May is the traditional satellite dish breeding season in Berkshire. As seen on the photo, the young ones are out of their underground dens, cautiously investigate the surrounding environment
It is! This is what is visible from the public footpath but there's whole lot more shown on the Chilterns OS map
@kravietz that might be an older map, the HF monitoring antennas got removed in the 2000s - there's mostly only China, Romania and a few religious stations on HF these days, and they all stream online too (I know a few retired engineers from the place I got to first meet during my pirate radio days π )
Nature is beautiful π€©
The reason far wrapping the bales I was told was that the grass is fermenting in anaerobic atmosphere, which prevents fungi and rot from developing inside the bales. In Poland these are called "kiszonka" which means "sour grass". The alternative is to dry it out, thus making hay, but it's more difficult as a single rain can ruin the process. On the other hand, cows can digest this "sour grass" while horses for example cannot and they need actual hay.
@Prof_Trixie @kravietz When it's pandemic and you are supposed to work from home but you have a job at the NSA.
@kravietz @encarsia @Prof_Trixie
this is exactly what "BBC" Crowsley park is used for, and has been since end of WW II !
To be honest, that's what it looks like! But hey, that's what radio spectrum is about, someone transmits, someone listens β I have no complaints.
@vfrmedia @kravietz @Prof_Trixie That's bringing up some "Devil's Hill" (Teufelsberg) vibes (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teufelsberg), the biggest ears the Americans and Brits had towards East during the Cold War.
Netflix has a pretty good series on Australia's Pine Gap facility https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pine_Gap
And I've read Ukraine just recently declared the famous Duga long range radar near Pripyat a historical monument
By the way, back in 90's I was so much impressed by Declan McCullagh reporting on Echelon that I registered echelon.pl domain for my personal blog and never imagined I'd be actually walking by its listening post while enjoying a pint of ale π
next time you are in Caversham, have a look at the Telephone Exchange on Church Street, and consider why it is so large and advanced looking (especially the bit round the back) for a relatively small suburb (they got the digital/electronic upgrades 6/7 years before Reading Central did, went to
6 digits before the main town, and many 0118 948 **** numbers and at one point whole blocks of 0118 946 **** numbers were used by the BBC...
0118 947 **** was TXK (Crossbar) in the 1970s, 0118 948 **** TXE2 (electronic) in 1980s and 0118 946 **** TXD (digital, I think it was Ericsson System Y) in the 1990s, whilst central Reading (0118 95* *****) was still TXS (Strowger electromagnetic) until about 1987/1988 (I did work experience with British Telecom and got to visit a few exchanges in the area, but not Caversham (they tended not to encourage visitors π )
Interesting, what's in there today? The building is sealed and doesn't seem to be in use.
it is still an active Telephone Exchange and the main distribution frame from all the copper pairs in the whole of Caversham will terminate there. Its likely that everything is now digital since the 1990s, so a lot of space is empty, but a Telephone Exchange always looks "sealed" from the front; the Openreach/BT engineers go in through secure entrances at the side and back with many codelocks, smartdoors and CCTV..
I think the front doors were only used in 1960s/early 1970s when the Post Office more often had Operator Assistance Centres co-located with the Telephone Exchange and there weren't as many security threats - by the mid 1970s there were concerns over the IRA and other groups targeting the buildings and certainly by mid-late 1980s they were some of the most heavily secured buildings anywhere in Britain (and to a great extent still are)
I'm driving there almost every day on work weeks taking my son to UTC, and last week he actually about... the Telephone Exchange as we usually spend significant amount of time in traffic there. I wasn't able to offer him much more information than what I knee about the old electromechanical exchanges I knew from Poland, throwing in some stories about phreaking and blue boxes π By the way, on Twitter the author of this blog just replied https://radioatlanticodelsur.blogspot.com/
A NSA retiree? π
@kravietz Just your average Subgenius setup
Wow, I didn't even realize this exists! π
@kravietz Salvation awaits! Quit your job! Slack off! 
Wait, did you just insert a Subgenius emoji at the end? π€
@kravietz Yes, Dobbs Town has custom SubG emojis and so does the Discord. 
@kravietz is that Crowsley Park? BBC had a whole new load of dishes installed recently, even after closing down the Caversham Park base of BBC Monitoring and moving back to London...