ww2 u-boat listening post for sale

Not really airfield related but it is ww2, a u-boat listening station on the coast of Pembroke has just gone on the market for aprox 40'000. this could catch on with farmers selling off their ww2 structures like pill boxes or bomb shelters, i know i would be interested. God knows what you would do with such a structure, perhaps restore and invite the public it??
anyway here it is

news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/wales/south_west/8286778.stm

ww2nut;31833 wrote:

Not really airfield related but it is ww2, a u-boat listening station on the coast of Pembroke has just gone on the market for aprox 40'000. this could catch on with farmers selling off their ww2 structures like pill boxes or bomb shelters, i know i would be interested. God knows what you would do with such a structure, perhaps restore and invite the public it??
anyway here it is

news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/wales/south_west/8286778.stm

OK. You got me. How does one listen for U-Boats, Kapitan?

When I was at Brawdy in the mid-70s I remember taking photos on Strumble - I am sure I photographed this and other buildings. Wasn't there a VOR or HF station or something located on Strumble to assist the trans-Atlantic airliners? I know we had Concorde and the like going over the top at high level.

OK. I understand now I looked at the link. It was a radio transmission monitoring station.

I had visions of a pongo with an earhorn listening for the sound of diesel engines.

Presumably ENIGMA was used to decode any transmissions which meant this site recorded them and sent them off to....(Bletchely Park?)

EDIT: Should have read closer. It was one of at least two other stations so they used DF on the transmission in order to triangulate the bearings and find an apporoximate location of the transmitting U-Boat.

PtE - You were not far off with your first comments. At Brawdy we had the 'US Naval Facility' - USNAVFAC - close by and it did listen to submarines. It was a shore station for a system called SOSUS and there was a cable out to an underwater sonar aerial array on the seabed in St Bride's Bay. This listened for the sounds of Sov subs and helped determine a sound signature for each vessel. It closed some years ago but I don't know if they removed the aerial array. I think there was a similar set-up at/near St Mawgan.

WJT;31928 wrote:

PtE - You were not far off with your first comments. At Brawdy we had the 'US Naval Facility' - USNAVFAC - close by and it did listen to submarines. It was a shore station for a system called SOSUS and there was a cable out to an underwater sonar aerial array on the seabed in St Bride's Bay. This listened for the sounds of Sov subs and helped determine a sound signature for each vessel. It closed some years ago but I don't know if they removed the aerial array. I think there was a similar set-up at/near St Mawgan.

Just to clarify, that is a far later and high tech version, using underwater hydrophones, satellite links, and fibre optic cables, it could moniter subs worldwide. It did move to St Mawgan from Brawdy in the early 1990s, sadly it has just closed down, and the USN have gone, apart from a handful of people dismantling equipment.

PETERTHEEATER;31925 wrote:

OK. You got me. How does one listen for U-Boats, Kapitan?

That was funny as Hell! never thought of it like that, very good
cheers

WJT;31926 wrote:

When I was at Brawdy in the mid-70s I remember taking photos on Strumble - I am sure I photographed this and other buildings. Wasn't there a VOR or HF station or something located on Strumble to assist the trans-Atlantic airliners? I know we had Concorde and the like going over the top at high level.

Strumble VOR still in use. Our Dublin flight joins the airway there.
www.trevord.com/navaids/stu.htm

As for U boat listening posts.......never heard of one.........I'll get my coat, again !

The aerial array didn't look anything like that at the time of my visit to Strumble. In fact, I made two visits: one to view the VOR (and wasn't there a Chain Home Low station there as well?); the second visit was to watch from a distance as a Royal Navy salvage vessle tried to raise one of our Hunter T7s which had an engine failure and ditched close to Strumble Head. The divers tied their location buoy to a bit of the wing which happened to snap off during s storm and float off with the buoy still attached. A couple of days later when the storm has died down they went down again but found only the bit of wing. The Hunter was not relocated and was left; it is probably still in the area today.

By chance I stumbled across some information on RAF Y-Stations WW2.

These monitored Luftwaffe air frequencies on VHF, actual voice transmissions and the listeners were German fluent WAAFs.

Perhaps the submarine listening stations also monitored voice transmissions in the same way although I think that U-Boats were obliged to communicate in code by HF.