I never thought I’d see a video of the inside of this place, although the nearby Caversham Monitoring station is well known worldwide this (and may still use the remaining antennas on this site, albeit controlled automatically) the BBC never officially said a great deal about it nor exactly what idid within the UK. The boffins who used to work there were pensioned off around the 1990s or transferred to other areas of the BBC. I expect the sound is missing from some parts of this video (which probably wasn’t supposed to be made in the first place or kept as a restricted item) for a good reason (some of the stations being monitored were “foreign” but a lot nearer to us than the Soviet Union and in supposedly “friendly” countries).

The bulk of them just took early retirement as they were in the later part of their middle age anyway, but many are still active radio amateurs (you can now get the same equipment they used today as a single USB device)

Operational duties included the measurement of frequency, field strength and occupancy of broadcast bands (LF – UHF); monitoring and reporting of propagation conditions (ionospheric/tropospheric), backscatter measurements at HF (a monthly test done using a frequency-shift-keyed service radiated by BBC Daventry, typically at 26.040 MHz); provision of relay services for 3rd. party broadcasters (Voice of America / Radio Canada International); reception & forwarding of foreign broadcast and radio-teletype services to Caversham Park; identification and direction-finding of illegal broadcast stations (in conjunction with HMG’s receiving facility at Baldock, Hertfordshire: 52° 0’13.33″N, 0° 7’48.41″W)

they didn’t need to look far for one of them that was being operated a couple of years later :laugh_at: (and to be fair also managed to get Britain to finally license community radio stations, years after most other European countries).

The Baldock monitoring facility is still operated by Ofcom today (its reports can be found online at the ITU website).