History
Tolsford Hill was originally established in 1959 to provide additional telephony circuits to France with capacity for television transmission in either direction. Initially connections within the UK were by cable - a full SHF link to London via Fairseat and Flimwell was added in the late 1960s. At one stage the BBC operated ad-hoc SHF links between Tolsford Hill and London.
Originally a 200 ft mast was used - the concrete blocks for the stays can still be seen around the perimeter of the site. The building was based on a standard telephone exhange/repeater station design. A new concrete tower was built in 1970 alongside the original building, which remains in use. This allowed additional capacity and replaced a temporary structure which had been used to carry the link to London via Flimwell.
By the early 1980s concern about the capacity and resilence of the link resulted in plans for a second route running from London via North Kent and Dover to Boulogne. A cross-link was provided between Tolsford Hill and Archers Court and some spare/emergency capacity may have been available by late 1982. The new route was fully operational from around 1986.
In addition to the cross-channel EBU ("Eurovision") link Tolsford Hill carried circuits to feed the nearby ITA Dover transmitter and local studios. The BBC station at Swingate apparently was fed via the London to Tolsford Hill cable at times when the EBU did not require the circuit however arrangements were subsequently made for the BBC to provide its own SHF feed.
The site is now used for the mobile phone networks and local point-to-point links. A DAB transmitter was added in 2016.
