Saturday, May 16, 2009

Voice of Tamil Elem in Madras - 1986

I have had a great support ,encouragement and motivation from a number of DX friends . Two of them with whom I continue to interact the most since our first meeting in 1978 are Tripti Ranjan Basu and Babul Gupta. During the days of publication of Asian DX Review in the 1980s the slogging would be done by TRB while BG did the designing of the bulletin and the weekend meetings would be held in my Hostel room.Equally long is my association with Sudito Ghose who is still my first source for technical queries. In the early eighties I met Prodyut Bannerjee with whom I continue to have a special relationship because of our common interest in the tropical bands and the mediumwaves and more so because we both happen to be of the same age. As a sailor and a keen DXer Prodyut would fascinate us with his exotic recordings , qsls all spiced up with his humor . A class friend of mine from my Medical School, Asis Kundu was with me for the DX expeditions , would lend his hand for the work for the bulletin and even accompanied me to search for the Voice of Tamil Elem in Madras in 1986. Ever since I met Kanwarjit Sandhu at his place in Ludhiana in 1986 we struck up a special bond and after the demise of Asian DX review it was the bulletin run by him - UDXL which kept up my DX links.

What about my other DX friends with whom I could not keep up regular touch all through these years, who nevertheless have a special place in my heart ? It was at Alok Dasguptas place , the Indian DX club International Hq in 1978 that I met TRB,BG SG and all. He had featured me in an interview for Adrian Peterson's Radio Monitors International which used to be aired over the Sri Lankan Broadcasting Corporation.Pratap Shankar Mazumdar was also an active IDXCI worker and so was Surajit Kumar Dey who was somewhere between a DXer and a Ham.Dr Swapan Chowdhury, the "Doctor" as we called him first showed us the digital frequency readout in his Panasonic receiver in the early eighties.During my trips to Madras now renamed Chennai I struck up a good rapport with B Sreedhar of HAP India and B Padaki who was one of the first TV Dxers in India. Manosij Ganguly the young enthusiast who used to be active with AIR frequency information even turned up to visit me at Aligarh where I stayed for some time.The two other younger DXer friends from Kolkata were Priyanjit Ghosal and Subrata Sengupta.My only overseas DX friend Peter Bunn from Australia turned up in the middle of religious riots at Aligarh. However, I managed to take him through a trip of the external services transmitters of All India Radio against all the odds and even had the station engineer serving us a sumptuous lunch.

This page will not be complete withought mention of my wife Paromita .She is half a DXer and a full friend ever encouraging. In private I have heard her say that she hates when I shift from station to station with little pause !.
(Thanks to Supratik Sanatani athena_eye@vsnl.com, http://www.geocities.com/supratiksanatani)

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