BT Radio Scarborough
High above the North Yorkshire town of Scarborough are two huge dishes, pointing over the town and out to sea. They are, as far as I can gather, a troposcatter link serving the North Sea oil platforms with telephony services. There are another pair, almost identical, in Cleveland. The photographs below were taken in September 2002.
 View of the site from a few hundred metres away. Within the compound is a first generation 'BT Cellnet' site, complete with the old JayBeam corner reflector antennas used on the old TACS (analogue) system. The dishes are huge structures, with a squat square section tower supporting them They can be adjusted in azimuth and elevation. Presumably one is for Tx, the other Rx. |
 Three-quarter view of one of the dishes. What's the frequency, Kenneth? I've got no kit that I can easily use to detect emissions from this. You can see too little of the feed to tell you anything, except that the feed is fed(!) with Heliax not waveguide. One of the dishes has an additional feed, slightly offset (Tx output monitor?) |
 Am I being cooked as I take this shot?! Although Troposcatter needs kilowatts (read about the 'North Atlantic Radio System' for example), the gain of these antennas is going to be so high (40dB+) that the actual Tx power required would be reasonable. Say 100 watts. You can make out the additional feed in this photo. Note the colinear antenna mounted on the tower behind the dish. This is almost certainly the BT radio paging service (153 MHz). This tends to confirm that this is the Tx dish- you wouldn't put a POCSAG paging transmitter on the receiver dish structure. Ugh! |