tal half-hour programme that the Marconi company was li- censed to broadcast each week from a studio in a former army hut in Writtle near Chelmsford. The programme was launched 'on air' on St Valentine's Day, 1922. The Captain had a gift for improvising on microphone. He became Britain's first radio star with an instantly recognisable call sign 'Two-Emma-Toc, Writtle testing' http://www.marconicalling.com/museum/html/people/people-i=17.htr Making Telecoms Work: From Technical Innovation to Commercial Success, First Edition. Geoff Varrall. © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Published 2012 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Making Telecoms Work Figure 15.1 2LO transmitter. 2 Reproduced with permission of the Science Museum. From 2015 on- wards the 2LO transmitter will be on display in the new Making of Modern Communications Gallery at the Science Museum in Kensington. phone. 3 The Daventry site also saw the birth of radar, after transmitters there were used to test if aircraft could be spotted by bouncing waves from them. The transmitters were retired in March 1992 after 67 years of service. Most of the land where the antennas had stood was sold off, reverting to farmland or being used to build houses. The few remaining buildings were initially used for storage, before being sold to Crown Castle in 1997 when the BBC transmitter sites were privatised. These long-wave and short-wave systems were an example of high-power wireless, beau- tifully engineered with frequency synthesisers built into seven-foot tall 19-inch racks. To achieve an 85% coverage was remarkable given that Northants had (and still has) poor ground conductivity, the combination of sandstone and a low water table), Orfordness, set in salt water was in later years to prove more effective. However, the site is also home to a DAB broadcast 2 The author is unsure of the provenance of the 2LO description. Possibly the transmitter had two local oscillators or perhaps the call sign was meant to be Hello Hello- answers on a postcard please. 3 Thanks to Richard Lambley o