidance from Pat Courtenay in the production studio, Gareth O'Callaghan in the transmission studio and George Long and Teena Gates, who ran him through the workings of the newsroom.
Mike found himself at the station even in his spare time which led to him being given more and more responsibility; this ranged from being sent out to record interviews with eye-witnesses for big news stories to chasing down celebrities when they were in Dublin to get a few words.
Along with the exciting jobs were the ones that others might find mundane, such as frequenting the local record shop to add to the record library.
Mike took great satisfaction in knowing that records he purchased would be playing over the airwaves within hours.
Over time he became more involved in the day to day running of the station, answering the phones, compiling listener polls and most importantly, manning the desk when a non-verbal op was required, such as playing out ads for outside broadcasts to playing the vinyl records that housed programmes such as Rick Dees Weekly Top 40 or filling in playing music back to back when presenters needed to step out of the studio for a period.
Stepping Up
Mike's work experience was taken to a whole new level one Saturday in March 1987 when he received a phone call from Tony McKenzie who needed someone to fill in that night on the 8pm - midnight slot. Mike was in the studio before the phone settled back into the cradle!
This became regular over the next couple of weeks and before long he was also doing Fridays and Sundays. He was actually earning a wage!
It was now approaching the summer of 1987 and Mike had finished his photography course. It was thanks to that course that there is now a wealth of photographs of Energy 103 that Mike very kindly passed on to Radiowaves and are littered throughout Part 2 of the Radio Nova Story.
You're tuned to ?
It was in Mike's new role as an employee of the station rather than 'Work Experience Man' that he found himself at the centre of one of the strangest broadcasts ever to be heard on a radio station in Ireland (or probably anywhere). No amount of work experience could have prepared him for the events of July 4th 1987.
It was a Saturday evening and at just after 9pm, Energy 103 play three songs in a row which triggers a competition which gives listeners a chance to win £10,000 if they are the 60th caller to the station.
Callers to the station, however, were confusingly told that the songs had not been played. In fact, the station that they were listening to was not actually Energy 103.
So, what was going on?
Well, the exciter from Energy 103’s FM transmitter had been stolen. This transmitter also linked to the 738AM transmitter. At this point, opportunists started broadcasting a spoof version of Energy on 103.0MHz, which got picked up by the 738MW, and they began by playing the three songs in a row.
Kevin Branigan remembers it well, he was on the phone to Mike Mahon who was on air when it happened:
I was asking Mike all the news and he said hold on a minute and I could hear him playing the ads and then the top of the hour up to 9pm, then it all went quiet in the background. Mike came back and asked me to check the radio. So I went into the kitchen and went back and told him that 103 was off the air.
They hung up as Mike then needed to find out what was going on. When Kevin heard what was going out on 738 a few minutes later he rang back. Mike checked for himself and realised he needed to contact Tony McKenzie..
Mike (pictured) takes up the story…
I was on air that Saturday night when the off-air return signal suddenly disappeared. The studio desk was still working and the power was still on, so I knew it must be a fault outside the building. Then we heard a strange spoof version of Energy being broadcast on our frequency complete with various idents, promos and commercials.I phoned Tony MacKenzie and he and John Power set off for the transmission site in the Dublin mountains. I kept the output going from Leeson Street ready for when the station was back on air.
The MW signal was restored after a couple of hours of the alternative Energy 103. We all listened to the recording of it on the Monday morning and had a great laugh.
Energy (the real one) managed to get a weak FM signal back on at around 1am. 738 was still a carrier at this point. Liam Coburn (left) was the overnight presenter. He managed to do a link at around 2am but Energy went off the air again. They eventually managed to get a signal on FM at around 5am with medium wave returning later that morning.
Meanwhile, sitting in a hotel room in Dublin, fresh over from the UK to take up a position on Energy 103, was Cassidy Jones who was tuned to 738kHz on that Saturday night. He later told Enda Caldwell that as he sat listening to what was going out on air he wondered what the f**k he’d got himself in to!
The PPM Game
Problems continued over the next few days with blank carriers noted at times and low audio at other times. On the overnight show on Thursday morning (9th) the new boy, Cassidy Jones (right), was heard to play a game he called ‘The PPM Game’. This game was meant for just one single listener though, a listener by the name of ‘Tony’. He broadcast messages at different times. These were along the lines of “a message for Tony, the PPMs are between 3 and 4”, and “another message for Tony, the PPMs are now at 4”. The ‘game’ ended with Cassidy saying “Another Message for Tony, perhaps you should head back to the studio now and come down off that windy old hill.” The ‘Tony’ in question was obviously Tony McKenzie and they were monitoring levels in the studio due to changes McKenzie was making at the transmitter site.
Meanwhile, the person(s) who stole the exciter left it back outside the door of 144 Upper Leeson Street a few days later.
The Other Side
Those responsible for the rogue broadcast insisted at the time that they were not responsible for the theft.
Here’s their side of the story with anonymity preserved...
The idea to jam the station had come about several weeks beforehand when it was realised that 738am was being fed from FM.
A fake show was produced with the intention of jamming the radio station from a portable location near the AM site ... they were ‘prepared to sacrifice a Walkman’ for the cause along with a small little 1w transmitter. The jammers had been responsible for the jamming of Q102 as ‘the ghost of Nova’ using similar methods a year beforehand.
One afternoon while hanging out and listening to Energy 103 they suddenly heard the 103FM transmitter cut out. They retuned to 738AM and realised that this would be their golden moment.
Someone ran down the road to get the pre-recorded Energy show and shortly afterwards they started broadcasting.
They never expected the takeover to continue as long as it did; they presumed it was a short outage from Energy and that they’d be quickly bounced off 738kHz once normal transmissions resumed on 103. As a result they actually ran out of stuff to play, hence they were repeating the pre-recorded show.
Energy 103 started phoning around every station in Dublin trying to find out who knew what was going on. One of the people they called was not directly involved in the jamming but was fully aware of who it was. Once the word got out that the Energy transmission site had been robbed the jammers began to panic in case they got the blame for the theft – but couldn’t switch off the jammer straight after the phone call because it would be too obvious who the culprits were! They left it on for another while and then switched off.
Mike said afterwards:
Amazingly, when I did our listenership survey the following week we had a big jump in numbers ao it didn't do the station any harm!
Thanks to Mike Mahon we can listen to the rogue broadcast as it played out. Quality is variable but worth sticking to…