The Daventry transmitting station was a major broadcasting facility located on

Borough Hill Borough Hill is a hill to the east of the town of Daventry in the English county of Northamptonshire. It is over above sea level and dominates the surrounding area. History Borough Hill has a history of human habitation dating into prehist ...

on the outskirts of

Daventry Daventry ( , historically ) is a market town and civil parish in the West Northamptonshire unitary authority in Northamptonshire, England, close to the border with Warwickshire. At the 2021 Census Daventry had a population of 28,123, making ...

Northamptonshire Northamptonshire (; abbreviated Northants.) is a county in the East Midlands of England. In 2015, it had a population of 723,000. The county is administered by two unitary authorities: North Northamptonshire and West Northamptonshire. It is ...

. It operated from 1925 until 1992, carrying

long-wave In radio, longwave, long wave or long-wave, and commonly abbreviated LW, refers to parts of the radio spectrum with wavelengths longer than what was originally called the medium-wave broadcasting band. The term is historic, dating from the e ...

medium-wave Medium wave (MW) is the part of the medium frequency (MF) radio band used mainly for AM radio broadcasting. The spectrum provides about 120 channels with more limited sound quality than FM stations on the FM broadcast band. During the daytime ...

, and

short-wave Shortwave radio is radio transmission using shortwave (SW) radio frequencies. There is no official definition of the band, but the range always includes all of the high frequency band (HF), which extends from 3 to 30 MHz (100 to 10 me ...

broadcasts at different times in its history. In its heyday the site had more than 40 masts and towers on an antenna field extending over hundreds of acres. Since 1992, only DAB services have been broadcast from the site using a single mast. All other antennas have been demolished.

Long-wave transmitter

During 1923, the

British Broadcasting Company The British Broadcasting Company Ltd. (BBC) was a short-lived British commercial broadcasting company formed on 18 October 1922 by British and American electrical companies doing business in the United Kingdom. Licensed by the British Genera ...

's chief engineer, Peter Eckersley, deduced that it would be possible to provide a broadcast service to most of the United Kingdom using a single high-power long-wave transmitter located in central England. A 50-acre site on Borough Hill was acquired by the BBC for this purpose. A T-aerial was suspended between two masts, each 500 ft high and spaced by 800 ft. The Daventry transmitter took over from Chelmsford on 27 July 1925, radiating with a power of 25 kW. The initial frequency was 187.5 kHz, but this was changed to 187 kHz in 1927, 193 kHz in 1929, and finally 200 kHz in 1934. The long-wave transmitter was replaced from 7 October 1934 by a higher-powered one at the Droitwich transmitting station in

Worcestershire Worcestershire ( , ; written abbreviation: Worcs) is a county in the West Midlands of England. The area that is now Worcestershire was absorbed into the unified Kingdom of England in 927, at which time it was constituted as a county (see H ...

. For its long-wave transmissions the station used the same 5XX call sign as its experimental predecessor sited at

Chelmsford Chelmsford () is a City status in the United Kingdom, city in the City of Chelmsford district in the county of Essex, England. It is the county town of Essex and one of three cities in the county, along with Southend-on-Sea and Colchester. It ...

, although from 9 March 1930 this was replaced in all on-air and other announcements by the new name bestowed from that date upon the service broadcast principally via long-wave from Daventry: the

BBC National Programme The BBC National Programme was a radio service which was on the air from 9 March 1930 – replacing the earlier BBC's experimental station 5XX – until 1 September 1939 when it was subsumed into the Home Service, two days before the outbrea ...

References

External links

The Transmission Gallery: Daventry
{{coord, 52.2542, -1.1401, type:landmark_region:GB, display=title Buildings and structures in Northamptonshire Daventry Transmitter sites in England