I didn't expect too much of this site, but the people running and conservating it have done a good job making the radio station's history come alive. A new visitor center has been constructed near the heritage objects/monuments. There's a cafe, a souvenir shop and you can buy tickets for a tour. After paying 50 Swedish kroner I was picked up promptly by an English-speaking guide.

The visible parts of the site consist of the six huge masts, a pool of cooling water with fountains, the pretty main building and two lesser buildings. Signals were only sent from here - a receiving station used to exist about 30kms away. Varberg (or Grimeton, to be more precise) was part of a global network that connected with New York. In the cafe, a mural shows the other locations of this ring: Poland, England, mainland USA and Hawaii. The introduction video shown at the site emphasizes the need for transatlantic communication in the early 1900s, as many Swedes had emigrated to the USA. This longwave radio station shortly filled the gap between the vulnerable underwater cables and shortwave (which was introduced widely in the year 1927).

In the surprisingly pretty Neoclassistic main building (which wouldn't look out of place in some fine Italian town), the machines that were necessary to operate the system are on show. Messages in morse code arrived here from a telegraph office in Gothenburg, where companies and the general public could deliver their messages to be sent overseas. These morse messages were then transmitted all the way to New York via the ingenuous transmitter. The site of Grimeton was especially chosen because of its flat coastal land and because there is a clear line from here to New York bypassing Scotland, Denmark and Norway.

In all, an educational visit to one of the most original WHS: the only one dedicated to telecommunication so far.