Mast height 123 metres (404 ft) Province Leinster | Built 1978 | |
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Location Corneddan, County Longford Address 53.807157,-7.71683, Anne St, Bailieborough, Co. Cavan, Ireland | ||
The Cairn Hill transmission site is located on a 278-metre hill (Carn Clonhugh) in County Longford that lies 10 km north east of Longford town.
This was the first UHF television transmitter to be opened in the Republic of Ireland by RTÉ to facilitate the introduction of their second television channel (RTÉ 2) in 1978, two new channels TV3 and TG4 were also added later. The site still has its original 123 metre tall cable-stayed steel lattice mast, (all the other main television transmission sites in the Republic of Ireland have had their original masts replaced). The transmitter was designed to cover an area of poor reception in central Ireland, and when it opened in 1978 it was the most powerful television transmitter in all of Ireland, with an effective radiated power of 800 kW. FM radio transmissions started in 2005 but to date (2016) only RTÉ Radio 1 and local station iRadio are broadcast from here. Digital terrestrial television (DTT) broadcasts began from Cairn Hill in February 2009, and analogue television services subsequently ended on 24 October 2012.
Today the transmitter, owned and operated by 2RN (a subsidiary of RTÉ), provides the national DTT service Saorview to an extensive area in the Irish midlands.