I've been in something of a rut so I wanted to make something totally different. I was inspired by a conversation I had one weekend with a new friend from Germany who told me this story and I wanted to see if it held water.

Well, it turns out that radio tower transmission distance has more to do with the lack of signal in Dresden than topography as the line-of-sight analysis I did didn't explain the historical coverage that I read about in places like Leipzig. The "Valley" part of the title is probably incidental and isn't the reason for the lack of radio transmissions in places like Dresden.

Map text:

Throughout the Cold War, East Germans were hungry for music, news and messages from their families on the other side of the Iron Curtain. Though Western TV and radio broadcasts near the border penetrated deep into East Germany, reunification in 1990 made it apparent that some areas like the region around Dresden had been left out of the loop by forty years of state media blackout. Those regions were called The Valley of the Clueless