Here are some recent photos of the Bacup television transmitter which I passed by recently on a lengthy and painfully hilly bike ride. Bacup is a dependent of Winter Hill and sits on high land to the east of this old mill town which is close to the Lancashire/Yorkshire border. Bacup sits at the top of the Irwell valley and much of the town is shadowed from both the Winter Hill and Haslingden transmitters by the high, forbidding moors of the South Pennines. The high position of the relay allows direct reception of Winter Hill via the two trough aerials. The relays west facing cardioid antenna, serves the town of Bacup, the surrounding districts of Weir and Britannia, plus a strip of the Rossendale valley about as far as Waterfoot where one or more of the five other nearby relays needed to supplement Winter Hill in this difficult reception area take over.
Bacup was originally an IBA landlord site which entered service with ITV on 9-Mar-1973 to serve 8,000 people. BBC 1 & 2 were added in May 1973 with Channel 4 from March 1985. The UHF cylinder contains a west facing cardioid. DSO was on 4-Nov and 2-Dec-2009. |
