A radio tower has been installed at Furillen.
It occupies the spot that was previously taken by a water tower …
… and, more recently, a windmill …
While some of Furillen’s structures – such as the Ferris wheel – are temporary and obviously whimsical, the structure that occupies this part of the sim should not be.
I wasn’t satisfied with the previous structures because although they looked good enough in that nostalgia-kitsch style that is (alas) so fashionable on the grid …
… they made absolutely no sense whatsoever.
Whereas the radio tower does. Indeed, there is a history of structures like this at Furillen.
The first radio tower was placed on Gotland in 1952, shortly after the so-called Catalina Affair, in which Soviet Jets shot down two Swedish planes over the Baltic Sea. Those planes had allegedly been intelligence gathering (predictably, the Swedish government denied this).
The radar installation – now labelled an ‘early warning’ system, of course – was first built on Furillen itself during 1953-4.
The station subsequently employed up to ten military personnel, four radar observers, and a series of guard dogs, including a German Shepherd called Hit and a Rottweiler called Boy.
The structure changed shape as the technology improved. Inevitably, pictures of such a sensitive piece of kit are not exactly in plentiful supply, but the images I have found so far suggest that it is not outlandish for us to imagine that the structure I have placed on the sim – taken from an existing build by KT Syakumi – once existed on the real Furillen …
… which has got to be better than windmills and water towers.
And I thought ‘no signal’ was also referring to your visit to the Lake District. Can I order one of the masts for our valley?
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You can get one here – https://marketplace.secondlife.com/p/Radio-Antenna-Tower/8171662
(See Serene? i DO pay attention)
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