I have a confession to make.

In truth, I preferred the cuddly Phil Riley. Phil, chief executive of Chrysalis Radio, which owns the successful Heart and Galaxy stations, had been tucking into too many pies of late (I know the problem) and decided to go on a diet. When I saw him at the JP Morgan radio conference in London I had something of a shock. He had lost 45lbs in weight and his chin had reappeared after a couple of years of being lost in a marshmallow wilderness.

As we crossed swords over my belief that the radio currency, RAJAR, was at best misleading and that electronic research should be brought in to protect advertisers, shareholders and radio stations, it slowly began to dawn on me where a little of Phil's weight had gone. From between his ears.

His arguments were so thin, so self-serving that nobody with an ounce of intelligence could seriously put them forward. But put them forward he did, in a well-practised dialogue - so well practised, I suspect his bathroom mirror had been taking a bit of a pasting.

His first point was that I had no right to go off and carry out my own research, as it threatened the unanimity of the currency. As he well knows, The Wireless Group did try to persuade the industry to fast-track this new system of electronic measurement, both through RAJAR and through the commercial trade body, the CRCA. The response was to indulge us with platitudes, while making it clear that the industry was in no great rush to see a new methodology this side of any time soon.

So we had no choice but to conduct the research ourselves. As a result, the genie is out of the bottle - and no amount of huffing and puffing and stuffing by Phil and his apparatchiks will put it back in the bottle again. I am sure Phil's reaction is very much akin to the reaction of typewriter manufacturers when they got wind of the arrival of the PC.

It is certainly not the first time that diaries and meters have been used effectively to measure the same industry in the same territory. It has gone on for years and continues to go on in the US TV market. Every year, the Federal Communications Commission orders a number of markets to convert from diaries to more accurate meters. And every year, the TV networks fight tooth and nail to keep that number down to a minimum - because under diaries, they do very well thank you; and under meters, they lose share to cable.

For those unaware of the results, the research - using an electronic wristwatch which records what you actually listen to, compared to ticking a diary taken by RAJAR - in the Maidenhead and Slough areas showed that national stations, and especially speech stations, were much stronger than were being reported. On the downside, listeners tuned in for a lot shorter period.

Unbelievably, Phil even suggested that the success of speech stations could be down to ambient conversation being mistaken by the watch to be a speech station. For the sound pattern of people talking in earshot of the watch-wearer to replicate precisely the output of a radio station at that exact moment is quite obviously ludicrous.

Phil also looked down his new slimline nose at our sample of 670 watches in the Star FM area. If he felt that was inadequate, then surely he - and more importantly, Star FM - would want their money back from RAJAR, which reports on the smaller sample of 602 diaries in that area.

The clear sound of the bottom of the barrel being scraped came with the suggestion that the watches would not be worn by children. First of all, watches are being tested with children in France. But more importantly, imagine this question put to the average nine-year-old. Which task would you rather do: wear this watch for a week and don't bother doing anything else OR fill out this diary of quarter-hour time periods, accurately recording which radio stations you tuned into over the week?

Even Phil would think it unlikely for the nine-year-old to answer: "Please let me fill in that complicated-looking diary. After all, I really don't feel I have enough homework to do as it is."

These preposterous criticisms are more easily explained when I can reveal that electronic measurement also showed that a number of commercial music FMs were doing poorly, with Jazz, Capital Gold and XFM at the head of the queue. And yet, by and large, the research is great news for radio, with all reach rising from 93 per cent to 98 per cent and 19 of the 23 stations researched showing increased reach.

The sound of axes grinding could be heard in this argument. I have repeated till I'm blue in the face that our RAJAR numbers could not possibly be right. Our live and exclusive coverage of the England Test series against South Africa produced inexplicably low RAJAR results. I got NOP to conduct research to find out why - and discovered that more people thought they heard the cricket on the BBC than on talkSPORT.

So eventually, I took my company's money (and we don't have biscuit tins of the stuff hanging around the place) and using the electronic watch did our own research - fully backed by Carat Insight and I remain hopeful that Zenith will also give us their endorsement.

When we started the research, we had no idea - repeat no idea - how it would work out. How could I know? We did great, but along with everybody else our hours collapsed but our market share went up by 22.2 per cent. Phil said that it would be a "bloody disaster" if this currency was adopted. Who for?

Not for a number of stations who do very nicely thank you, but there will be losers, most notably XFM and Jazz. I don't blame Phil - it's not only him but other radio CEOs - for wanting the status quo. RAJAR is a comfortable currency and they do nicely out of it. After all, you seldom see radio executives with that worried look of other media businesses where the currency is more transparent - television and print.

So my advice, Phil, is to get back on the pies so that you can once again understand the technology issues facing our industry.

Kelvin MacKenzie is chairman & chief executive of The Wireless Group