Qualla: Mediumwave Transmitter Flevoland

Mediumwave Transmitter Flevoland: Introduction

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

On 9 January 2019, a few hundred people stood at a safe distance on the wet Flevoland grass and watched two of the tallest structures in the Netherlands fold in on themselves. Charges had been wrapped around the lower sections of the twin 195-metre steel-lattice masts near Zeewolde. The cables came down first, snaking through the air in long lazy arcs. Then the masts themselves leaned, hesitated, and collapsed straight along their footprints in a precise, undramatic way. A 400-kilowatt voice that had spoken into car radios from the North Sea to the Alps simply stopped. Ninety years of Dutch mediumwave broadcasting ended in a small cloud of polder dust.

Mediumwave Transmitter Flevoland: Why the Polder

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Mediumwave radio is fussy about ground. The signal travels along the surface of the Earth, and what it travels over matters - salt water carries it far, dry rocky terrain absorbs it. When Dutch engineers needed a high-power AM site in the late 1970s, they chose a stretch of recen...

Mediumwave Transmitter Flevoland: Voices on 747

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

In 1985 the Dutch public broadcaster reorganized, and the two frequencies were reassigned. NPO Radio 1 took 747 kilohertz; NPO Radio 5 took 1008 kilohertz. The 747 signal was the workhorse - news, talk, sports - and at 400 kilowatts of carrier power it carried far. Truckers heard...

Mediumwave Transmitter Flevoland: The 00:02 Sign-Off

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

At two minutes past midnight on 1 September 2015, the 747 kHz transmitter near Zeewolde - and the 1251 kHz transmitter at Lopik that had partnered it for decades - went silent. NPO had chosen the small hours deliberately. There was no countdown, no final message, just the carrier...

Mediumwave Transmitter Flevoland: What Replaces a Voice

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The two 195-metre masts were among the tallest structures in the country at the time of their demolition, surpassed mainly by the Gerbrandy Tower at IJsselstein and a handful of newer wind turbines. Their footprint on the polder is now a flat field bordered by a low service road ...