Beacon photo page's by Johan Veldhuis.  

Berlin Tegel VOR, TGL , August 31, 2017.

Wim writes in his travel report:
We now enter the coordinates of TGL (Tegel) in MG, but ignore her for a while and find our own route over the Berliner Ring again. As soon as MG and I agree, she can do her thing until we don't trust the result. That is when she wants to go to the airport. At a petrol station we look for a street name on a Google Earth printout and go there. We were also in the area in 2012 and then we saw no possibilities. We now have a few more ideas with Google Earth. Now MG takes us where we wanted to go. Yes, we are getting close but there is still a fence in the way.
We look for a possibility to get to our desired point via the other routes, but time and again we don't succeed. Fences and bushes block our view of the airport. Eventually we give up. It is long past lunchtime.

But, we don't give up forever, see the text below the next map.

Location TGL, red lines are fences. © OpenStreetMap.

On September 5, 2019, we made another attempt, with the help of Google Earth.
What looked like a kind of residential area on GE turned out to be a large allotment complex (on the map at the bottom left). We could not get to the entered coordinates by car because the site was closed off with a kind of barrier. We thought we were on the right track, so we continued on foot. As usual, a gate appeared. With a kind of no entry sign on it. That was not so unusual, but on top of the gate was NATO wire and behind the gate was a wall that was a bit higher and also had NATO wire on it. So even if we forced the gate, we would not get a meter further. We looked further to see if we could see the end of the wall somewhere, but that did not seem to be the case. While I was making a sound recording at the car, Johan tried to photograph a plane taking off. An alert resident asked him what he meant and turned out to be very friendly. Yes, further to the left the wall ended.

So we trudged along the wall and came to a spot that I had as a reserve. Although I have to say in retrospect that the DVOR must have been in view, we did not see it because of the great distance. But on the way we had seen a kind of small peephole in the wall. Every time we looked through it in the hope of seeing the DVOR. At the gate we walked further along the wall and here too there were peepholes. Don't imagine too much of them, about the size of an A4! We walked on until we could go no further. Unfortunately the wall did not follow a straight line, which meant that our field of vision was occasionally directed at the wrong part of the airfield. We walked back to just past the unfavourable bend and looked through the hole in the wall there. Hats off to Johan, he saw something that looked like a row of DVOR antennas. And lo and behold, that had to be it.

The full length of the telephoto lens was needed, which corresponds to 750mm. Johan had to push the mesh of the fence askew, which allowed me to take a few photos through the mesh and the peephole. They weren't great, blurred by heat vibrations, but we finally have a photo on our third visit to Berlin.

Have you taken a better photo of this beacon yourself and would you like to help us with it? Please let us know by e-mail.

This beacon is not in the GEN 2.5 list of 2024.

The gate with the wall behind it.


Well, with a wall behind the gate?


Finally TGL in the picture.