RS 1, the Norderney

Written by Super User. Posted in In English

WAS THE VERY FIRST ONE.

SOLD OUT

The first miniature Radioships.com mad, in the summer of 2008, is bought by fans in the U.S., Great Britain, Belgium, Germany and of course the Netherlands.

I introduced the miniature on the evening of july third when the site went up. RS1 was not the first model I had made of Radio Veronica's vessel; not long after that horrible august 31st 1974 I had made a wooden Norderney. That one was about one foot long.

I had given the Radioships.com project some thought before I really started. What scale should I use? What materials were possible? I ended up with a scale of 1:400. Most fans are male and I thought they would want to place their miniature on a shelve with books or cd's or lp's. And their wives must not get mad while cleaning the house, so the ships shouldn't be too large. Also I thought that making the miniatures bigger would require to fit them with airials and cables and that would make them much more expensive. And of course there also was the matter of P&P...

So 1:400 it was!

The 50h anniversary of Veronica was reason for a special day in the building that once housed the studios. It's a luxury hotel, nowadays.

I made two special versions of my Norderney miniature for the men behind Stichting Norderney: Ad Bouman and Juul Geleick, former technicians of Veronica. Since a few years their Stichting Norderney provides a webstream of historic recordings, organises 'days' and publishes the official account of the history of the legendary radiostation.

Here I am, presenting Ad and Juul with their miniature:

Late 2012 the Norderney returned to the Netherlands, to be equipped as a multi purpose 'stage' in Amsterdam. I had the opportunity to take this special photograph: