Holme Moss Transmitter

I decided to take the short trip up to Holme Moss Transmitting Station the other day after realising it isn't actually as far away as I thought. The site is home to a radio transmitting station in West Yorkshire. The mast provides VHF coverage of both FM and DAB to a wide area around the mast including Derbyshire, Greater Manchester and West Yorkshire.

Holme Moss Transmitting Station.

Holme Moss was the BBC's third public television transmitter, launched on 12 October 1951. The mast survived until the end of the Band I TV broadcasts in 1985, with a replacement mast being constructed, adjacent, in 1984. The site is now owned and operated by Arqiva. Emley Moor and Moorside Edge can be seen from the car park to the side of the mast.

Some sections of the 228m mast.

The base of the station is 1719 ft (524 m) above sea level and the mast another 750 ft (228 m) on top of that. This gives a maximum aerial height of 2467 ft (752 m) which is one of the highest in the UK. The mast weighs 140 tons and is held up by 5 sets of stay levels. At 250 kW ERP on the national channels, it is one of the most powerful VHF sites in the countr which explains why it wiped out my 2m reception while I was there.

The station at the foot of the mast.

Being the main radio site in the North West and Yorkshire region, there are also a number of smaller relay transmitters used to fill in areas which receive poor coverage from Holme Moss. This is particularly evident around the Pennines where there are frequent hills meaning reception from Holme Moss is poor (especially indoors).

Emley Moor Transmitter Site viewed from Holme Moss.

I took a few pictures of the site and then parked up in the car park to put a few calls out. Unfortunately as I said, 2m was wiped out with QRM but I managed a quick radio check with 2E0FAM on 144.525 but the noise was too much to continue. I put GB3WF into my Baofeng and put some calls out and M0RNS came back to me but I received a text off a friend saying I was blasting 5/9 through GB3MR on the same frequency despite being miles away and on 5w so I called it a day and admired the view.

As I sat on the edge with a view over towards Emley Moor and Huddersfield, some guys were waiting for thermals to do some parasailing which was quite entertaining. They all had handheld radios that look like Baofeng UV-3R's but I monitored the usual parasailing frequencies on 143mhz and heard nothing, the same for 446mhz too.

Parasailing from Holme Moss.

After a couple of hours sat in the sun admiring the view I headed home and stopped to get a shot of the transmitter site of the GB3WP 70cm repeater on Harrop Edge near Hyde.

GB3WP in there somewhere!

Thanks for reading!

73's, Lewis M3HHY.

Manchester, UK.