Report on club talk “British Shortwave Utility Stations"

Report by Philip G4GHZ on club talk “British Shortwave Utility Stations - A look at what shortwave utility transmitting and receiving stations are still operational in the UK"

On Sunday 20 October 2024, Don G4LOO delivered a fascinating talk to the RSH on UK HF Utility Stations, meaning non-broadcast stations. His talk covered a wide range of HF utility station sites within the UK including those used for aeronautical and maritime communications, international links and the most recent development of High Frequency Trading links, the latter used for low latency international commodity exchange and stock exchange trading.

Don explained that the term High Frequency Trading in itself has nothing to do with the HF spectrum. The term instead means high frequency of trades. However, in order to achieve that one of the techniques now being used is HF radio as that has lower transmission delay than international fibre-optic cable links

Don illustrated his talk with extensive use of Google Earth and Google Street View which he cleverly used to interpret the type and purposes of HF antennas at the various UK sites, some of which were determined by interpreting shadows and antenna fixings in the aerial photographs.

You may find the following links of interest:

Wefax stations

https://www.weather.gov/media/marine/rfax.pdf

Maritime RTTY stations https://www.dwd.de/EN/specialusers/shipping/broadcast_en/broadcast_rtty_1_092023.pdf

There is also:

https://www.kilkeel.org.uk/maritime%20radio.html