BBC Far Eastern Relay Station

BBC Far Eastern Relay Station
	BBC Far Eastern Relay Station (Singapore)
Location	Lim Chu Kang, Singapore
Coordinates	1°25′13″N 103°43′40″E / 1.4201524°N 103.7278319°E
Built	1977

Between 1946 and 2023, the BBC Far Eastern Relay Station broadcast BBC World Service radio programmes to large parts of Asia on shortwave. Transmitting from a number of different sites, notably Tebrau in Malaysia (1953-1979) and then Kranji in Singapore (1979-2023), the station was one of a number of BBC "relay" stations around the world - so named because they "relayed" programmes primarily generated in London - which also included Cyprus, Hong Kong and Oman. The station played a key role in bringing the BBC's impartial news to millions of Asian listeners in the post-war period, when the Cold War was at its height.

Each site was built on a vast scale, comprising studios, a transmitter hall and giant feeder cables leading out to a large "aerial field" where masts carried a complex array of antennas for transmitting multiple radio programmes simultaneously to different destinations on different bands and wavelengths. At least in the case of the Tebrau site, there was also extensive on-site housing for around a hundred multi-ethnic staff and their families, as well as sporting and social facilities.

The BBC Far Eastern Relay Station closed in July 2023, after 75 years of broadcasting, as the site was reportedly needed for development by the Singapore Government.^[1]

History

Origins

In 1937 the BBC began planning a shortwave transmitting station to relay BBC World Service signals from the United Kingdom to the Far East.^[2] As World War II began, a Marconi 100 kW HF sender (as the BBC termed transmitting equipment) was sent by sea to Singapore, but was lost when the vessel carrying it sank due to enemy action. A second attempt was thwarted by the advance of Japanese forces through Malaya.

So it was not until after the end of hostilities, in 1946, that the BBC began broadcasting from four 10 kW Marconi type SWB11 transmitters at Jurong in Singapore. This equipment, which had previously been used in Sri Lanka, now transmitted live programmes in English, Burmese, Indonesian and Thai from the purpose-built studios at Singapore's Cathay Building as The British Far Eastern Broadcasting Service. These studios moved to Caldecott Hill in 1949, a site which remained a centre for broadcasting in Singapore until 2015.^[3]

However, local generation of live BBC programmes ceased in 1951, with the exception of some English language announcements.^[2] Programmes were now relayed from London using signals picked up by two Rhombic antennas and a Beverage antenna feeding AR-88 diversity and Mullard ISB type GRF552 receivers. This equipment was initially housed in an empty bungalow at the water filtering site at Woodleigh, now part of Toa Payoh.

The Tebrau site (1953-1979)

By the early 1950s, the station had moved to a major new site at Tebrau, near Johor Bahru on the southern tip of what what was then peninsular Malaya, with construction beginning in 1953.

By the mid-1970s the Malaysian Government, sensitive to the suggestion that it was still enabling the broadcast from its territory of "propaganda" by the former colonial power, made clear it would decline to renew the BBC's license to broadcast. British diplomats at the time also reported that the Malaysian Ministry of Communications in Kuala Lumpur was interested in the site for its own purposes.[1]

A number of other sites were considered by the BBC - including Brunei and the Australian territory of Christmas Island in the Indian Ocean - but no decision had been made when Singaporean Premier Lee Kuan Yew, who happened to be visiting London, was told about the problem during a casual meeting with a BBC executive while attending an interview at Bush House, the headquarters of the World Service. He immediately offered Singapore as a possible new site.[2] After this breakthrough, further negotiations led to the offer of a 30-acre site on Turut Track near Kranji, on the northern edge of Singapore, only 30km away across the Straits of Johor.

The Malaysian Government agreed to annual extensions of the license until the new site could be constructed and the station transferred. The final broadcast from BBC Tebrau took place on 18 March 1979, and the site was subsequently sold by private treaty - partly in order to avoid drawing more negative attention to the BBC's long-standing presence on Malaysian soil, according to British diplomats.[3]

The Kranji site (1979-2023)

Around the turn of the new millennium, the transmitting station at Kranji began relaying programming from other broadcasters, in addition to the BBC, including NHK World-Japan, Radio Canada International, Radio Australia, and Deutsche Welle.^[2] Operation of the station passed from the BBC to a succession of private companies including Merlin, VT Communications, Babcock and Encompass.

Closure

Following a decision by the Singapore Government to reassign and redevelop the area around the site, closure of the BBC Far Eastern Relay Station and demolition of all its structures was announced in July 2023.^[4]

Operation

Tebrau

The site, on the southern tip of peninsular Malaysia just outside the city of Johor Bahru, covered 180 hectares of what was at the time virgin jungle, with construction beginning in 1953. There were originally six transmitters - two 100kW Marconis and four 7.5 kW Marconis transferred from Jurong in Singapore - and some 20 antenna masts, with power being generated by three enormous diesel electricity generators.[4] In the early 1960s, the low-powered 7.5kw units were removed and replaced with six more transmitters, making a total of six at 100 kW and four at 250 kW.

At its height, BBC Tebrau was on air with a total power output of 1.6 megawatts, broadcasting from 10 transmitters and a huge array of more than 20 curtain antennas. The feeder lines - which fed the signal from the transmitter hall to the antennas - ran for more than a quarter of a mile across green fields and down into a valley, the longest known feeder lines in the history of shortwave broadcasting.[5]

Kranji

Construction began on an antenna field initially comprising 17 towers supporting 14 Marconi 4-Band Kraus, 4 BBC dual-band and one 4 MHz array.^[2] While the swampy ground required substantial earthworks, its proximity to salt water offered high electrical conductivity advantageous to effective radiation from the antennas. A transmitter hall similar to the design of Woofferton transmitting station was completed and 4 x 250 kW Marconi B6122 and 4 x 100 kW Marconi B6123 senders were relocated from Tebrau. This equipment began service on 1 February 1978 and installation was completed in March 1979.

By this time, the receiving station feeding the senders at Kranji had moved twice, first to Yew Tee Army Camp, where Plessey PRD200, Plessey PRD200, Racal RA133A Diversity and bandscanner receivers operated using an existing military antenna. That temporary arrangement was replaced on 1 December 1977 by a new receiving station at Sungei Punggol on the banks of the river. The receiving station building, a Marconi omni-directional antenna and one antenna tower were on dry land with the remaining 7 towers supporting 4 Rhombic and 2 sloping V aerials erected over the river estuary and only accessible by boat. 6 Plessey PRD200, 10 Channel diversity receivers, a Plessey PR2250 search receiver and a Plessey PR2250 receiver modified for bandscanning were now used to capture the signal to be relayed, all under remote control from the transmitting site at Kranji. The link between receivers and transmitters was carried by two paths to offer redundancy: a cabled PCM system, and a radio link on the hill at Bukit Timah. With the arrival of a satellite feed of the programmes from London, the Punggol receiving station was demoted to backup status until its closure in 1990.

During this period an extra tower and an array covering 15-21 MHz were added at Kranji, with automatic equipment to turn the senders on and off, to assign and slew the beam radiated from the antennas, to select programmes, and to control tape machines. In 1987, the installation of an additional Marconi BD272 250 kW transmitter brought from Daventry transmitting station increased the number of senders to 9, followed by another similar unit from Skelton transmitting station two years later. At its peak of operation in the 1980s, the station employed 55 staff and broadcast over 100 hours of programming daily, running up a monthly power bill exceeding SGD400,000.