Aki Anastasiou has had a love of radio since he was just 10 years old. It’s a passion, he says, that is matched only by his love of the latest gizmos and gadgets.

Talk Radio 702’s resident traffic reporter and technology geek has been helping Gauteng drivers avoid rush-hour snarl-ups for years.

But it’s not the traffic Aki wants to talk about when I meet him for lunch across the road from 702’s studios in central Sandton. As he sits down, he places a panoply of smartphones on the table, excitedly pointing to BlackBerry’s new Torch device, which he’s reviewing, and asking me for my thoughts on it.

“I’ve always loved technology and gadgets,” he offers after we’ve compared notes on the latest phones. “I was one of the first people in the country to get onto the Internet and have owned a ZX Spectrum and Commodore 64.”

But it isn’t only computers that give Aki a rush. By his early teens — in the mid-1980s — he’d already developed what became a life-long love affair with radio. His dad owned a coffee shop in Vanderbijl Square (now Ghandi Square) in central Johannesburg, just around the corner from 702’s studios at the time. Radio jocks like John Berks and Stan Katz — now legends of the business — had the young Aki utterly enthralled.

“I used to phone in to John Berks and enter competitions, where I’d have to make animal mating noises, and so on.”

He’d go to the studios on his way to school to collect his prizes, where he befriended many of the presenters.

At weekends, he’d drop off menus from his dad’s takeaway. “It was a five-minute walk back to my dad’s shop, but I’d arrive back three hours later,” he laughs.

Eventually he was given a job splicing eight-track tapes and loading them into cartridges.

But Aki’s passion for radio soon affected his schoolwork. Instead of studying for his final exams, he’d spend all his spare time at 702.

After one sleepless night in the studios, he took his mom’s car to write his final English exam. On his way to the exam hall, he fell asleep behind the wheel, totalling the car. Needless to say, Aki failed matric hopelessly.

At the behest of his father, the bosses at 702 called him in and made him a promise — and gave an ultimatum. He would write his matric again — through Damelin — and if he failed he would no longer be welcome at the radio station.

That scared the bejesus out of the young Aki. He passed matric the second time around and then joined the fledgling radio station on a full-time basis.

He was like a kid in a candy store, working with his radio heroes like Katz, Berks and Gary Edwards.

But his early radio career was soon rudely interrupted when, at the age of 19, he received his army call-up papers. But even while serving in Potschefstroom and, later, Pretoria (after he’d completed basic training), he’d drive back to Johannesburg every weekend to feed his passion for radio.

He remembers one weekend where he was manning 702’s mobile studio — known as “The Boomer” — at a Checkers store in Voortrekkerhoogte, near the military barracks in Pretoria.

“All the colonels and commandants shopped there and poked their heads into the caravan. One of the major-generals poked his head in, saw me there, pointed at me, and said, “Jou fokken Griek, wat doen jy hier?’”

In 1988, after two long years of military service, he joined 702’s promotions department, later moving into programming and sound engineering, before eventually joining the traffic desk. Aki spent 15 years reporting from the skies in 702’s helicopter before escalating maintenance costs forced its grounding around the turn of the century.

Technology — cellphones, webcams, Twitter — have replaced the need for the “eye in the sky”. But Aki tells me over our main course that he misses the time he spent in the chopper.

“I was privileged to experience the 1994 election, the pre-election protests, and the 1995 Rugby World Cup from the air. I’ll never, ever forget it.”

In fact, 702, which had changed its format from music to talk — rival music station Radio 5 had been granted an FM licence — played a pivotal role in SA’s transition to democracy.

But it’s an incident in the bad old days that Aki recalls most fondly. He tells me about PW Botha’s “Rubicon” speech, in which the former state president famously failed to make meaningful political reforms.

“Stan Katz was on air, I was the sound engineer, and Allan Liebowitz was reading the 5pm news. Allan read the news about PW’s speech and Stan had the Talking Heads’ song ‘Road to Nowhere’ lined up.

“After Allan read the item, Stan played the song — during the news bulletin! Allan started laughing. When he continued reading the news, Stan played the song again. Allan cracked up laughing.

“But it was a slap in the face of the government,” Aki remembers. “It was like laughing in the face of the president. We received threats from the government. The radio station could have lost its licence.”

Today, the political environment is far less volatile. And Aki, still manning the traffic desk, now spends much more of his time covering the technology beat, and hosts his own weekly technology show, Technobyte.

“I’ve lived through some interesting times at 702, through the good and the bad,” he says as we ask for the check. “I’ve been very privileged and have got to meet some incredibly interesting people. And some idiots as well.” — Duncan McLeod, TechCentral