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THE TRANSMISSION GALLERY
MACCLESFIELD FOREST (LINK SITE)
| Photos by Dave Burrows and Rob Shufflebotham | Page last updated: 2012-02-12 |
| This is Macclesfield Forest PCM site. This was one of the sites which took the main PCM digital feed of the national radio services between Sutton Coldield and Holme Moss. The SHF dishes are aligned with the Tickhill PCM site to the south and Holme Moss to the north east. As can be seen it's well weathered. Not sure how much longer these will be around as the links are now redundant as mentioned on the Tickhill page |
| Receive from Tickhill was on 7.540 GHz, vertical. Transmit was on 7.701 GHz horizontal. |
| Rob: The NGR was out but some detective work using Google Maps found the correct one. All the kit is still there untouched, but the fence is falling down a little. Not sure what the dipole is for. (Editor's note - we've now been told, scroll down further on this page). The weather a bit rough when I was up there. The access track is just that, a track so it must have been foot access only for the engineers, even if Google Maps lists it as a green lane! There are two Andrews dishes at the site, along with a rather short Orange mobile phone mast (planning issues?) and an Airwave site which was built in a clearing about 50m along the track, for no apparent reason. Airwave don't seem to like sitesharing, its not the first site I've seen this done at. Airwave antennas are different from normal, if anyone is interested! |
| Feb 2021 - we've had this submission in from Peter Thomas on the subject of the mystery dipole seen above: This site was one of several - including outstations at Calver Peak and Belmont, also in the Holme Moss TMT (Transmitter Maintenance Team) area - that were equipped with a VHF radio telephone link (141.8575MHz). In addition to providing voice communications between base/outstation/TMT vehicles also supported fault reporting equipment (T.I.P. - Telephone Indicating Panel) to be interrogated remotely by the Holme Moss TMT staff. The allocation of 141.8575MHz was common to *all* TMTs across the UK and during conditions of settled high atmospheric pressure ( => tropospheric enhancement), it was not unusual for the MIC (Monitoring Information Centre) operator at Holme Moss to hear her/his geographically distant counterparts at Sutton Coldfield, Crystal Palace etc. - ! By way of working around the problem, a simple 1.5kHz tone-controlled mute lifting facility was designed and implemented throughout the Holme Moss patch by the STE at Holme Moss. During the mid-late 1980s, the BBC Transmitter Department's nationwide R/T system was upgraded by addition of selective calling facilities (CCIR coding standard). This 'Selcall' equipment was designed and produced 'in-house' by staff at Transmitter Support Services, including Tim Cook and the team. Each base was allocated a notional 'base' code (e.g. Holme Moss TMT base = 400), with the respective team mobiles/outstations being allocated as 401 ('Mobile 1'), 402 ('Mobile 2'), etc. The Holme Moss patch installation work (including that at the Macclesfield Forest SHF) was done by Guy Stanbury, one of the Operations Engineering team at Holme Moss. |
Macclesfield Forest (Link site) index
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