Lindholme Radio Tower

Situated at the North side of the airfield was the bomb dump. On this site in the 1980's there was a large truncated radio tower which could been seen from miles around both. The tower sported UHF stacked dipoles at each corner of the tower. Lindholme and Northern Radar were disused at that time (though Northern Radar was on a care & maintenance program ). When the tower was removed a mobile phone mast was put in its place.

Similar very distinctive truncated towers all with the same 4 uhf stack antennas could be seen several sites in the UK around that time not necessarily near to active airfields .

Does anyone know what the purpose of these radio towers was please?

Thank you in anticipation.

As Lindholme was a Bloodhound control station I wonder if thats what this tower is from?

Thank you for your reply . I am familiar with the military uhf/vhf ground to air antennas, however these were not this type, hence my curiosity.

I have attached a snapshot of the stacked dipoles which were on each corner of the truncated tower at Lindholme . These are normally associated with ground to mobile or person to person and similar to the ones used by the Police at that time.. We just thought that it was odd to see such a substantial structure with 4 of this type on top and this was repeated at numerous places in the UK at that time.

Cheers,
Graham

Ive never seen an aerial like that so cant help, we could do with some ex ground radio people on the site. One thing that springs to mind is could it be anything to do with 840 Signals Unit? This was formed at Lindholme after the airfield closed and was here until the mid nineties.

They look like standard UHF "PMR" aerials. 455 MHz or thereabout.
They may be phased together to give a particular pattern. ie cardioid.

They are very common, most shopping centres have them for shop watch etc

The radio mast was here (Top lefthand corner)

You have the location of the radio tower correct , thank you. It has now been replaced by a mobile phone mast in almost the same place.

These types of antennas in that era would normally have covered a frequency range of between 400 to 470 MHz. However, UK airfield ground comms (RAF) did not use this spectrum.

I concede that this could have been related to Northern Radar and 840 Signals or in the days when it was a TCC for Bloodhound. However, I did note that these could be seen at other places that were not directly related to Bloodhound .

It could simply be that when the RAF and 840 Signals were leaving, the Home Office commandeered the tower for the Police personal radios, as an infill to cover Hatfield Woodhouse, Lindholme and Finningley. I have before never seen an RAF radio (substantial) mast built on a bomb dump though!

The antenna is indeed UHF and is what we knew as an SA460 or CDF450 'in the trade', dependant on manufacturer. With the elements stacked and phased in that way they are more directional than omni (with 8dB peak gain). They had a reasonable bandwidth and were widely used by the police on their UHF divisional systems up to the mid-2000s. Now used on some Airwave sites, among others.

Does its direction provide a clue as to the intended coverage area?

Martin