Here Today, Gone Tomorrow

Around 0520 UTC tomorrow morning, Saturday 21st August, one of the three AM transmission masts at Lopik will be blown-up and the 165 meter mast will topple onto the polder. It is a controlled explosion as part of a plan to reduce the interference problems in the neighbourhood of the transmitter site. The northerly mast is coming down, the southerly one will remain, but only radiate at a power of 100 kW instead of 240 kW which it did until recently. The third mast is used as a standby only.

I plan to join the press corp filming the explosion since it marks the end of a piece of Dutch broadcast history. During the war years the mast put out the Reichsender Bremen, i.e. it was part of the Nazi propaganda network for Europe, in this case serving occupied Holland. After the war, it was used for transmissions of Hilversum 1 & 2, networks of the public broadcasting system in the Netherlands.