Backbone (British radio communications network)

The British Telecom microwave network was a network of point-to-point microwave radio links in the United Kingdom, operated at first by the General Post Office, and subsequently by its successor BT plc. From the late 1950s to the 1980s it provided a large part of BT's trunk communications capacity, and carried telephone, television and radar signals and digital data, both civil and military. Its use of line-of-sight microwave transmission was particularly important during the Cold War for its resilience against nuclear attack. It was rendered obsolete, at least for normal civilian purposes, by the installation of a national optical fibre communication network with considerably higher reliability and vastly greater capacity.

BT remains one of the largest owners of transmission and microwave towers in the UK. The most famous of these is the BT Tower in London, which was the tallest building in the UK from its construction in the 1960s until the early 1980s, and a major node in the BT microwave network.

The earliest operational GPO microwave links were provided for 405-line BBC television.

In 1939 the Post Office placed a contract with EMI for an experiment in the relaying of television signals to Birmingham. In this case, the signals from Alexandra Palace were to be received at Dunstable and transmitted over a radio link to Sharmans Hill, Charwelton, some 40 miles distant towards Birmingham; thus carrying the signal two-thirds of the way from London to Birmingham. World War II intervened and this early experiment had to be abandoned.

The GPO built in an experimental chain of radio relay stations for television, which used the relatively low VHF frequency of 195 MHz and frequency modulation with a deviation of 6 MHz per volt. Each relay station consisted essentially of back-to-back rhombic antennas on opposite sides of a hilltop, connected via an amplifier. The frequency was not changed. The system was first tested on March 24, 1949. The stations were located at:

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