Brora Y station

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The bugging station was in the far north of Scotland on the east coast of County Sutherland
The HRO of the National Radio Company was the most widely used wireless receiver in the British Y stations

Brora Y Station was a British military base . It was only a few hundred meters south of the village of Brora, directly on the Scottish North Sea coast. During the Second World War , there was an important listening point for the British secret service .

history

The facility was built in 1939 for the General Post Office (British Postal Service). In addition to the radio direction finder at Wick , the Wick Y station , about 65 km to the northeast, the Brora station was one of the most northerly exposed Y stations on the main British island . In contrast to its northern sister station, whose main task was to locate enemy radio stations , Brora was specialized in intercepting enemy radio communications . These included the German Enigma machine encrypted and Morse code transmitted ciphertexts . The radio messages recorded in Brora were forwarded to the Government Code and Cypher School (GC & CS) ( German for "Staatliche Code- und Chiffrenschule"). There, the British Codebreakers succeeded in deciphering and evaluating the intelligence service . The German radio messages often contained important war information, which the British grouped under the code name Ultra and used for their own planning.

After the war, the station was used as a listening post for another forty years by the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) , the successor organization to the GC & CS , before it was closed in 1986.

literature

  • Robin Denniston: Churchill's Secret War - Diplomatic Decrypts, the Foreign Office and Turkey 1942-44. The History Press, 2009, ISBN 978-0750923293 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Entry on Brora Y Station  in Canmore, the database of Historic Environment Scotland (English)

Coordinates: 58 ° 0 '25 "  N , 3 ° 50' 55"  W.