Chalmazel - Pierre-sur-Haute, Chalmazel

The Pierre-sur-Haute military radio station is a 30ha site used for French military communications. It is in the Sauvain and Job communes, with the boundary between the Rhône-Alpes and Auvergne regions passing through the site. A civilian radio relay has also been built at this location by the telecommunications company Télédiffusion de France.HistoryIn 1913, a semaphore telegraph (French: Chappe telegraph) was built where the military radio station is now. At the time, it was a small stone building, with the semaphore on top.In 1961, during the Cold War, NATO asked the French Army to build the station as part of the 82-node transmission network in Europe known as the ACE High system. In this network, the Pierre-sur-Haute station, or FLYZ, was a relay between the Lachens (FNIZ) station to the south and the Mont-Août (FADZ) station to the north. The NATO radio station was using American-made tropospheric scatter equipment to relay voice and telegraph signals on a network stretching from Turkey to the Arctic Polar Circle in Norway. The French Air Force took control of the station in 1974. In the late 1980s, the system was gradually replaced by a combination of national defense systems and some NATO-owned subsystems. The large parabolic antennas, known locally as Mickey's ears, were replaced with the current two-antenna setup in 1991.

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