Lefax Radio Log

You might recall Paul did a guest post on the Lefax Radio Log back in August 2012, well recently he offered to donate it to me for safe keeping and also because of my radio engineering background, which was very generous and kind of Paul.

We agreed the best way to get it to me and it arrived when Alison was at the London Book Fair a couple of weeks ago.

It arrived safely, but seeing it close up the leather organiser is rather delicate. But Paul had managed to remove the pages from the rings successfully without doing any further damage to the organiser.

I've been doing some research and I'm making contact with The Leather Conservation Centre in England, so hopefully I will have some better answers on how to preserve this leather artefact for many years to come! The ring mechanism is a little bit rusty, but they still work. I will be hoping to attend to the rust soon as well.

I have also scanned in all of the pages at a reasonably high resolution and I will be making these scans available for research purposes as well.

So although I read Paul's description a couple of years ago there was one small detail I sort of over looked. This 1920's Lefax organiser has a very different set of rings in it compared to the type we see these days.

The difference is how they work. No tabs on these, but the two sets of three operate independently of each other, watch:

Both sets closed

Open the bottom set

Open the top set

Close the bottom set

Because there are no tabs you have to use the rings themselves to open them. And as you know we strongly advise against doing this with any ring bound organiser these days. Simply because pulling apart one set of rings can twist the internals of the mechanism and you end up with the well known gaps in the rings issue.

However, if the rings are independent of each other, like on this one the problem is greatly reduced. I am not sure when the ring mechanism makers around the world stopped making rings like this, but there are definitely some positives about this type of design!

Having scanned in the pages I was able to read the pages much easier on my big iMac screen as my eyesight isn't so good with small print and trying to read things close up, old age sadly. But on the screen I am able to read the pages with ease.

Some of the following images you will have seen as photos in Paul's original post.

A huge range of inserts, some I can only guess what they are about.

This is just the first page of the radio log, I'm sure you don't want to see all 32 pages of it. But in case you do, hop over to my blog and you can see it in full.

As a comparison, come forward 60 years to the late 1980's and these are the sheets from the Filofax International Data Set that included the BBC World Service frequencies and broken down in to regions served. 

And the list of programmes for the BBC World Service from 1987.

Admiralty Handbook of Wireless Telegraphy 1938 edition which cost £0, 6s, 9d in 1940.. I have the receipt! an old Morse key, and the pages from the Lefax Radio Log! I like to keep up to date with technology!

When I got my first Filofax back in 1986 I was working for the UK radio regulator in the section that assigned frequencies for sound broadcasting transmitters in UK. I mainly dealt with the ones on VHF FM, but my colleague that I sat next to dealt with the MF (Medium Frequency - 526.5 kHz to 1606.5 kHz) assignments. So it was interesting to see the equivalent lists for the USA back in the 1920's.

Back in the 1980's BBC and IBA (Independent Broadcasting Authority as was) used to produce their own Engineering Information Guides. These were small pocket books that listed all the radio and TV transmitters, the size of the books where about Filofax personal size, which for me at the time was very convenient.

I will enjoy doing more research in to how spectrum management was carried out in the 1920's compared today. I've already spotted something in the details that might be worth exploring in more detail, but I will tell you about that at another time!

Again thank you for Paul's generous offer to donate this radio log to me.