 |
UK Broadcast Transmission |
         |
|
    |
|
|
|
|
|||||||||
|
|||||||||||
THE TRANSMISSION GALLERY
BROUGHER MOUNTAIN B
| Photos by John Gallagher | Page last updated: 2023-12-21 |
| Brougher Mountain was built by the BBC to provide 405-line BBC 1 and BBC FM radio to Fermanagh and West Tyrone. Both TV and radio entered service on 24-Feb-1964. The original structure was a 46m square sided tower with a 7.6m cantilever topmast supporting the band II FM radio antenna. Further details of the 1964 installation are available from the BBC RD report link at the foot of this page. 405-line BBC 1 closed in January 1985. A new 55m tower was constructed for the addition of UHF TV, which is the main tower seen in these pictures. UHF TV transmissions on three channels entered service on 6-Oct-1978. Brougher Mountain was the last UHF main station to enter service. Channel 4 was added in December 1983. Originally the programme source for Brougher Mountain was via a somewhat contrived route. Because the UHF channel assignments at Brougher Mountain were all upper adjacent to those at Divis, rebroadcast link (RBL) from Divis couldn't be used as the primary programme feed. It was available as an RBS, presumably with a reduction in picture quality. This may also explain the metal shields directly above the horizontal receive troughs. Strabane was originally planned to be a relay of Brougher Mountain with site number 151.01 and transmitting on channels 57/63/60/53 at 0.8 kW VP. However, when it finally opened in 1977 it was as a relay of Limavady on channels 39/45/49/42 at 2 kW VP. This then allowed Brougher Mountain to use Strabane as its RBL source when it opened in October 1978, the full path therefore being Divis>Limavady>Strabane>Brougher Mountain. However, from 1991 the BBC1 & 2 programme feeds were via an intermediate link station at Gortin Forest. Interim DTT entered service on 20-July-2000 with all six multiplexes transmitted from the main UHF cylinder. BBC FM radio was re-engineered for mixed polarisation in February 1985. ILR (Downtown Radio on 96.6 MHz) was added on 31-Oct-1987. Radio's 1 & 4 added on 6-July-1993. |
| 9-Feb-1971. Five men working for the BBC were killed by an IRA landmine as they drove up to Brougher Mountain. RUC officers at the scene. On the evening of 6th January 1971, a bomb destroyed one corner of the transmitter building at Brougher Mountain and took the station off air. A second device at the base of the tower failed to explode and was removed by the army bomb squad. BBC staff from London were sent to assist with the repairs and parts were flown in from around the UK. The transmitters were back on air by the morning of the 9th January. Much of the credit for getting the station back on the air so quickly belonged to Bill Thomas. On the morning of 9 February 1971 Bill drove to Brougher with his young colleague Malcolm Henson, who had secured his "dream job" as a BBC engineer in 1969 and had been in Northern Ireland less than two weeks. At a farm yard at the base of the mountain they collected three workmen, John Eakins, Harry Edgar and George Beck, to drive the last section of the rough track in a BBC Land Rover. Before they reached the summit, they drove over a trip wire which detonated a land mine hidden in a pile of rocks at the side of the track. All five men died instantly. It was thought the IRA booby trap had been intended for an army patrol which made frequent visits to the area. |
BBC RD report: Transmitting aerial for Enniskillen VHF TV and radio station (1964)
| |
Back to TX Gallery index | TX main index
|
