Qualla: Naval Radio Section Aldergrove

Naval Radio Section Aldergrove: Introduction

Thu, 17 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Most military real estate exists to hold something: aircraft, ammunition, soldiers, ships. This one exists to hold nothing. Of the 1,220 acres the Royal Canadian Navy owns outside Aldergrove, British Columbia, only about 440 carry the antenna field. The other 780 are an electromagnetic interference buffer - farmland and second growth kept free of subdivisions, transmission lines and anything else that hums, because the entire purpose of the site is to hear faint signals arriving from the far side of the Pacific. The emptiness is not a leftover. The emptiness is the installation.

Naval Radio Section Aldergrove: CKN, Calling the Fleet

Thu, 17 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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 ...

Naval Radio Section Aldergrove: Loud and Clear

Thu, 17 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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 w...

Naval Radio Section Aldergrove: The Antenna Farm

Thu, 17 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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 panel...

Naval Radio Section Aldergrove: Remote Control

Thu, 17 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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...

Naval Radio Section Aldergrove: Still Listening

Thu, 17 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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 Ar...