Wikipedia

Radio Netherlands reports that BNR, Radio Bulgaria is also about to make cuts. Programmes in 10 Balkan and European languages will be transferred from shortwave to the internet as from 1 February 2012.
A website has been launched by the station’s frequency manager, Ivo Ivanov, where listeners can sign a petition “to save the broadcasts of Radio Bulgaria on shortwave and mediumwave.”

Friday 30 December- (0.6 kW) SWR station at Ulm on 1413 kHz
Saturday 31 December – (700 kW) ERF Mainflingen on 1539 kHz and the WDR mediumwave transmitter at Langenberg on 1593 kHz which has been broadcasting in DRM mode.
8 January SWR “Bodensee Sender” on 666 kHz (150 kW), Muhlacker on 576 kHz (100 kW), Freiburg on 828 kHz (10kW) and RheinSender/Wolfsheim on 1017 kHz (100 kW).

Radio Netherlands Media Network

Radiomap

Westerglen near Falkirk, Scotland is the oldest transmitting station in the United Kingdom; it entered service on June 12, 1922 and predates the BBC. It houses one of Britain’s three long wave transmitters which carry the Radio 4 network on 198 kHz. Normally as the three transmitters are synchronised your radio receives the strongest signal, but one day two years ago the Droitwich main Radio 4 LW transmitter was out of action for maintenance. The signal from Westerglen could be heard, quiet and distorted but unmistakeable, here hundreds of miles away. The buildings at the station date from 1932 and are in the same Art Deco style as those at the other two long wave sites originally built for originally the National Programme.

In 2011 Station controller Gwyneth Williams announced that Radio 4 was likely to continue using the long wave transmitter for the next ten years at least.

Originally posted 2009, updated October 2011

During the war the long wave service was taken off the air to avoid it being used as a guidance beacon, and the transmitter switched to medium wave and the European service. All through the war Droitwich was used to send coded messages to Resistance and other agents in Europe and the Germans even planted false messages on it which were broadcast unwittingly. There were even secret German spying missions to the transmitter during the war. At the start of D Day Droitwich was switched back to long wave – to provide the expeditionary forces programme which mutated after the war into the ‘Light Programme’, and to provide a radio beacon for our own pilots!

Since the reorganisation of the BBC in the late sixties the station has broadcast Radio 4. Since the 1980s it has also been used to transmit control signals to Britain’s electricity consumers who have economy seven electric storage heating.

In 2011 Station controller Gwyneth Williams announced that Radio 4 was likely to continue using the long wave transmitter for the next ten years at least.

See also Westerglen.

Original post 2009. Post updated October 2011.

The Marnach Transmitters. Photo: Jerome Pellot

Radio Luxembourg is probably one of the most famous radio stations in the world. To British listeners, it is the fabulous 208 service in the evenings on 208 metres medium wave, the Infra Draw Method, the Teen and Twenty Disc Club and many other golden memories of the 1950s and 1960s.

Radio Luxembourg started broadcasting to the UK on long wave in the 1930s. The long wave transmitter is still operational and provides the French language service with studios in Paris.

During the war Luxembourg was invaded by Germany and the station fell into German hands. The medium wave transmitter at Marnach was re-engineered to provide a strong beam in the direction of Moscow and the station was used for propaganda purposes.

Later in the war as the Germans were retreating the station engineers hid the key transmitting components in a hedge, preventing the Germans taking the station off the air; because of its wide coverage throughout Europe, the station was handed over to the United Nations who used it to read out lists of displaced persons to enable them to find each other and be found so that they could be repatriated.

The station was then returned to Radio Luxembourg. In the early 1950s the English language service was re-started using the medium wavelength instead of the long wavelength. In 1951 the Marnach transmitter site was again re-engineered to provide a switchable directional beam which was focussed on the Ruhr and Rhine area of Germany during the dayime then switched to focus on the UK at night. The German service was launched during daylight hours and the English service began around 7 pm every evening. Also in 1951 a 150 kilowatt transmitter was installed at Marnach for the transmissions.

By the late 1950s the transmitter had been increased in power output to 600 kilowatts. There had been programme changes forced on Radio Luxembourg by the development from 1955 of Commercial Television in the UK; quiz shows, adventure shows and comedy shows transferred to commercial TV. Radio Luxembourg’s British operation nearly went bust but record companies bought up the air time in 15 and 30 minute chunks and saved the station. Listeners may remember the period 1956 to 1965 as being one long advertisement in which only half the record was played.

Decent reception across the UK in the evenings required a decent ground wave and that required larger coverage and more power. By the 1960s the power had increased yet again to 1,200 kilowatts, at the time the most powerful transmitter in private ownership in the whole world. There was also some re-engineering of the Marnach transmitter masts increasing them from three to five masts but that did not make any significant improvements to the coverage in the UK and the two additional masts were taken down again and the original pattern using three masts re-instated.

I remember one evening programme presenter Barry Alldis, now deceased, rummaged about in the cellars and discovered the original pre-war station gong, and gave it a fresh airing. It sounded somewhat knackered.

When commercial radio was introduced in the UK from 1973 the English service of Radio Luxembourg started to lose listeners and business but soldiered on until the station was cancelled some years later.

The medium wave installation at Marnach is to be discontinued and demolished within the next three years. It currently broadcasts the German service in the daytime and is used by other broadcasters such as Radio China for international broadcasts at other times. The facility is used at times to radiate DRM digital radio as well as analogue radio, but the parent company has received permission from the Luxembourg authorities to decommission the site. It will be replaced by an information technology and telecommunications data centre.

Press release from the Luxembourg Government dated 3 October 2011

Rampisham Down broadcasting station, Dorset, England. Geograph

Old radios often featured a dial which showed you where the stations were on the band. Sometimes they were labelled by service name, like BBC Welsh Reg (region, not a bloke) and sometimes by city like Wien but often by the site of the transmitter, and one of the most often marked ones was Beromunster.

History Switzerland

Beromunster was one of the big hitters on the medium wave. It is Switzerland’s main AM analogue transmission and was first set up in 1931, which makes it a relative baby because the main decade in which countries set up their stations was the 20s; it was set up to counter the propaganda being beamed at Switzerland, which is 70% German, by the Nazi regime. The main mast was completed in 1937 and is still in use, although its feeder cable systems have been damaged by lightning in recent years and not repaired. The was also a second mast.

After the war Germany had lost all its AM services and Beromunster became a main source of news and information to the defeated population.

The ageing installation was turned off in 2008 when Switzerland went fully digital.

On 19 August 2011 the second mast was blown up.

Radio Netherlands reports that the east radio tower was not considered deserving of official monument protection and was therefore blown up. The tower stretched 126 metres into the sky. The associated clearance works will be completed by the end of the year.

In December 2010, the local Beromünster population voted in a referendum to reclassify the former national transmission site as a special area for art and culture. The former operations building has been transformed under the direction of the artist Wetz into a Centre for Art and Culture in the Beromünster National Transmission Centre (KKLB – Kunst und Kultur im Landessender Beromünster). The Centre will be progressively expanded and developed.”

The transmitting station at Orfordness, Suffolk, UK, has a long and chequered history.

The site was developed in the second world war for experiments firstly in the development of radar and then of Britain’s first atomic weapons.

The Cobra Mist building now used as transmitter building at Orfordness. Photo: Radiovision

During the 1960s and 1970s, at the height of the Cold War, it was the location of a top secret joint American and British experiment to develop an over the horizon radar system. A massive building was constructed on the site, and a fan shaped array of transmitter and receiving antenna was erected. You can see ghosts of the fan system in Jonathan Marks’ excellent video.

The over the horizon radar, Cobra Mist, never worked properly and was suddenly abandoned in 1973.

The BBC and Foreign Office were looking for alternative sites for the World Service Transmitters at Crowborough, Sussex (the famous Aspidistra). The site at Orfordness was suddenly available and facilities were moved from Crowborough to Orfordness.

A 50 kW medium-wave broadcast transmitter which is beleived to be the Continental set that had been used to transmit propaganda to Rhodesia and then to jam a pirate station in international waters was the first to be moved from Crowborough to Orfordness, for test purposes.

Then the two 250 kilowatt Foreign Office Doherty transmitters were moved to Orfordness.

Two sets of aerials, a directional area for 648 kHz for daytime reception in western Europe and night reception using sky wave over all Europe, and a pair of three tower arrays for 1251 kHz use for Eastern Europe daytime reception.

A 600 kilowatt transmitter from Telefunken was the next transmitter to be installed, followed by a Nautel transmitter for DRM transmissions.

The World Service ceased to use the facilities in March 2011 and the site at Orfordness, with the former Cobra Mist building (built on stilts because of the flood risk) holding all the transmitters, was seen to have no commercial future.

Then in July 2011 there was a serious fire incident at two Dutch main transmitters which have caused havoc to transmission facilities in The Netherlands. On 4 August 2011, after tests and equipment maintenance was carried out, NOS Radio 1 began being transmitted on 648 kHz. After a couple of months repairs to the Dutch transmission facilities and the enquiry into the cause of the fires had progressed to the point where the transmitters could be returned to normal duties, and the arrangement with Orfordness was discontinued.

The Netherlands authorities were lucky that the facilities were available and the incident serves as a reminder to broadcasters that decommissioning old AM installations can lead to a lack of flexibility when dealing with the unexpected.

Jonathan Marks has made an excellent video of the Orfordness station.

Tribute to BBC 648 kHz Orfordness – The Enthusiast’s Version from Jonathan Marks on Vimeo.