The Blaenplwyf transmitting station has sat above the Aberystwyth coastline for 66 years and can be seen from Aberaeron to Tywyn.
The 152-metre structure was built by the BBC in 1958 to bring broadcast services to the hills.
Now run by Arqiva, it’s responsible for beaming telly to your homes and FM and DAB radio to your cars and is now one of 1,500 across Wales.
The transmitting station, which is now fully automatic with zero staff needed to run it apart from maintenance checks, has an eery feel.
The mast is a landmark along Cardigan Bay
The station catches lightning during a storm ‘quite a bit’ according to transmissions engineer Ian Edgington, but is safe thanks to earthing cables.
The rooves are reinforced to be ice-proof from the deathly shards that can fall from the mast, barely visible in the fog.
The sheep who pay their rent by mowing the grass stare at visitors and windowless rooms with loud whirring machines give off an abandoned submarine vibe.
However, this place is part of the Dyfed Powys Local Resilience Forum and could be locals' lifeline should anything dramatic happen, like a national grid failure or... the end of the world.
As often referenced in dystopian dramas, the supposed success in surviving apocalyptic events hinges on access to information through TVs and radios.
At stations like Blaenplwyf, they’ve got that figured out with not one but two main power supplies, so if one goes down the other one takes over without a blip.
Should both fail two backup generators kick into life and have seven days of juice to keep things running without anyone needing to flick a switch, with engineers on 24-hour standby with a 2-hour response time should anything need a manual fix.
The BBC was responsible for setting up the original UK broadcast services and has retained power to pull the plug on all national BBC feed services to the public remotely which is tested once a year, for vague purposes.
But what if you live in the sticks? Relay masts were built to ‘bounce’ the signal that might not penetrate a hill, to go around it.
One such relay mast exists in Machynlleth and mirrors the signal to Aberdyfi so everyone gets their telly... or can locate nuclear fall-out survivors.
Their resilience systems also provide backup for less dramatic events, such as a technical glitch in an analogue transmitter for DAB- there are A and B drives for every machine so if one goes down, there’ll be a seamless switch to make sure you don’t miss Cash in the Attic.
But what should happen if aliens try to hijack the airwaves or mysterious hooded figures want to broadcast their shady schemes to the masses? Ian, the unlikely hero in the event of emergencies describes this as ‘very difficult’- as the machines are built to recognise the output before it’s broadcast.
So if the show being processed looks suspiciously different to Loose Women or whatever show the system expects to see, it won’t be broadcast. Sorry shady figures.