a third outstretched triangular boom. At the end of that boom was a heavy insulator that hung down to provide attachment for a large swinging cable that stretched down to the transmitters below deck. This cable shunt-fed signals to the top of the mast from which radiating antennas were then attached. When engineering on the mast was completed, Pierson doubted it could withstand the Atlantic crossing and North Sea weather. He was advised by Tom Danaher, who had designed the mast for Wonderful Radio London which Bill Carr had used for his antenna work, that the triangular boom of the CEMCO structure would fail due to heavy stress on it by the swinging shunt-fed cable. Just as predicted it came crashing to the deck two hours after the ship left port. Carpenters had been hired at the last minute to construct sleeping arrangements for additional staff made necessary by the change from automation to live presentation. The Collins Radio board had been delivered at the last minute and was being wired at sea by Rick Crandall, one of the first hired by Pierson to program the stations. When the ship arrived in Europe it was incapable of transmitting programs due to delays caused by the unavailability of CEMCO staff. Against advice from attorneys representing the CEMCO turn-key contract, Pierson chanced voiding the CEMCO contract by hiring a British engineer to get the stations on air with an improvised replacement antenna. When the engineer succeeded in getting SRE as the first station on the air, another problem emerged. Carr had suggested three frequencies for the antenna that he believed he would build, but Carr had cautioned that research needed to be carried out on their suitability in Europe. The attorney for the ship venture accused CEMCO of failing to conduct this research when it was discovered that when Swinging Radio England finally got on the air, its 845 kHz signal began clashing with an Italian state-owned radio station in Rome while both 795 kHz and 815 kHz were off-channel and too close to the 809 kHz frequency used by a BBC network in Scotland. When engineers enabled Britain Radio to begin broadcasting at the same time as SRE, it was because they had lowered the power of its transmitter and used a new but inferior frequency (1322 kHz/227 m). In order to resolve complaints from the Italian government about the SRE