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UK Broadcast Transmission |
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THE TRANSMISSION GALLERY
Photos by Bill Wright
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St David’s, Pembrokeshire, is Britain’s smallest city, sitting near the tip of a peninsula to the north of St Bride’s Bay. This is a beautiful part of Wales, full of surprises. St David’s is about the size of a small village, and gains its city status from the eponymous cathedral, which sits like a jewel in a small valley below the city.
Much of the area has line-of-site to the main TV station, Presely, but a few houses around the cathedral are screened from it. Hence the St David’s relay site exists. The total catchment area seems remarkably small though, and during a day’s exploration I only spotted about ten aerials aligned on the relay.
The relay is on the cathedral itself. I spent some time chatting to various cathedral officers and it seems that the RBL aerial is in the old belfry in the main tower, just behind one of slatted openings originally intended to transmit the sound of the bells. There are no longer any bells in this belfry. Cromwell’s marauding thugs smashed a hole in the belfry wall and rolled them out, to smash on the ground below. Subsequently a new bell tower was constructed half way up the hill to the city, and now forms the gateway to the cathedral grounds.
The transmission aerial is inside the central flagpole on the main tower. The erp is 2W, which is more than adequate since the farthest receiving aerial can’t be more than 100m away. When I tried to receive the signals from a line-of-site location 1½ miles away CCI was the limiting factor.
Since the cathedral is in a small and confined area of low ground the view towards it from many parts of the city and its environs is of just the flagpole and the surrounding castellated parapet.
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