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UK Broadcast Transmission |
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THE TRANSMISSION GALLERY
| Photos by Ringway Manchester | Page last updated: 2026-08-23 |
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| This is the remains of Solar 1287AM, a radio station that was based at St Helens college in Merseyside for well over a decade and launched on Monday 27th September 1999. It has now been forgotten. So much so that I had a real hard time finding much in the way of information on it. It’s as if it never existed in the first place. This is a great example of an LPAM or Low Power AM station. It appears that it continued broadcasting until around 2012. Today there’s very little information about Solar 1287AM. |
| What struck me is the lack of fencing around this site. I've been to many and never seen one so exposed, which is probably the reason why the door to the cabinet has been ripped open. It appears to be a typical Radica installation. LPAMs usually use vertically polarised antennas with a loading coil near the top and what’s known as a capacitive 'hat' at the top. |
| At the base of the mast is a small cabinet which has long since been broken into. It houses a Radica AT50 which is not a transmitter but rather an antenna tuner. |
| It's in terrible shape unfortunately, covered in cobwebs, dirt and dust, but it's still there, many years after it was last used. |
| Inside the college I would hazard a well-educated guess there was, and probably still is, a Radica AM50 transmitter which would have delivered 50 watts into the aerial, possibly through a feeder buried underground. |
| Of course, with the inefficiencies involved in this type of aerial setup, that 50 watts in would have generated a whopping 1 watt of effective radiated power. Solar 1287 apparently covered a radius of about 7.2 miles from the college which is not at all bad considering the low output power and inefficient antenna system. |
| It launched on Monday 27th September 1999 when the Radio Authority gave the college a 5-year low power AM licence to broadcast throughout the college grounds. The studio was based in St Helens college's SmithKline Beecham Building whose tower you can see in the left side of this photo. Programming consisted of a mix of news, music and information, 24 hours a day to more than 20,000 people apparently which shows that Solar's signal clearly extended beyond the college's grounds. |
| Music ranged from the 1950s and 60s to the present day and features included an entertainment guide, a food feature by the college chef and a travel special from the manager of the college's travel shop. It was in part funded by the European Social Fund, the European Union's primary financial instrument for investing in people, boosting employment, and promoting social inclusion, along with additional funds allocated by the college itself. It ran local advertising on air to generate additional revenue. |
| Solar 1287 was operated by college staff and students with media backgrounds. The station provided training in radio broadcasting, and many students went on to work on other stations and have long careers in radio. |
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