You see something similar around the UK, and particularly in Scotland where the terrain wasn't conducive to long coaxial cable links - mostly squat squarish tow

You see something similar around the UK, and particularly in Scotland where the terrain wasn't conducive to long coaxial cable links - mostly squat squarish towers that used to hold either microwave horns or (later) dishes. You can see one in the link below, the tower on the left. The one on the right was (when I used to maintain kit up on this site) run by Scottish Power as part of their communications network, with tower space leased to other customers. Just visible at the top of the left tower are two 156MHz folded dipoles used for VHF marine communications in the Clyde estuary, which went to two old Philips VHF transceivers in the wooden shed you can see in the enclosure behind the fence. That was replaced by a metal shed about ten years ago when I went to site one day and found that a combination of rotten wood and the depredations of rabbits along the bottom of the timbers and a particularly severe gale had made it "sink" by about 18"! Some of the sites on the west coast were quite interesting, with Mallaig having UHF and VHF links stretching 30 miles or so to remote islands with no real line-of-site. The VHF link to Canna just south of Skye carried a single call on around 80MHz (I think it was 84MHz/76MHz split, can't remember) which fed a tiny ten-line telephone exchange. There was a six-channel link to Rhum, a little to the east, which was a much larger island and had a more conventional exchange. All gone now, and done using IP over 6 or 24GHz microwave links to little 1U servers in the exchanges. http://dgsys.co.uk/btmicrowave/sites/68.php http://dgsys.co.uk/btmicrowave/sites/68.php