Exploring the former RAF Aird Uig site
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 28 ส.ค. 2024
- Whilst on holiday on the Isle of Lewis we made the difficult journey up to Gallan head which is where the former RAF Aird Uig site is located. It was a former ROTOR 3 Early warning radar station that could detect low flying aircraft in the North Atlantic. The site is now a nature reserve and the local village have plans to make it a Whale and Dolphin observation point and possibly a dark sky observatory.
History of the site
www.subbrit.or...
Gallan Head Community Trust
www.gallanhead....
back in the 80s,my late partner and i had to travel from Cheshire with a generator,while the one there was being serviced,we did this with a 40ft trailer,scariest journey of my life but also the most stunning..Fabulous video thank you,,
I worked here along with many of my trade colleagues in the RAF. I was there for a few months around 1984 or 85. The last building that was boarded up was the building that housed a Marconi 100kW low frequency radio transmitter used for submarine communications.
The front doors were boarded up. Inside if you turned left there were a couple of bedrooms for the Cpl shift NCO and for the Junior Technician / SAC maintainer. We used to do 2 1/2 day shifts and in the 3 rd day we would be relived by the next shift around lunchtime. We then traveled back to RAF Stornoway. RAF Stornoway was the big disused building on the corner of the road heading up to the airport near Stornoway.
The transmitter was housed at the opposite end of the building to where you stood by the boarded up entrance it had a wooden floor and under a trap door innthe floor was a set of steps going down to a pit below about 30 foot. I’m not 100% sure what it was used for but may have been something to do with the site when it was a radar station in the 50s and 60s when there was a type 80 radar there. I think that other big building the ones with the plastic sheeting on the doors was the building that housed the modulator and the power supplies for the radar which would have been built on a steel structure above the building. The type 80 was a massive radar, rumour was that it blew over into the sea. Which was common with the big radars in these remote locations..
The antenna for the transmitter was a 600 foot mast and had a 1 man lift inside the structure to take a rigger to the top. The mast was triangular in shape and sat on a ceramic bowl like insulator as the who mast was live. Coming down in a parasol fashion where a number of radials with insulating blocks which were part of the aerial and also acted as stays for the mast. Those big anchor blocks where the stay anchor points for the mast.
The antenna feed from the transmitter was tuned by an antenna tuning unit which was a small building and inside was like you have never seen. The building I think has been demolished now as it was near the base of the antenna where you identified the 3 sided triangular shape. That was only the foundation for the antenna and the base of the antenna was about 5 foot in the air and was wider.
The transmitter tuning building was lined with copper sheet and there were all sorts of copper devices to arrest lightening strikes, form the capacitance and inductive requirements.
Thats really interesting - thank you :) The Gallan Head trust who run the place now, said they were looking into possibly using the submarine comms as a means to listen for whale song but I'm not sure how feasible that is. Also there seems to be very few photos of the site unless its zoomed in from miles away - I guess the MOD would take a very dim view back then of people taking photos of the site.
@@alanprioroutdoors hmm if the locals were interested in listening to whale song I think they may have their wires crossed a little. This site was to provide one way comms to submarines. The admiralty would schedule broadcasts and the subs would be listening and react to anything that was addressed to them.
I think what the locals might be getting confused with is the use of a string of underwater hydrophones allegedly installed that spanned between Canada and “somewhere” in the U.K. well that somewhere wasn’t here I can’t reveal where due to OSA. But it wasn’t within a few hundred miles at least from here.
It’s not that technically difficult to set up hydrophones to listen to whale and other sealife
After a bit of research the plinth you can see at 3:47 outside of the building on the hill is actually the support plinth for the type 80 rotating radar that straddled the building. It turns out it wasn't a substation and actually the modulator for the radar