Jiří Tieftrunk

"Radio Free Europe had shortwave transmitters in Portugal. The ionospheric bounce was getting the signal to Central Europe. The Eastern Bloc countries had no territory in Western Europe to build jammers and get the ionospheric bounce to send the jamming signal into central Europe. They had to build the jammers on their territory, let's say in Ukraine, and the ionospheric bounce was getting the jamming signal to us. The problem is, the ionosphere changes with the Sun's illumination. As the Earth rotates, the ionosphere over eastern Europe loses its ability to reflect the jammer signal from Ukraine before the ionosphere over Western Europe does, which is supposed to reflect the signal from Portugal to our territory. So, especially in the wintertime, the ionosphere over Eastern Europe was breaking up and losing its ability to reflect while the ionosphere over Western Europe still had that ability, and the jamming signal from the East had a much lower chance of covering up the useful RFE signal. That was an ideal situation for us listeners. I also said it at the StB interview: 'Physics is physics. The ionosphere is the ionosphere. You can't do anything about it.'"

"Also, because I had some knowledge of communication technology from school, I knew that a radio needed an antenna, especially for the short waves. So I took a long wire, terminated it with a banana pin and inserted it into the antenna socket in the radio." - "And what happened?" - "The shortwave radio sort of jolted and suddenly there were a lot of stations in different languages. I didn't know basic English at the time, nothing. But I recall catching a station one morning that said, 'Aichi radio Europa libera!´ It gave me the impression that they were Italians. I didn't know it was Romanian. It was actually Radio Free Europe in Romanian."