Well,

Ronan wanted 558Khz from the outset. So many times he told me ' Hey, baby, 50K on 558 '. This was his dream outcome and those around him said that the masive mast was needed to perfectly suit that frequency. But as Tom Anderson sabotaged Ronan's wish for a Gold format, Peter C also decided to use 319 ( it is a good frequency that we have used before ! ).
So, much time passed and only the capitulation of Laser made 558 available.
I am not a marine architect but just work on common sense. Ronan was driven by ' why not ' but my mantra is ' what if '. To be fair, Ronan may not have thought that the UK would extend territorial limits and nobody expected the 87 hurricane.
As I am sure everyone knows, ships ' pitch ' fore and aft and ' roll ' side to side. The rolling motion is more extreme and Revenge is only 38ft 6ins wide. With the weight of the tower and the pendulum effect, the forces acting on it were extreme and it was entirely reliant on the side stays. Now I don't know ( maybe others can advise ) if the stays were ever tensioned and made to match the tension on each opposite stay. I suspect not. I speculate ( only that ) that the hurricane fractured some insulators on the port side and de-tensioned the stays which is why the mast fell over the stbd side. Anyway it was in the sea. Ronan said that an identical mast would be made and flown out by helicopter, which just showed that he had nil knowledge of engineering.
But the ' what if ' factor came and bit him as he knew that if the ship went inshore anywhere, it would be impounded by creditors due to the way the project was funded in the early 80's. So Revenge was trapped at sea.
Then came the conundrum of who would pay for any new mast of any design. If money was salted away in Lichtenstein this could not be admitted. So I guess that Lotto 6/49 were persuaded to fund the miracle Valcom glass fibre tower that was 100% unsuitable and failed beyond repair the first time it was erected. Had it been structurally sound, it was doomed anyway being rated for only 5KW. Nobody held their hands up to say they thought it would handle 50KW.
So it came down to the Aussie who liked to be called Mick Dundee to find secondhand towers in a metal scrap yard at £250 a section. Nobody congratulated him.
When the station was operating again it was soon raided, as discussed in a previous posting.
A long saga of things getting buggered up time and time again.
I am still cursed by 500+ tons of cement in the hull that was poured to counter balance the sodding mast. Now she sits far too deep at the stern that will hamper dry docking, while I hope I don't need a sharp intake of breath when a surveyor orders me to break up and remove the cement to check the condition of the tank tops.

Ah, the romance of radio from the ocean !

PM.