Sunday 16 June 2013

Photography: Radio, Live Transmission

The forested base of the ATV10 transmission tower – © 2013
The transmission towers atop Mount Dandenong have long loomed large in my imagination. All my life, I have looked up at them as they transmitted the signals of society down to the sprawl.

From the oval at my primary school, the Dandenong Ranges and their towers seemed fixed and implacable on the horizon, but not once in my adulthood had I bothered to travel to the towers themselves.

Like the pre-rendered skybox of a video game, the towers stood sentinel in the background of my life – until I had a day off and some petrol in the car. These are some of the results.

The photographs were taken on a chilly Melbourne day where the clouds loitered around the Dandenong Ranges, or more properly, around the summit of Mt Corhanwarrabul, where the transmission towers are located.

The two towers clustered fairly close together at Eyre Rd have been broadcasting radio and television signals across Victoria for decades.

The third (as pictured at the top of this post) is the giant of the three. Originally built to broadcast ATV10, it is used, like the other towers, for the broadcast of digital and analogue television and radio of all the major networks into Melbourne and the surrounding areas.

The towers are now operated by TX Australia, a joint-venture owned by the three commercial networks.
The two Eyre Rd towers, HSV7 (left) and ABV2 (right), identified by the network callsigns they used to exclusively broadcast – © 2013
The mist-shrouded forest around the ATV10 tower – © 2013
The ATV10 tower has been extended in height and in broadcasting capacity over the years – © 2013
Base of the ATV10 tower – © 2013
The ATV10 tower soars 190m skyward – © 2013
All images were taken with a Fujifilm X100 and processed in Adobe Lightroom 5 © 2013 Richard Plumridge

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