Ing. Karel Kužel

“The radio I bought was a great purchase because I could use it to listen to both the Voice of America and Free Europe, which was jammed. You could actually tune it out sometimes. I took an active interest in jamming technologies and countermeasures. I knew that it could be jammed both by direct wave and by reflection. The reflected waves required the jammer to be the same distance from the transmitter that it was supposed to jam. Free Europe broadcast from Portugal, which was more than a thousand kilometres away from Czechoslovakia, so the reflected-wave jammers had to be positioned all the way in the Urals in Russia. So the reflected waves would clash right above our country. But that wouldn’t suffice for perfect jamming, so every larger city had its own jammers, which used direct waves. I liked hiking, so I’d set out for the weekend and get to places that were outside of the jamming area, and then in the evening I’d listen to Free Europe or something from my radio while tucked up in my sleeping bag, and that was very refreshing.”

“It was called the TITC, and it was a newly established organisation. Those were good times because it was something new, a new organisation, with new habits. It was performance-oriented, which was very unusual and refreshing during Bolshevism. There wasn’t much bureaucracy there, rather a spirit of enthusiasm. So those were good years there.”