Comments by "" (@EbenBransome) on "Ringway Manchester" channel.

According to a former GCHQ guy I knew, now dead, back in the 1950s the Russians used to communicate en clair, and he and his colleagues were out there listening to them in the desert with RAF cover in cause they were caught. He said after a bit they knew quite a bit about the private lives of some of the Russians, picked up some Russian jokes, and decided they were "just like us". After a few years he got bored, declined promotion to a desk job, and was found a rather well paid job in a government-friendly organisation. He didn't visit Russia till the Yeltsin era on a tour, accidentally came out with some fluent colloquial Russian in front of the tour guide, and was thereafter regarded with great suspicion and none of the Russians would talk to him. Old habits died hard.
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@josekanucee1428 He was well paid for it.
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As a teenager I was experimenting with a push-pull double power triode, building what I thought was a low power oscillator to do some experiments with NMR (nuclear magnetic resonance) as described in Wireless World. I managed to blank out the BBC2 channel over a half mile radius. Fortunately the valve burnt out before they were able to get organised and locate the signal.
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But in the USA, a good percentage of the cost of buying and running your equipment is so that corporations you don't vote for can send you advertising. The BBC has zero adverts. Also, some of the funding goes to keep radio transmitters going which allow local radio and the like to function at low cost. Paradoxically if the disgusting right-wing propaganda outfit GB "News" succeeded in its desire to abolish the licence, it would no longer be able to transmit to air because it would not be able to afford to keep the transmitters going.
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