THE LOOKOUT | The pirate TV banker who cut the RTP signal to announce the birth of his daughter

Hélder Lucas has a collection of 250 music radios

Hélder Lucas, from Benfica do Ribatejo, who worked for almost three decades as a banker in Almeirim, is one of those responsible for television piracy in the 1980s in Almeirim and in areas around the municipality. He broadcast events he filmed and also the Spanish television signal, as well as Disney cartoons. Until the day he started tickling those in Lisbon who were in charge of broadcasting.

On May 26, 1984, the Montejunto broadcaster was broadcasting the two RTP channels – private channels had not yet been dreamed of – when the broadcast was interrupted for Hélder Lucas to announce the birth of his daughter. “Sorry to interrupt the broadcast, but I want to show my daughter Dalida who was born today” he told viewers while showing a video of the newborn girl who years later would work at a television production company. It was open to piracy in an era when the Internet still seemed like science fiction.
Hélder Lucas was a banker and spent his free time studying pirate schemes, antennas, transmissions which he combined with his passion for radio and later also for the production of institutional videos and weddings and parties, even filming and editing several videos for SIC, on 90s, when the first private television was taking its first steps. Born in Benfica do Ribatejo, municipality of Almeirim, Hélder Hipólito Lucas, 72 years old, used in the 1980s to carry out television piracy schemes by the founder of Rádio Pernes, José Guilherme Paradiz, who he calls the first television pirate. With these drawings he made a transmitter to transmit images he captured of events in the region.
The banker was also involved with Eduardo Reguinga, from Fazendas de Almeirim, in the retransmission of the Spanish TVE, in the Almeirim area and surrounding areas, which people called the Spanish channel. It also rebroadcasts Disney cartoons. Nobody paid and those who lived in the area were privileged to have more than the two Portuguese channels. The internship he did at a bank in Lisbon allowed him to gain training in a television studio that belonged to the bank’s headquarters. In 2020, he stopped working as a camera operator.
When he wasn’t at Totta e Açores, now Santader, in the center of Almeirim, where he worked for 29 years, especially on weekends, he filmed events with the expertise he had already acquired with a German-made film camera that he bought before start working at the banking institution. His father’s death encouraged him to record family moments. Among the images he keeps in his memory and in his archive is the Santarém International Folklore Festival in 1980, as well as other festivals that he filmed in 1983 in the north of England and in 1984 in France. These events were some of the many that he retransmitted beyond the Spanish television signal until 1993, when the communications authority went to Almeirim to put an end to the adventure that was already gaining a lot of attention in Lisbon.

Amateur radio and the collection of 250 radios

Hélder Lucas has been collecting “musician” radios since he was 22 years old and has 250 devices that he acquired over half a century in antique shops or antique fairs, some of which were in the exhibition “The importance of radios and radio on the 25th of April 1974” in Santarém. Some are rare. At the age of 12 he built a galena radio, a simple receiver. In addition to his passion for telephony, he is also a fan of amateur radio (citizen’s band) and in 2019 he took the National Communications Authority (ANACOM) exam to obtain amateur radio category two with the code “CS7AWT”.
Learning about amateur radio began in the 70s when he began broadcasting on the citizen band, using the nickname “Al Capone”. The first contact he made abroad was to a person in the former Yugoslavia. Having completed an Electronics course at the Álvaro Torrão Correspondence Teaching Center – Rádio Escola, Hélder is saddened to see that radio amateurs who had a natural taste for the activity, which includes technical and scientific knowledge, are disappearing. And he highlights that if the Internet fails, radio amateurs will continue to ensure communications.