The arrangement dates to the war. In December 1942 the navy put a wireless telegraph broadcast station on Matsqui Prairie, the flat alluvial bottomland northeast of Aldergrove, and the following November added a receiver station in Aldergrove itself. The callsign CKN went on the air that same month, and the split was deliberate physics rather than bureaucratic whim: a transmitter powerful enough to reach a ship off Japan will deafen any receiver standing near it. Separate the two by twenty-odd kilometres of farmland and both can work at once, one shouting while the other listens. Wartime staffing was heavy and then, as always, it wasn't; the stations shrank after 1945 into a caretaker existence, waiting for a reason. The reason arrived in Korea.

Through the 1950s the Aldergrove site grew the way Cold War installations everywhere grew - more antennas, more operators, more buildings for the operators. In 1956 it received the traditional naval honour of being commissioned as HMCS Aldergrove, a ship's name for a place that would never leave the Fraser Valley, with a badge showing the caduceus of Hermes throwing three forks of lightning between two red alder leaves. The motto was Loud and Clear. Canadian Forces unification in 1967 turned it into CFS Aldergrove, and by then it was handling ship-to-shore and air-to-ground traffic for Canadian and allied forces across the Pacific coast; the Matsqui transmitters alone were pushing an average of ten thousand messages a month by 1968. A second building programme ran from 1975 to 1978 and added a microwave relay tower for over-the-horizon links.

Seen from the air the site reads as agriculture that has gone slightly wrong - rectangular fields, gravel access roads, and then a scatter of guyed steel masts standing where no barn should be. Aldergrove's receiving arrays hang from masts around 170 feet tall, log-periodic panels angled at specific slices of ocean. Matsqui's transmitting antennas run considerably higher, the low-frequency structures reaching as much as 600 feet, with microwave towers near 300. The stations also run ionospheric sounders - chirpsounders, in the trade - which sweep a test signal skyward to measure how the upper atmosphere is behaving that hour and therefore which frequencies will actually reach a destination. The technique dates to the mid-1960s and has never really been bettered. In 2000 the navy replaced the ageing Harris RF-745 transmitters with RF-1155A sets under a modernization contract worth roughly sixteen million dollars.

Then the Cold War ended and the defence budget did what defence budgets do. In the mid-1990s the station was placed under remote control from CFB Esquimalt on Vancouver Island, its receivers and transmitters driven by the Remote Control and Monitoring System. On 31 March 1996 CFS Aldergrove was disbanded as an independent Canadian Forces station and became Naval Radio Section Aldergrove, a detachment. Staffing fell from more than 130 people to about twenty; today one operator and fifteen to seventeen technicians keep the site alive, doing maintenance rather than watchkeeping. Redundancy is now geographic instead of local - Esquimalt can reach across the continent to drive NRS Mill Cove and NRS Newport Corner in Nova Scotia, and CFB Halifax can drive Aldergrove and Matsqui in return. Between 1996 and 2006 the single quarters, the water tower and the junior ranks mess all came down, and the base housing on 272 Street followed after the emptied site drew repeated trespass and theft.

A near-abandoned station is not an abandoned one. The property still does regular military work: B Troop of the 15th Field Artillery Regiment and B Company of the Royal Westminster Regiment parade here, alongside 169 Columbia Royal Canadian Sea Cadet Corps, 1922 Royal Canadian Army Cadet Corps and Navy League Cadet Corps 125 Columbia. In August 2012 work began on 272 Street, south of the main gate, on a construction engineering facility for 192 Construction Engineering Flight. In the summer of 2019 the Regional Cadet Support Unit (Pacific) opened a forward deployed office here, putting two zone training officers on site to cover the Fraser Valley, Surrey and Langley. The antennas, meanwhile, go on doing the one thing they were put in a field to do. Somewhere off the Pacific coast a Canadian warship keys a transmitter, and 1,220 quiet acres of British Columbia farmland catch it.