A pix from the article Views from on top a telecommunication tower in Muar... The story is in Text for Views from on top a telecommunication tower in Muar...
Time for another installment of "Remembering the "A" Level college days". I'm sure many of the roomates from 51C still remember our radio station broadcasted from the room. In fact I believe most of Batch 7 of PPP/ITM "A" Level college would remember it as attested by a comment in the article
Remembering the "A" Level college days. Damansara Utama where the cool days started! saying:
"Jeez... I remember climbing on top of the roof of our blocks just to get clearer reception of your illegal radio broadcast! heheheheh...... err....". The comment came from a girl whose room is at least 200 metres away from 51C. That should give some idea how popular was the radio station then.
OK. I can't remember exactly when the station was started... but I think it should be within the first six months of our tenure at the college in Damansara Utama. What I do remember was the engineering boys in 51C (I was a math student remember while the rest of the room was shared with prospective law students) especially Mangor and Tonga were experimenting with some home-made circuit using a circuit-board and some components when they realised that they could use it to transmit radio signals which could be picked up by any normal radio. So it's only natural we should find a way to make the signal stronger... just strong enough to transmit and cover the whole blocks of dorms.
At first it's just us playing around with a home-made microphone attached to the apparatus while some of us at the other end of the room tried to pick up the signal using small radios. From the normal banter as fillers for the transmission, we started making up stories and advertisements just for laughs. Soon we told students from other rooms about our little experiment and they too tried to pick up the signal from their radios. Within a short space of time word started to pick up and soon enough even the girls at the foremost end of the dormitory blocks were clamoring for regular broadcasts.
So it started being a regular daily event... if I remember correctly, come night time many would tune-up their radio to hear our broadcast. Mango being the main "engineer" behind the project would maintain the apparatus up to need while Tonga played the cool regular deejay. While the rest of us would interject once in a while and sometimes play deejay too, kudos goes to Tonga for being able to maintain a smooth program which consist of friendly talks and banters, made-up advertisements for fun and the most popular, songs on request.
Between the 15 to 20 of us 51C guys, there's enough cassettes of popular song collections to keep the game going for a long time. It came to a stage where many boys and girls would send request of songs with accompanying messages on papers for us to air. While the session of playing songs would feed enough fire for the college gossip machine - as in who is interested in whom, who is coupled with who and such - for me the real fun was in conjuring up made-up story-lines to fill in the slots. And among these were the made-up advertisements which often had the college talking about it for days and so on.
Too bad I couldn't remember many. Remember, that's why I'm writing pieces under "Remembering the 'A' Level college days", because I'm trying to remember what I've forgotten from those days. But I do remember what was supposed to be an interview between the US sprinter Carl Lewis and his Canadian arch-rival Ben Johnson. Played by two of us from 51C (I can't remember who) it started with some arguments as who was supposed to be the fastest man on earth before the two 'sprinted' down our dorm to settle the score once and for all.
It was a huge pleasure to write and conjure up little scenes to fill up the slot. I remember doing a little parody on an advertisement for what was supposed to be a brand of washing detergent. Remember, on television they often have the part where a brand X is first used for washing to dirt to little avail... and then the promoted brand is featured to clear all unwanted stains in no time. So we had our own 'advertisement'... as usual brand X managed to clear just a bit of the dirt. Then came our brand of 'choice' and voila, every dirt was cleared in a jiffy... in fact everything was cleared including the clothing itself. For with the clothing totally eliminated, so goes the stains! Get it?
Anyway with that I close this installment of "Remembering the "A" Level college days". Another comment in
Remembering the "A" Level college days. Damansara Utama where the cool days started! said that while the radio station started illegally only to die out naturally after it was legalised following a visit to our room from a college lecturer, what I do remember was the whole activity was actually stopped when the college guards came rushing into 51C... looking for me after I ran through a girls' dorm and that would be part of the next installment. Cheers! :]
These are pictures I took at a recent reunion cum family day of my old school mates from the Johor Science School in Keluang, better known as Sekolah Menengah Sains Johor or SMSJ. We first entered the school in 1982 but are generally known as the batch SPM 1987 students because that was the year we took the all-important SPM examinations for secondary school students which would determined our course later in life, at least as to what universities would we qualify for. Although I was kicked out of the school in 1986 for discplinary problems, I still took the exam in another school in 1987. In 1987, I made a brief visit to SMSJ and that was the last time I saw almost all of my schoolmates ( a few would later study at the same college, a few I met later while studying in England).