Being the civil defence fanatic I am, I had a look at the UK Warning and Monitoring Organisation videos on youtube. Whilst watching "Sound an Alarm" (one of the videos) I found a Hörmann (Munich) HLS F71 sounding the red alert warning and the black fallout warning.
All of the other HLS F71 siren videos show their data tags as being made in 1971 and this particular siren was no exception. The video had cut scenes of the siren from the underground compression and maintenance room and at a distance.
For anyone interested in where the siren is, it was located outside Oxford, however I have doubt that it is still standing to this day because most of the 7000 sirens in the country were removed and sold, scrapped or donated in the 1990s after the Royal Observer Corps. and the UKWMO were disbanded.
Right, enough waffling. Here's the video. Skip to 7:52 on the youtube video for the carrier receiver set to start sounding and the sirens sounding. If you watch on, you will hear the HLS F71 perform the black fallout warning. It's basically the German air attack signal in disguise.
I dunno, we only had a system of Carters, Klaxon Signals and Castle-Castings and maybe single-tone Klaxons here and there but not Hormann mechanical sirens.
There's another thread elsewhere on the forum on this matter. Apparently Greenwich has a factory fire nearby Blackwall Tunnel, and had a siren going off. I am unsure of if its fake or not because of course, video editing can do that but what I could do is look on Google Maps to see where that fire was and look around in that vicinity.
I have seen the factory site near the Blackwall Tunnel. To me, the siren sounds like a single tone Klaxon Signals 10 port siren. If pitched with a standard British siren, the tones mesh together perfectly. My dad saw one at a Scottish airport on the wall of a wartime hanger.
As for the siren, the geography looks to be that of a typical Oxfordshire landscape, but you never know. As for the other sirens sounding in the film, that is a sound affect. If you look at the school siren, you can see that the rotor is not spinning.
However, since I was beaten to this making of a thread on this video, I can only ask whether more research should be done to see if any more of these were installed. Should there?
Re: The United Kingdom Had German Sirens??
Posted: Mon Oct 24, 2016 1:41 pm
by Digisirran
I contacted Hormann, unfortunately their response was that they haven't kept records that date to the 70s after reshuffles and configurations of the company throughout the years. But they did however send me a PDF brochure from the 80s (because of course there's an IBM PC in it!) which is as far as they can go back as of 2016/17. The brochure has no testimonial countries list like Whelen or SiRCom has. I'm surprised that Hormann would've done it if they have had that information.
I strongly believe there's no HLS system anywhere in the county. It's possible that the video used was somewhere in Germany rather than here. And lo and behold they had a siren that looked like one of their HLS's but with drivers attached to the horns.
Re: The United Kingdom Had German Sirens??
Posted: Mon Oct 24, 2016 2:48 pm
by E57
What's in the document?
Re: The United Kingdom Had German Sirens??
Posted: Mon Oct 24, 2016 4:09 pm
by Digisirran
E57 wrote:What's in the document?
Only contained information (all in German) of their sirens and controls. Nothing more. Cool to see that they still did electronic ones back in the 80s.
Re: The United Kingdom Had German Sirens??
Posted: Mon Oct 24, 2016 4:39 pm
by Chem_Boffin_6589
Is there a way to scan the document and post it here? (this'll also be good for my German speaking skills...)
Well, I understood it... somehow. But the HLS 573 had a pressure of 200 bar needed to operate?! (it must be LOUD, considering that the HLS 273 is 100dB at 400 metres)