AUDIO ARCHIVES OF

SUNSHINE RADIO, PORTMARNOCK, CO DUBLIN

SKIP TEXT AND MOVE TO FILES

1980 - 1981 - 1982 - 1983 - 1984 - 1985 - 1986 - 1987 - 1988

This station began life in September 1980 on AM only, 531kHz. Broadcasts were made from the Sands Hotel, a beautiful picturesque location right on the sea front in Portmarnock, just North of Dublin. By 1986, Sunshine was given a complete make over by American format specialist Bill Cunningham, and transformed from a community station for Portmarnock almost, into Dublin's number one.

Sunshine closed along with the bulk of the stations in Ireland at the end of 1988. In Scotland we could hear all the channels used. In 1988 Sunshine and rival Q102 hogged no less than 6 frequencies each!! Sunshine used 531 and 846 MW, and no less than 4 FM frequencies around 101 area!!

Many of the old favourite offshore djs were still with the station in the early days. The initial broadcasts included Robbie Dale (owner), Tony Allan, Chris Cary, Peter Madison, Declan Meehan, and M'nom Christie. Later you could hear Stevie Gordon (who broadcast in Ireland as Stevie Dunn), Tom Hardy, Daffy Don Allan, Johnnie Lewis, Tony Dixon, Tony Fenton etc. Newsreader Adrian Hoorsman who features regularly, eventually went on to work on the fitting out of the Ross Revenge in Spain. For whatever reason, he never made it to the air on Caroline though. Many more now well known names passed through the doors of Sunshine Radio.

Below includes a selection of Sunshine Radio recordings, from the station's early days. Many of these recordings were made in Scotland from 531kHz, hence some occasional interference from television sets operating nearby. 531 is one of the frequencies which is susceptible to TVI, ie interference from the timebase of neighbouring television sets. (multiples of 15.625kHz, of which 531.25 is a harmonic). When many of the recordings were made, winter was approaching, and continental interference was also a combining factor. There are some other recordings from the very early days of the station, but after listening to them again, many suffer excessive interference. A reasonable selection of recordings however have been unearthed from the archives.

All that said the recordings are perfectly acceptable to someone familiar with good old AM radio as background entertainment. Most of the recordings are typically made on an average weekday, and are a great insight into Sunshine Radio's daily programming from 1980/81/82.

NB: These recordings are not of the same audio quality as the Radio Nova 1984 archives. By 1984 better recording equipment was available, and Nova was running 50kW.

Below are also some files taken from reels made in 1988 mainly. These were recorded in Scotland and can suffer from slight TVI and AM noise. Generally they are of very good listenable quality. The files are unique in the fact that they have never been made public in the past and have only recently been transferred to MP3 files. They are transferred from the master triple play reel, and done so in one large chunk. Therefore the finished file in some cases will be around six and a half hours long.

840430_1800_news_531_sunshine_inc_rte_jamming_mw.mp3

News report recorded in Scotland from April 1984 about Sunshine Radio being jammed by the government station, RTE. The jamming on the MW signal is clear to hear on this recording