Martin Watkins describes the site:

The transmitter at Les Cars is situated about 25 kms south west of the major town which forms the centre-of-population served, namely Limoges. The original mast (220 m) was constructed in the late 1950’s on a site 535m above sea level. At that time it carried FM radio (3 programmes) and a single VHF TV service using 819 lines. Because of the greedy bandwidth requirement of such a large number of lines (each channel was over 13 MHz wide) both Bands I and III had to be used for this one programme in order to achieve nationwide coverage. Limoges was one of the rarer sites to be allocated one of the two channels in Band I.

It would have been interesting to see the aerial system, and the fact that the present day Band II aerials are only about half way up the mast suggest that the mast aperture used for Band I was large. In addition, one wonders if any special precautions had to be taken to achieve linearity across the whole bandwidth: the vision carrier was on 52.4 MHz and the sound on 41.25 MHz, and using the centre frequency for this channel as a reference point the bandwidth required represents nearly 24% of the value of this centre point. A comparison on the same basis for the system A UK channel 1 gives a figure of 8%.

The coverage achieved with 200 kW erp on ch 2 was enormous, and to this day Band 1 aerials can still be seen on houses 70 or 80 miles away. The three FM services were radiated at 150 kW erp, with a fourth regional service combined into the main array in the mid 1980’s. UHF was added in the mid 60’s (2^nd national channel) and early 70’s (3^rd national channel).

This first national TV channel remained on VHF in black and white only until the late 70’s when duplication on 625 line SECAM colour on UHF was quickly rolled out across the country. Les Cars started duplicating the two versions of this first programme in 1978. The Band I/III service closed in about 1983 and a concentrated effort was made to re-engineer Band III as quickly as possible for use as an additional national 625 line SECAM colour service. This opened in 1984 and was used by Canal +, which was probably the first national subscription channel in Europe to use scrambling, a technique described by the EBU at the time as “pseudo-random time-shifting of the video signal

At Limoges this re-engineering involved a move from Band I ch 2 to Band III ch 10. The released aperture space on the mast was subsequently used for additional regional programmes. The service area for Les Cars includes a “departement” in a separate “region” to that of the main coverage area, and a separate version of the third TV network (FR3) is radiated from directional UHF panels, along with a different regional radio programme to that transmitted from the main FM aerials. Photos of these regional arrays are shown in the sections for Band II and UHF.

The last 18 months have seen the construction of a replacement mast and the demolition of the old mast which can be seen HERE. The only major change to occur during this process was to convert to vertical-only polarisation for the main FM services.