Black Mountain transmitting station
broadcasting and telecommunications facility near Belfast, Northern Ireland
The Black Mountain transmitting station is a broadcasting and telecommunications facility, situated on Black Mountain to the west of the city of Belfast, on land 301 metres (988 ft) above Ordnance Datum (mean sea level) in Northern Ireland (grid reference J278727). It includes a guyed steel lattice mast which is 228.6 metres (750 ft) in height. The height of the top of the structure above mean sea level is 529 metres (1,736 ft). It is owned and operated by Arqiva.
History
Construction
It was built by BICC.
Transmission
1959: The station is commissioned by the Independent Television Authority to transmit ITV signals (provided by Ulster Television) on 405-line VHF, using Channel 9 (Band III) on high power. Test transmissions commence on 1 October with official service from 31 October.
1970: UHF 625-line PAL colour television begins at high power from the adjacent Divis transmitting station.
1975: A low power UHF filler service begins, designed to cover districts close to the station that cannot pick up Divis.
1976: FM commercial radio station Downtown Radio (later Cool FM) starts transmissions.
1985: VHF 405-line television is discontinued in the UK, having been replaced by the UHF service.
The public source identifies “Black Mountain transmitting station” as broadcasting and telecommunications facility near Belfast, Northern Ireland. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Black, Mountain and transmitting.
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Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 9, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q4921357. Authority coordinates are 54.587, -6.022. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1959, 1970, 1975 and 1976.
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This entry incorporates text from “Black Mountain transmitting station” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.