Transmitters Droitwich

Stuart Wadsley wrote to Radio Rewind:

"I worked for Auntie in the mid eighties and one of my early morning pleasures while working at the Droitwich Tx Station was to fire up the some of the transmitters in the early morning.

We did over night maintenance but from about 0300 to 0545 I seem to remember we took mini shifts getting a snooze and I used to plug up the feed from Radio 1 into the DF to wake me up. Now at about 0550 ish there was a bed of Radio 1 jingles and beds that some poor Tech Assistant no doubt put together to wake up the transmitters.

Here are some pictures of the old Radio 1,2 & 4 transmitters and innards that were used prior to the big re-furb in the mid eighties, also some pictures of the emergency generators."

		The Radio 2 transmitter.
		Control desk where the trainees had to log all shipping forecasts I m sure this was a ruse to stop us listening to Radio 1!
Antenna for Radio 4 - this was also used for Radio 2; the T is the R4 antenna.	From memory this was the R1 antenna.
Close up of one of the valves. These were water cooled.	Close up of one of the valve showing how air was also used to cool the valves.	Two engineers maintaining the area around one of the valves in the R4 sender.
Me on top of one of the standby generators.	a closer look at the generator.	The Radio 4 transmitter at Droitwich
HT rectifier, again for T7 (Radio 4).	Some of the cooling for the senders, no idea which sender though but it shows how much heat had to be disposed of.	'Glued together' pic of the R4 sender. It s on the first floor, the ground floor was filled with transformers and cooling equipment

Last Band II TV transmitter serving Sutton Coldfield. The power was turned down gradually to encourage people to use UHF; there were still a few black and white viewers around!!  1984.