World War II
On 1 September 1939, the BBC merged the National and the Regional Programmes into one national service from London. The reasons given for this included the need to prevent enemy aircraft from using differentiated output from the Regional Programme's transmitters as navigational beacons. To this end, the former "regional" transmitters were synchronised in chains on (initially) two frequencies, 668 and 767 kHz, with an additional chain of low powered transmitters (known as "Group H") on 1474 kHz appearing later. Under this arrangement "regional" broadcasting in its pre-war form was no longer feasible; however, much of the programming on the new service was gradually decentralised to the former "regional" studios (because of the risks from enemy attack/bombing/invasion in London) and broadcast nationally.
The new service was named the Home Service, which was also the internal designation at the BBC for domestic radio broadcasting (the organisation had also had Television Service and Overseas Service departments).
Read more about this topic: BBC Home Service
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