Before the collapse of communism in 1990, about the only things travelling abroad from highly isolated Albania were propaganda messages.
They reached far and wide thanks to Chinese-built transmitting stations, which made Radio Tirana on short wave one of the clearest signals in the region despite coming from a country which was one of the poorest and smallest in Europe.
These days, ironically, the state that banned religion during its years of hardline communism relies on rebroadcasting Christian stations to keep the Radio Tirana service going.
In its heyday, the station tried hard to convince the world to follow Albania's example -- in 22 languages from English to Indonesian and with more than 80 hours of programming a day.
"Luckily the world did not hear," said New Zealander June Taylor, one of the many foreigners who worked at Radio Tirana as announcers and translators.
Radio Tirana painted a rosy picture of how everybody was happy, healthy and working so hard for the good of the country that Albania had become self-sufficient, Taylor said.
It portrayed big evil capitalist countries where most people were unemployed and could not afford to send children to school while youngsters lay in the streets drunk on Coca Cola and Pepsi, two beverages Albanians only tasted after 1990.
"The Socialist economy does not know anarchy or crises in production. It does not throw workers onto the street because of bankruptcy or enterprises closing down," proclaims one transcript of a story broadcast in August 1979.
What the stories did not mention was that Albania was a poor and repressive state which denied its citizens basic freedoms and shot dead many who tried to travel abroad.
WESTERN FANS
But to many people who knew Albania only from what they heard on Radio Tirana, the country was an island of hope. Taylor's father, a dentist from Auckland, was one of them.
He volunteered to stay for two years in Albania, where his medical skills and help in translating the books of communist dictator Enver Hoxha were most welcome. They ended up staying longer after Taylor fell in love and married a local man.
As a native English speaker, she was hired in 1974 to read and translate news and stayed at the radio station for 19 years.
"News arrived at the very last minute. The quality of translation left much to be desired and they were packed with boring slogans," Taylor said.
Phrases like "the army and the people are one and indivisible", or how the "working collective of the Enver Hoxha tractor combine fulfilled the plan three months ahead of schedule" were among those she read out for years.
Still, the station received thousands of letters from all over the world. A Swede learnt Albanian just by listening to the radio. Others wrote to commend speech programmes and folk music.
An English farmer in 1979, after hearing about an earthquake that hit northern Albania, wrote a letter saying he wanted to come and help with his tractor and his family, Taylor said.
"Many Marxists from Western European countries came to Albania convinced it was a state run by its people. But it was enough to walk out of the radio to realise that it was not true," Taylor said.
DISTORTED NEWS
As part of Radio Tirana's efforts to tell the world what was right and wrong, Janka Selimi, a Bulgarian national married to an Albanian, had the unenviable duty of criticising her home country for being servile to the Soviet Union.
"We said that they were turning bourgeois for owning a car and their apartments. Any time I read that news, I felt like I was betraying my country," said Selimi, now 58.
Not that she or any other journalist at Radio Tirana had much of a choice. Their job was just to read and translate reports that came from the official news agency ATA or straight from the Central Committee of the Communist party.
"During the war in Vietnam, one of us added up all the numbers of the killed American soldiers we had been reading every day and it turned out we had wiped out the whole U.S. army at least twice," Taylor said.
But no one dared to tell their bosses.
MARX MAKES WAY FOR JESUS
In the mid 1960s, Albania broke with the Soviet Union and allied itself with China. The Chinese then built radio stations in Albania in order to make their voice heard in Moscow and Washington, Irfan Mandia, the radio's technical director said.
Two transmitting stations -- one for AM and for short wave -- were built in isolated locations, heavily guarded by the army and equipped with anti-aircraft defence. The powerful signal of Radio Tirana reached out to the world, challenging even the BBC.
Engineers now admit it was not just because of the strength of their signal that Radio Tirana was heard so clearly.
"Before 1990, we broadcast on the band of frequencies reserved only for radio amateurs, where there was not much interference," Mandia revealed.
Although the technology of Radio Tirana looks very out of date in the digital era, the equipment is still up and running -- to the astonishment even of the Chinese engineers who built it -- thanks to dedicated local maintenance staff.
After communism collapsed and "it became clear we were no shining lantern for the world", the foreign radio service was cut to seven languages and just three hours a day, Mandia said.
"Now we had free space, the equipment and no programme. So we offered our services to international radios," Mandia said.
Religious broadcaster Trans World Radio became the main client of Radio Tirana's foreign service and its saviour from bankruptcy.
Mandia said the services Radio Tirana now offers to third parties, which also include Voice of America of the United States and Germany's Deutsche Welle, have made it profitable.
But he knows that soon it may be harder to find spare parts for his Chinese transmitting station than new clients to serve.