The Deferred Facilities

"Deferred Facilities" was the catch-all, mean nothing name the BBC gave to the technical infrastructure, from the microphone to the transmitter, that the WTBS would have used to broadcast. Some equipment, such as transmitters and distribution lines were in everyday service to broadcast peacetime radio, other areas, such as the bunker studios, would have only come into use as circumstances dictated. 

The Bunker Studios

The most visible part of the Deferred Facilities.

Each civil defence region bunker and the BBC's own facilites in all the locations the WTBS would have operated from, had studios. 

The Distribution Network

Getting the signals to and from the Government and BBC bunkers and to the transmitters was undertaken by the GPO (Post Office , later British Telecom) via their Defence Network (PODN) as well as dedicated radio links owned by the BBC. 

The Transmitters

The number, and type of (MW/VHF) transmitters required to cover the United Kingdom to faciltate emergency broadcasting varied over the life of the WTBS.

Initially it used a system that was repurposed from one used in World War 2.

By the final phase of the WTBS, in the  1980s, the transmitters it would have used were those that, in peacetime, broadcast daily entertainment.

OB Point X & OB Vehicles

In the early period of the Cold War the BBC setup a broadcast facility in Government Offices in Whitehall called "OB (Outside Broadcast) Point X". 

It was designed to allow the Prime Minister or his Ministers to address the nation on the state of international tension. 

Planning had allowed for the possibility of Wood Norton been put out of action. In the Precautionary Stage, a "studio on wheels" OB truck would be driven to the Drakelow bunker, most probably one from the fleet at Pebble Mill in Birmingham, parked outside (it was too big to fit in the tunnels) and made ready to be the standby HQ of the WTBS.

"As a Comms engineer, we had to do regular lines tests of DF circuits. We were told to pick up a certain pair on a GPO block at a certain transmitter and listen across at a certain time. We weren’t told anything else. However, the GPO engineers had labelled the block with the destinations."

M H - BBC staff communications engineer