Beeston Hill Y Station Beeston Hill Y Station was a secret listening station located on the summit of Beeston Hill , Sheringham in the English county of Norfolk . The chain of Y stations were the front line of the War Office ’ s Bletchley Park , which had the code name station X . Description . This Y Stations was a specially constructed wireless interception facility which was also used for direction finding on enemy wireless transmissions . This became particularly important in the Battle of the Atlantic ( 1939 – 1945 ) where locating U - boats became a critical issue . Admiral Dönitz told his commanders that they could not be located if they limited their wireless transmissions to under 30 seconds , but skilled Direction finding operators were able to locate the origin of their signals in as little as 6 seconds . Modus Operandi . The equipment used for direction finding was located on the summit of the hill in a small Hexagon al shaped hut . The radio interception equipment was positioned within a control room which was located from the direction finding station . This listening station intercepted VHF radio signals , which were used by German E - boats ( fast surface vessels ) for short range voice communication . The Listening station was part of a chain of stations set up around the country that gathered the enemies raw signals , transmitted in Morse code , for processing at the X - station at Bletchley Park . Coded messages were taken down by hand and sent to Bletchley on paper by motorcycle courier s or , later , by teleprinter . Code Breakers . The chain of Y stations , of which Beeston Hill belonged , contributed , on average , 3000 coded messages to Bletchley Park each day . At Bletchley Park the messages were taken to different ' Huts ' , depending on whether they had come from the German army , air force , navy or another source . The secret military intelligence gathered in this way was code - named Ultra and Winston Churchill called those involved his " geese that laid the golden eggs but never cackled " . during the early days of the Second World War , it was members of the First Aid Nursing Yeomanry who were entrusted to personally deliver the decoded messages personally to him . The Site . The concrete remains of part of this facility can still be seen on the summit of the hill . They consist of an octagon al concrete base that measures 3 , 850mm across , with a channel running west to east across the middle . On the southern edge of the octagon is a raised area of concrete , which is 225mm higher than the rest of the base . Around the edge of the octagon are the remnants of what was once a reinforced parapet , which has long been removed . There are also signs of a Fletton brick wall running westward away from the raised area . The octagonal shape of the base indicates that a direction - finding station operator ' s hut stood there . It would have consisted of a double - skinned wooden structure in which the cavity was filled with shingle designed to make the structure " splinter proof " or " bulletproof " . BBC ' s Coast TV episode . There were several of these stations around the east coast and by triangulating the signals , the exact location of enemy shipping could be pinpointed . In an episode of the BBC1 series “ Coast ” , the technique was explained and demonstrated . In the same programme , Joy Hale was interviewed by the presenter , Hermione Cockburn . Hale had been a WREN during the war and had been an operator at the Y - station .