The town of High Wycombe is located in a valley at the southern end of the Chiltern Hills in Buckinghamshire. High Wycombe is a tv relay of Crystal Palace and a relay of Wrotham for network radio.
There are two stacked slant polarisation Band II antennas clustered on all four faces of the mast just underneath the UHF cylinder. RX feeds are provided by a pair of UHF log periodics pointing at Crystal Palace, with a stacked pair of Band II log periodics just above pointing approximately in the same direction at Wrotham, both to the south east.
The feed for the recently introduced (2004) BBC 3CR is more of a mystery as there are no antennas pointing in any northerly direction. [Ed] BBC 3CR is line fed.
A pair of band II log periodics can clearly be seen pointing southwest towards Henley and Reading, but their purpose is also a mystery as the only transmitters in that direction are a network FM relay at Hemdean, and Radio Berkshire's masts at Henley and Fountain House. Perhaps someone in the know can shed some light on this.
[Ed]. After some research and discussion on the Tx List, these southwest facing logs are pointing at Hannington and were intended to receive the then future Radio Berkshire. They were installed at about the same time as the Wrotham logs in 1987, but before Radio Berkshire went on air. However, the allocated Tx frequency of 104.9 MHz was then re-allocated to Melody Radio at Croydon. By 2004, the BBC had completed its national FM radio expansion and a frequency of 98.0 MHz was available for local radio at High Wycombe. By then Radio Bedfordshire had become Three Counties Radio, which included Buckinghamshire, so 3CR was the BBC local radio service transmitted. High Wycombe is in Buckinghamshire after all. |
