Ben writes: It was getting dark when I arrived at the Neath Abbey TX, but now armed with a decent SLR digital camera I continued undaunted...
This TX is located behind a school on an area of high ground to the North of Neath. The access road runs through the school playing fields, but there is also a footpath that starts to the south of the school and passes within metres of the structure.
It has two sets of TX aerials, two VP logs - one above the other - pointing Eastwards into the Neath Abbey area, and two pairs of horizontally polarised crossed log periodics pointing West and North-West, serving the area under the shadow of it's own hill.
The single RX log periodic is vertically polarised and pointing South-West at the parent station of Kilvey Hill, itself a relay of Wenvoe.
Neath Abbey was originally a BBC landlord site which entered service early in 1993. The original structure was a 12m lattice pole. This was replaced with the current tower in July 2002. The station was built using both horizontal and vertical polarisation to provide coverage to the required areas and consequently has two site number. 106.92 HP. 106.93 VP. All antennas are fed from a single set of transmitters, the power being split equally between the two polarisations. The nominal ERPs for the analogue service were 8W (VP) and 6.3W (HP). At DSO the ERPs were increased to a nominal 10 watts in each plane. |
