On Wednesday, September 11, Prince Albert II of Monaco visited Roumoules – in the Alps of Haute-Provence – to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the commissioning of the Radio Monte-Carlo (RMC) transmitting center.

Long Waves and Medium Waves

“Built in 1974 by Lucien Allavena, technical director of Radio Monte-Carlo, the Roumoules transmitting center allowed RMC to greatly extend its listening area in French and Italian territories,” explained the Prince’s Palace in a press release at the beginning of the week.

The broadcasts were on Long Wave on behalf of French RMC (with a power of about 800 kW) and on medium waves, the famous and historic 205 meters of the Principality.

Some inaccuracies…or maybe not

The prince is a known listener of Riviera Radio (in English, 106.5 and 106.3 from Mont Agel), but perhaps he is not (was not) of the Italian RMC from the times when it ended its programs with the famous song “ciao a domani – per ora chiudiamo” – sung by Matia Bazar.

Otherwise, he would have known that on “Italian territories” the 205 meters equal to 1467 Kc did not come from distant Roumoules, but from Mont Agel, about 1000 meters above his palace, even though – actually – the transmitters on 205 meters were at both sites.

Based on a perhaps unique situation, during the day the one from our RMC was active from Agel and in the evening and night the one from Roumoules, with religious broadcasts from TWR “Trans World Radio”.

History repeates itself

Did the prince make a mistake then? Thinking about it, maybe not, or at least that’s what we like to think.

Even if the reason is so indirect that we’re not sure this is the origin of the statement. As you can see from this sticker, in 1964 the only existing RMC, the French one, announced a cadeau, a gift for Christmas: a new long wave broadcast, still from Mont Agel.

By moving to long waves, French RMC freed up its historic transmitter, the 205-meter one: an opportunity seized by Noel Coutisson to create Italian RMC.

Well, the same thing happened 50 years ago: having proved ineffective, the long wave transmitter in Monte Carlo is replaced – precisely – by the one in Roumoules. History repeats itself: what to do with the long wave systems on the French Riviera?

Simple: readapt the LW system to MW once again, for the benefit of RMC in Italian. Thus the famous 701 Kc is born (“Radio Montecarlo Settecentouno“).

And so yes, we could really say that “Roumoules allowed RMC to greatly extend its listening area in Italian territories“: despite not broadcasting to Italy at all.

Silent sites, present antennas

The Romoules site, like that of Agel, is now substantially silent. Long waves turned off, we know of sporadic transmissions on medium waves. Instead, everything is turned off from the position above Monte Carlo.

Turned off, but not demolished: unlike what was decided in Italy, the towers of Monaco Media Diffision are still standing and even, as we have recently seen from some photographs published on a Facebook group, maintained, at least in their structural components.

We are History

So what did Prince Albert go to do at a turned-off transmitting site? Perhaps to give us a testimony, a message: we are history and our Radio Monte-Carlo. Those frequencies transmitted great orchestras before the war, were used by the Nazis during World War II, and accompanied the economic boom of the 1960s.

In some way, the Prince is telling us that transmission sites are historical monuments, just like others.

A message that we would like to be understood also in Italy, where instead a ruling class ignorant of its own history managed in 2013 to destroy even a transmission center, that of Budrio, built by Nobel Prize winner Guglielmo Marconi.

Those who don’t know its history can read it here, while those who want to delve into the reasons for the demolition can search online for what publisher Ing. Anselmo of Challenger wrote about it at the time: one who – like Prince Albert II, remembers and celebrates History.

(M.H.B. for FM-world)