1960s BBC TV Transmitter Breakdown tape
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- Опубліковано 14 чер 2024
- It's the UK in the sixties, you turn on your television to watch the football but because of a transmitter fault, rather than seeing the match you hear what’s on this tape instead. Let's have a listen.
Massive thanks to Mart for lending the tape and to Ringway Manchester for the help.
The RINGWAY MANCHESTER Channel can be found here: / @ringwaymanchester
The full tape (both sides) can be heard here -
• TRANSMITTER FAULTS TAPE
00:00 Start
01:16 Tape box trivia
05:18 Side 1
09:49 Side 2
13:32 Special Guest - Ringway Manchester
16:43 Wrap up
18:16 Patreon credits
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Q) Why are there comments from days ago when this video has just gone live today?
A) Patrons / techmoan usually have early access to videos. I'll show the first version of a video on Patreon and often the feedback I get results in a video going through further revisions to improve it. e.g. Fix audio issues, clarify points, add extra footage or cut extraneous things out. The video that goes live on youtube is the final version. If you want to see the videos early and before any adverts are added, you can sign up to Patreon here: / techmoan - Наука та технологія
The RINGWAY MANCHESTER Channel can be found here: www.youtube.com/@RingwayManchester
The full tape (both sides) can be heard here ua-cam.com/video/a_0xLaSQAQ0/v-deo.html
Lewis is awesome++
Yaaayy🎉
Love ringway Manchester - maybe you can do an episode on 'Number Stations' with him 😂
Hol up! You got Lewis on?!?!? Two of my fave UA-cam blokes in one place!?!?!? 🧐😳🧐😳🧐😳😳🧐🇬🇧 SWEEEET!!!!
Ringway is an awesome channel, a wealth of info. I got hooked by the series on pirate radio in the UK
Desperately want to hear someone sample "im sorry we have a breakdown" right before a beat drop.
It really cries out for that, doesn't it?
It reminds me of a time, years ago, when a friend found a recording of the soundtrack from, if I remember right, a Disney World science ride that involved a narrated motion ride through footage from one of the ''70s Mars probes. Part of that narration was a man gravely intoning something along the lines of, "What you are looking at is a close-up photograph of a groove," which all of us listening to it agreed _desperately_ needed to be a sample in a techno song.
@@ZGryphon 100% agree, that would work so incredibly well. That's awesome.
"I'm sorry, we have a breakdown" (Do It To It starts playing)
I wonder if Anders Jensen is in the mood for techno today.
Lol that sounds very 80s
"Reduced power or... standard breakdown. Sounds like my typical week." I turned 50 last week, and I felt that joke in every single one of my ancient, routinely malfunctioning organs. :)
I'm only 35 but as an insomniac and migraine sufferer I can cetrainly relate!!
I wish you the best for your health.
@@RaccoonHenry Microdosing LSD is used by many cluster headache sufferers, it's the only thing that works for some people. I highly recommend you don't do it, or take medical advice from comment sections:)
I felt that comment too!
You read my mind regarding sampling that intro.
In the best possible way, I don't come to your channel for adrenaline highs, so this is perfect for a lazy Sunday afternoon listen.
So much of everything now is about getting people riled up just for clicks - here we can just chill for a bit.
THANK YOU
@@TechmoanIm probably one or the few who still has a big living room hifi and i got a cassette deck put back in my car. I transferd some reel to reels for a freind recently he had all kinds of fm radio recorded from new york in 1963 he has a boxing match of famous people to.
@@PeteXcore5 🙂👌
@@Techmoan"Someone sent me this MYSTERIOUS tape. You won't believe what I found in it!". Don't forget to add a red arrow in the thumbnail.
Swedish radio once had a sound signal that was transmitted to shut down the transmitters in the country for the night -a rap group sampled that sound and incorporated it into one of their songs. One day one channel on Swedish radio played that song without thinking about it -probably because it was the group's latest single. When the song reached the part where the sound appeared, all the transmitters in the country shut down as programmed and had to be restarted again by a collection of really unhappy people.
What does the signal sound like? And did Swedish radio stations play the national anthem before they close down back in the day?
@@TrentJordan3198 It was a short series of beeps and I don't think they use that system anymore -and they go on for 24 hours these days anyway. What I remember so was the end of the day just somebody that said that it was the end of the day.
Funny story. Love it.
That's brilliant!
Birth of security by annoyance :D Same story with phreaking. Don't think your design is more clever than anyone whenever :D Security through obscurity is still a problem, but here it was first time met in real life.
Silence detectors have caused embarrassing situations in the past. Capital Radio in London experienced one during the silence for the Queen Mother's funeral in 2002. By that point, there were no engineers left at the station who had been around long enough to know that there was an ancient tape cart machine at the transmitter site loaded with a montage of 1980s-era Capital jingles. You can guess the rest...
ua-cam.com/video/sWt8ZIgDA9I/v-deo.html
That's hilarious 😂😂😂 thanks for sharing!
Rememberance Sunday was always squeaky bum time in my days as a broadcast engineer and presenter. Though on the topic of silence detectors, I was aware of one station that used separate detectors on the left and right leg, falling back to a web stream with a delay.
When an ad campaign ran with a hard pan effect… that was trippy.
@@marcsteele8368 I've always wondered why they turn up the background noise on the radio when there is a moment's silence in the proceedings.
When I was working in radio, we would remotely mute the transmitter itself for minutes silences (they're not that common here) - not an option in the distant past as transmitters didn't have remote control!
"Oranges and Lemons" was well known as a BBC interval signal at that time - it was used as the startup music for the Light Programme and had been used during the war for the Forces Programme, so people associated it with the BBC. As a bonus there was no question of it being in copyright as a composition or a melody which made it easier for the Beeb to be able to transmit its own recordings. The other holding music is most likely library music, as was pretty much all testcard music right up until the end of the testcard (later in-vision Ceefax) era - this was administratively much simpler than using their own recordings as under the broadcasters' agreements with the Musician's Union there were strict rules governing how many times a performance could be transmitted and it would have required royalty payments to various people.
The RP announcement is pretty fascinating. With all respect to @RingwayManchester and his expertise I don't think silence detection or picture loss testers would have been in play here. This tape almost certainly came from a staffed main transmitter which didn't have a line feed but relied on rebroadcasting a line-fed site like Sutton Coldfield - Sutton would have had the ability to radiate its own locally-generated testcard, but I suspect lesser main stations didn't have a slide scanner but could generate the crude test signal they describe electronically (it's basically a square wave synced with the start of each line so you get a bar down the screen). Automated monitoring did of course become very much the thing as the network continued to grow beyond the number of stations that could reasonably be staffed and as technology improved, but at this time in the 1960s staffed stations were very much the norm.
I scanned a set of BBC transmission network routings from the early 90s a while ago which clearly showed how things worked. Should see if I can find them.
Oh hey - and notice how they were telling you to turn the volume up on your TV due to the tx being in reduced power? That's because System A (405-line) audio was transmitted using AM rather than FM, so the carrier and sidebands being a few dB down would have yielded quieter audio at the receiver. 625-line audio uses FM, which would come out of the speaker at the same volume assuming the signal was strong enough for the receiver to demodulate.
Wonderful, I was about to ask if O&L was used during the war. The song always puts me in mind of Orwell's 1984 , which was influenced by his time at the BBC (in room 101).
Oranges and lemons appears in 1984 & George Orwell worked for a time at the BBC.
Absolutely a staffed transmitter. Valves needed replacing fairly regularly and circuits would go out of alignment.
As noted, some of the transmitters were not line fed. The Reduced Power tape was (as stated in the announcement) used where the signal the relay transmitter was dependent on was on reduced power and the picture or sound it was rebroadcasting was greatly impaired. This was 405 lines VHF AM (positive modulation). Regenerating a good signal was difficult.
One of the things System I (625 lines) brought in was negative modulation of the video signal, so the sync pulses were at maximum RF power, making relaying more reliable, also sound was FM not AM.
@@theeniwetoksymphonyorchest7580
He knew: he was wondering if the use of O&L was because it was used at the BBC while Orwell worked there (presumably during WWII)
As a former broadcaster and producer, it was vitally important to ensure that the ‘silence’ ambient noise was sufficient to hold off the silent alert during the 2 minutes silence for example. Backup tapes were automatically fired off at our transmitter sites. I actually went out to record the ambient noise in the countryside myself.
In commercial AM and FM radio, it was vital that there be no silence broadcast, as then listeners will change to another station and might not ever come back. Usually the tape contains whatever style of music the station normally does, to keep listeners amused - without any commercials or presenter patter - usually a good thing!
At a station I worked at (as a technician), the transmitter was controlled remotely from the studio, via a link separate from the audio link. At the studio, we were able to remotely disable the lost audio detector, for things like the 11th hour of ANZAC day (5 minutes silence to commemorate soldiers killed in wars), prime minister died, and the like. And a faulty lost audio detector! As every station went to silence at precisely the same time, listeners would bother retuning.
I've never heard of sending noise to prevent triggering the interval tape. That could annoy listeners and MAKE them go to another station. Hopefully you had some bird song or something in it. You couldn't send white noise for more than 15 seconds or so, as that will trigger the lost audio detector too.
@@keithammleter3824 Hi, yes it contained faint birdsong, it was ambient ‘country’ sound. And certainly preferable to the backup disc kicking in during remembrance with Prefab Sprout’s ‘Hot Dog Jumping Frog, Albuquerque’ - which may have caused annoyance.
At a hospital radio station, I was a volunteer engineer at we had a now power RSL AM transmitter. The output from the studio switch superimposed a 22khz tone on the audio to the transmitter. This was filtered out, and the clean audio was sent to the transmitter, and the 22khz tone went to the dead air detection system.
The dead air system was linked to a telephone line. If rhe tone was lost the back-up tape started. In out case it was a multichage cd stack with a mic of music and station identification jingles.
The reason for the tone was to alow for the presenters to cockup switching studios.
The telephone link allowed a suitably trained person to ring the dead air detector and using dtmf tones either bring a studio on or off air disconnect the entire studio complex and or start /stop the emergency tape (cd). You could also listen to the station output over the phone.
Overkill yes but we had a broadcast engineer with way too much time on his hands and liked designing stuff.
Fascinating.
In 19 minutes I've learned the full way to say BASF, where the word we used for cassettes came from, how breakdown messages could be transmitted despite signal outage, why birds tweeted at night during CH4's Big Brother, and that the song I sang as a small child in the 1970's, Oranges and Lemons, originates all the way back in the early 18th Century. WOW, thank you. That was just about the most condensed history lesson I have had in quite some time. Fascinating, and brilliant Mat. Whether it's futuristic systems and their retro counterparts, or historic stories of audio and video, you deliver these videos with excellence every time,
That's what the tweeting was for? I'd have thought it'd all have been digital by then, with out of band signalling to tell the transmitter it was still connected. Well I never!
I also love it when Matt calls in the help of an expert in case he knows he's out of his depth on a certain subject. It is the rational sign of putting quality first rather than ego.
The tape you have is pre-BBC standardisation (in my day - 1980s, it was BBC Type 200) so I assume this LPS26 was selected for many of the reasons you state. The announcer doesn't seem to be an on-air personality. I don't recognise it, and although well rounded, the tones aren't that "plummy" as would be the case with on-air staff. We used alignment tapes to setup up the reel-to-reel machines, of which the BBC made in-house. The announcements on them were recorded in the 1960s, yet still used 20 years later, and the voice pronounces Kilohertz as "kiloherets" - very posh! I suspect the voice was a producer or someone "with good pipes" in transmission department.
Here is a short history of the use of audio magnetic recording tape in the BBC.
Type 100 & Type 101
In 1969 the BBC issued a specification for its first standard tape, referred to as tape Type 100. This was based on EMI 815. Two supplies were selected, EMI and Ilford (Zonal). The
tape’s construction was a PVC backing tape with an oxide coercivity of approximately 300 oersteds, but the oxide was subject to pinholes which led to dropouts and frequent rejection.
As an improvement, the manufacturers changed to a polyester backing. This material was included in the specification, called tape Type 10, the BBC subsequently issued.
Probably because the operational use of the two tapes was the same, Type 101, which had rapidly superseded Type 100, was always confusingly referred to as Type 100. It became
the mainstay of BBC mono recording work from its introduction until early 1980, when, because of the recession and rationalisations in the recording industry, supplies of unbacked
tape ceased.
Type 102
Towards the late 1960's the BBC was experimenting with radio broadcasting in stereo and a search began for a tape to support this. A higher recording capability was needed for two
track work, coupled with a physically stronger tape making it less susceptible to edge damage. The introduction of stereo radio broadcasts was accompanied by the introduction of
a digital 13-bit PCM based transmission distribution system to provide UK-wide high-quality broadcasting, meaning any tape selected would also need to be capable of reproducing a
15kHz audio bandwidth.
By the start of formal stereo broadcasting in 1972, the BBC had adopted Type 102, a greenbacked tape, based on 3M's Type 262, for stereo work. Each track was capable of a peak
flux level of 600 nanoWebers (nWb) per metre and it was fully compatible with the full-track recording machines, producing a peak flux level of 400 nWb/m into a full-track head.
Type 200
As soon as Type 102 was adopted a search began for a better stereo tape. Type 102 was able to match the capability of the recording machines, such as the Studer A62, available at
the time, but it was clear that machines of a better performance were on their way. When the Studer A80 and Telefunken M15A were selected by the BBC it was known they were
capable of recording at a much higher flux level.
Although many tape products from a variety of manufacturers, were available, most gave improved performance at the expense of print-through, although this did not bother
professional recording studios, who mostly recorded at 30 ips. and then transferred the material to disc, the BBC still stored much of its output on tape and thus this was an issue.
Agfa’s PEM 468 formulation was found to be the tape that satisfied the BBC’s criteria, and based on this product, a specification for Type 200 was drawn up. It required more bias flux
than the older machines had been designed to supply, although Studer A62's, B62's and some Nagra machines where modified to meet its requirements.
At its peak the BBC was using the equivalent of two hundred thousand 2400 ft. reels of quarter-inch tape per year across its local, national and international radio services and
television, as well as 2” multitrack tape in its music recording studios.
Type 200 specification tape offered the advantage of a 5dB increase in signal-to-noise ratio that could be obtained from current developments in analogue tape machines and tapes,
(4dB higher recording level and 1dB improvement in tape noise). It used a peak recording flux level of 1012 nWb/m. Any further analogue improvements could only be possible using
noise reduction techniques, which, with over 1000 machines in use, was not financially viable, although some multi-track recording machines were initially equipped with Dolby A
and latterly Dolby SR noise reduction systems.
After its introduction over the next few years, the older recording machines, only capable of using Type 102, were replaced.
O wow, that's a lot of detail. Thank you!
Type 102 3M tape branded as Scotch with the wonderful/crude 'Specially made for the BBC' sticker added to the box. Also 102 came with a pink backing.
I did the math, and that peak usage is around 15 feet per second.
Former radio DJ from the 1990s, we had silence detectors but all they did was shut off the transmitters after 30 seconds of silence. The intent was so that the station didn't broadcast silence all night long after the last DJ left at 1am. We were one of a very few FM stations that still signed off overnight by 1990. But the way it was wired, it only monitored the mono signal. This was ordinarily fine until our studio board developed a phase problem with one of the studio microphone inputs. The way stereo FM works to make it mono compatible is by transmitting a L+R and L-R signal. The mono receiver just outputs the L+R signal while the stereo receiver uses the L-R signal to split the two channels. So when an input on a stereo mixer develops a phase problem, suddenly L+R cancels itself out and the mono signal is silent. Meanwhile, L-R is full of sound so the stereo receiver decodes it just fine. We didn't notice anything in our headphones or in the studio, but the silence detector kept shutting off the transmitter every time we read the weather report.
Somewhat related: It used to be pretty common for poorly produced local TV commercials to have a mic input that was, for some reason, out of phase. If you were watching TV through a surround sound decoder, you would suddenly have someone selling you a car from the rear channels. My audio-obsessed teenage self used to hear this and think, who is out there making content to air on television and can't tell when their audio is out of phase??? haha
even the console was bored to death by the inaccurate weather reports.. 🤣🤣🥳🤡
This video takes me back to my first job in the mid 1980s working at a commercial AM radio station where I lived called 3GL (Geelong, Victoria, Australia). The backup system for when communication between the station broadcast studios and the transmitter failed was an auto reverse cassette deck located in the transmitter room with music and station IDs recorded onto a TDK D cassette that was basically left playing 24/7. Audio input to the transmitter would switch automatically from the remotely located studio feed to the cassette deck when silence was detected for a preset period.
If nothing else, this was a testament to the durability of both the cassette deck and the cassette itself. The humble TDK D is indeed a VERY durable cassette!
As the ad jingle went: Muuusic lives on Tee Dee Kay-ayyy!
@@markiangooley and the legendary "TDK Does Amazing Things to my System"
Do you remember where the studio and transmitter were? I'd be interested in having a drive by to see what's there these days!
I would really like to know the model number of that cassette deck. In 24/7 operation, I guess even the most high-end decks would go South, beyond economical repair within a year, probably sooner. If it was a Sony with a ferrite&ferrite head, or an Akai with GX head, the head itself would probably last a few years in 24/7 operation, but the capstan and motor bearings, pinch rollers, idlers, etc. would still wear out pretty quick. And honestly, it would be a pretty silly system design to do it that way. The silence detection should start the deck, not just switch over to its continuously playing signal. If the deck had no remote control input, it is easy enough to solder some wires to the play and stop buttons and operate them with relays.
The advantage of the system playing 24x7 is that you can monitor that the backup system is working. If it only gets spun up once every couple of years, there's the risk of it having silently died in the intervening time.
There's also the advantage that if something happens in the studio (eg fire alarm), you can just cut over without worrying about starting something up.
Broadcasting silence can actually be worse than turning off the transmitter since you can end up in violation of your licence if the station ident doesn't go out often enough.
Thanks for this Mat, amazing technical breakdown! Those tapes are radio history. I imagine there’s more sat languishing in store cupboards in some of the big sites waiting to be dusted off.
Two of my favourite UA-cam creators in one video! Thanks for the fascinating collaboration Lewis and Mat!
Love your content mate
Surprising that you two haven't teamed up before to be honest!
The Conet Project. Wullenweber arrays. The Buzzeh.
My Dad was responsible, back in the late 1940's, for "holding music" at the BBC when it only broadcast two radio channels (the Home and Light services). I believe it was when he was at University, sponsored by the BBC, during his vacations. His job was to listen to one of the channels, and if there was a break in transmission, to play a record instead (vinyl, not tape) until the transmission came back on air. He said it was incredibly boring, but with the benefit that being incarcerated with the girl who was monitoring the other channel was no bad thing. 😊
Aannd that's how you were made.
@@sfmc98 Unlikely. Dad's story was from the 1940's, while I was born in the 1950's. That's a long gestation period.
What an utterly fascinating thing.
I’ve never heard anything quite like this before and I find it really interesting. Would love to find more backup tapes like this and just listen through from start to finish.
The alternate versions of music selections make this far from boring, and as a musician myself, just hearing all those live players get together for something that really shouldn’t be heard very often is amazing to me.
Despite the age of the tape it’s mostly well preserved as well, which is great to hear.
Nice touch getting Lewis on the video as well, his stuff is incredibly captivating and he’s a wealth of knowledge.
On the Star Wars A New Hope Sound Track there's a hidden Track with John Williams and the Musicians going through a Couple of Takes of the Main Theme. Also on the Haunted Mansion Sound Track there's Tracks of all the unused Speeches for the Ride and Outtakes. Very Cool.
I am right there with ya. Always looking for little trivia and things like this, and had to share it with like minded friends
Fascinating stuff alright. These days, with a modern FM radio transmitter, "Silence detection" is all done in software. The very idea of a backup transmitter or tape to tell listeners what is going on, would be scoffed at. ;) The primary music programme computer simply monitors the output audio, and if something does not go right, and silence is detected past a certain number of seconds, the computer just bumps the next track up and plays it without any DJ intervention at all. Even FREE software like ZaraRadio support this kind of thing. We don't know how lucky we are, considering how hard it was to do stuff like that back in the 60's.
Techmoan & Ringway Manchester TOGETHER! Yay!!! 👍😊👍
I used to work in BBC Radio continuities in the 1980s. It was possible to override the silence detectors and to turn them off if requested by the sound balancer / studio manager / sound mixer / tonmeister (choose appropriate international term) when mixing quiet dramas or music with intended silence or low levels. I suppose the same effect might be achieved by mixing low level HF tone with the programme mix. It's was also possible to toggle the FM Stereo/Mono flag remotely too as it was deemed good operational practise to only enable stereo FM when the source programme was indeed stereo.
Some older people may remember the BBC Micro Show in the 1980s. One of the interesting things I got involved with was broadcasting computer programmes for the ZX Spectrum and the BBC Micro over the air after closedown. This required all the audio processing limiters in the transmitter chain to be disabled each time we broadcast - but it worked quite well.
When I started we would turn off the MF transmitter (Washford Radio Wales 882kHz) overnight and turn it back on again about ½ an hour before the first broadcast in the morning. Someone then worked out it might be better to re-broadcast BBC Radio 2 through the night as it caused less wear and tear on the system by not power cycling a 100kW transmitter.
The reduced power tape was used specifically at 405 line transmission facilities. It mentions adjusting the picture contrast and sound volume controls to compensate for reduced power. This only worked due to the nature of 405 line TV signals having a positive modulated picture and AM sound. Reduced power on 625 line would have been compensated for automatically or would result in a snowy picture, with more severe reductions in strength resulting in potential noise in the sound (identical to a weak FM transmission as the sound is FM) and a loss of color to a completely unviewable picture.
Oh god a TV without an automatic gain control system. No static, no snow, just silence and darkness on channels in which a station isn't transmitting. You'd need to adjust the gain either each time you change the channel. Maybe there would've been TVs with pots for adjusting each channel individually. Sounds barbarian, but I suppose that's what you get with the bleeding edge in the 1930s.
Orange and Lemons was used as a BBC Overseas Service Interval Tune played on SW transmitters before the scheduled service started. It helped listeners find the frequency before the programmes began.
And you just had to learn yourself that that specific tune meant you were listening to the BBC.
I'm a television master control operator in Ohio. Our solution to a "Please Stand By" situation in those days was to record announcements on a "cart," an NAB tape cartridge that auto re-cued. No music. If the situation warranted, you might be instructed to put a record of instrumental music on.
Silence detectors are still in use today, setting off an audible alarm. The latency in digital transmission makes it impossible to monitor the transmitters directly, so we need an automated "wake up" if things go down.
They must've kept this tape on the ready near a tape deck similar to the one you used. A five inch reel of thin tape on a full-sized Ampex of that era could stretch the tape. Too much torque. And broadcast standard tape recording didn't use the reversible two-track format.
Many programs were on 16mm film. The most common cause of a program interruption: the film broke. Whenever that happened... ... ... Please stand by.
I’m at the edge of my seat. As far as I’m concerned this is as interesting as it gets and I appreciate the lack of hyperbole that is so prevalent. And how thoughtful it was to find an explanation from a specialist.
Very interesting. My father was a musician with the 'BBC Northern Ireland Light Orchestra'. Their job was to spend the day recording 'test card' music, as well as programmes to encourage workers to boost their productivity - 'Music While you Work' - and weekly live concerts - 'Friday night is music night'. Orchestra long gone - now amalgamated with the Ulster Orchestra.
Lewis and his channel are absolute gold for people interested in all aspects of radio,.
Thanks, Mat. At some point in the late 1990s BBC Radio 1 was broadcasting a live concert by Glasgow band Mogwai. In one of their songs which went from very loud to very quiet, it got so quiet that the automated system monitoring the broadcast interpreted it as silence and something having gone wrong. This led to the emergency broadcast kicking in. It was nothing like your tape, but a pop song. As far as I can recall, it was a Kylie Minogue song, about as far removed from Mogwai’s post rock stylings as it was possible to be.
It also, in a roundabout way, happened to me. I had a radio show playing heavy metal on Sunday evenings on a pirate radio station in Limerick, Ireland in 1987. One Sunday, having put a record on (Iron Maiden or some such) I went for a pee. When I returned, Rick Astley’s Never Gonna Give You Up was playing. It turned out my record had started skipping and the teenager who hung around the studio because he loved radio had grabbed the nearest record and put it on. Instead of thanking the kid for his quick thinking, I told him off for tainting my show with a mere pop song. Poor kid. I probably killed his love of radio there and then. And I was only a few months out of my teens myself, which in retrospect made it all the worse.
Mogwai being replaced with Kylie Minogue was a pretty similar audio transgression, albeit on a vastly bigger scale.
So you got RickRolled before RickRollin' even became a thing.
@@Bahama3ay Ha! I never thought of it like that, but you’re right, I did. Maybe that was the foundation text of Rickrolling.
This also happened to me! I used to volunteer at a community radio station (Three D Radio in Adelaide, Australia) and had a shift 6-8am Saturdays. It was a little rough for someone enjoying their 20s at the time, and occasionally my body did not wish to cooperate with the on-air requirements. One morning I needed to leave the studio for something a little more "in depth" than a pee. Despite putting on the longest track I could find before departing, the track played out before I could return and automatic silence detection kicked in! Alarms started blaring and an unhappy technician called the studio phone. I made a somewhat panicked return to the airwaves...
@@AlexAngas That’s hilarious. I’m glad I only needed a number one.
The emergency tape was a frequent (unintended) feature of John Peel's shows
You must be one of the few people who can drag out talking about a tape for 30 min but still making it sound interesting.
Not heard time beat for year's. Thanks Matt.
I work in a broadcast facility in Australia, and can confirm what he said about the monitoring of audio - while we don't play any background music or anything during events such as a state funeral (and just deal with the alarms), we constantly monitor the state of audio, video and captioning of off-air transmissions in various places across the country. Still fairly new to the industry, having changed careers from IT a couple of years ago, and still have plenty to learn, but have found it a very interesting field to work in so far. As for the tape recordings - even as someone who grew up in the 90's honestly they bring back memories from when I was young - I grew up in a rural area and remember you could tell if a really bad storm was coming because the ABC would keep switching between the program and its test signal (which consisted of background music playing while the Philips PM5544 test pattern was displayed)
That was interesting. They didn't broadcast test picture, they radiated it. Haven't seen BASF tapes in a while either.
A couple of years ago BBC Radio 3's programme 'Late Junction' had an episode themed around the use of silence in music. It turned out they were very limited in what they could include for the very reason they were afraid they would trigger these silence detectors and be switched off!
I love these "time capsule" videos, fascinating, thanks Mat!
The Oranges and Lemons "suite", a light-hearted tune that repeats itself with slight distortions, kept reminding me of that "Everywhere at the end of time" album. Matt's right, this whole thing is ripe for sampling.
I remember on TV stations that sometimes the big Klystron transmitter tube would have one side go bad. You could still put both the audio and video through the good side but at reduced power. This was done until a new tube could be obtained usually from overseas (outside US). I wrote a program back then that measured the audio and video signals for FCC compliance testing and we would adjust the frequencies if they were drifting too far out (Or after tube replacement). Nothing like having your hair stand up when near those big tubes under power.
That was on UHF stations, much later than this tape. Band 1 405 line transmitters used valves. The cavities required for a 50MHz TV channel would have been enormous!
No outage on Techmoan when it comes to fascinating tech.
Breakdown of a breakdown tape. You always manage to make interesting videos. Obviously you put a lot of effort and research into them. Thank you Mat!
Always thought the birdsong on Big Brother was to add a bit of atmosphere - had no idea there was such a technical reason for it, great video Mat and Lewis
If you heard it during conversations it was often to hide swearing (if pre-watershed) or if the housemates were talking about someone or something that was deemed too sensitive (ie could cause legal proceedings to be brought against C4 or C5 if broadcast etc)
The overnight birdsong, when the housemates were sleeping was quite loud so I always assumed it was to try and wake up people that had fallen asleep watching so they would go to bed proper.
Seems odd to me that you would detect audio silence to make sure there was a broadcast signal when you literally have a heartbeat in the form of a synchronisation pulse every video line.
@@Antireality But you could have a fault where you are just broadcasting black and burst with no information.. the tv in somebody's house would appear to be dead.
@@Antireality I would suspect that the no audio test was just one of several automatic failure alarms. During transport at each hop the video and audio signals were likely split out, amplified, recombined and then re-transmitted on a different frequency, and this process could lose one or the other or both and even potentially still have sync but with no actual video. It is also possible that it was just a reuse of existing systems for radio audio broadcasts rather than developing a new system.
"This is a journey into sound" 🤣 Stereophonic sound? Thank for bringing this memorys back into my brain - and bringing a big smile in my face! So: keep the frequency clear - and thank you for showing this incredible peace of history!
A journey which along the way will bring to you new colours, new dimensions, new values!
Although I am going to have "Oranges and Lemons" stuck in my head all day, this video was actually very entertaining!
From my experience it doesn’t go away - although I’ve had a lot more exposure.
Fortunately, Mat's ending music wiped that away for me, but _that_ will be stuck in my head for hours now instead! 🤣
A local pop FM station used to have a classical music show on Sundays and sometimes they'd forget to turn off the "dead air backup" system. When that happened and there was a long pause between performances, the backup system would suddenly play "Safety Dance" by Men Without Hats.
Techmoan and Ringway Manchester together on the biggish screen!!! It gives me the same kind of exhilaration as the
Look and Learn and Victor dropping on the doormat on a Saturday morning....thanks Fellers.
I worked at Winterhill Lancashire for the ITA in 1968 as a junior engineer in training. We had full power two sets of VHF 405 line Transmitters which were used alternately for transmission keeping total useage hours even. If the transmission set broke down it was a mad scramble whilst the transmitter warmed up to the basement and switch the ariel feeder on the combining unit over to the other transmitter. Going to blacks and no sound were the big no no. I cannot remember any automated equipment, may be the BBC who were co-sited did, the ITA had human qualty control monitoring to the second and logged, As a government organsation transmitting commercial advertising content we had to ensure where the problem originated and exactly how long. The providing studio did the same. Our control rooms were directly linked by dedicated phone lines plus a dedicated phone line to the GPO swiching centre. They ran a three shift system, at the evening one shift with the main duty of coontrol monitoring. Day two shifts on control and monitoring the other on maintenance. ITA for transmitter anousements used gramphone records and vision a slide in the flyspot scanner. There was also a CRT type unit in the racks which had a specilal anode instead of a screen with the normal service message etched on. The electron beam scanned this anode reading the meassage into a video signal. All mid 1950's technology and high maintenance. There was only one tape recorder an old Ferrograph now stuck away in a corner. It used to on continuious standby carrying the doomsday message of imminent nuclear armagedon part of operation Blackburn.
Well done Mat, another fine example of how to turn a potentially boring item into a fascinating and educational piece. Thank you.
BTW, I used to help run a local FM radio station and we monitored the TX output with an FM tuner, the output from that went into a laptop - primarily used as the "Ofcom" monitor (a requirement for local stations). There was a drop out detector software running on that, so if the TX stopped outputting for any reason, the software would alert the support team via SMS and Email. No backup transmitters though.
In 1965 I worked in a GPO exchange as a apprentice telephone enginneer and if you dialed the wrong code for example if you missed out 0161 at the begging of dialing a voice would tell you to put the phone down and redial with the 0161.
It was pre recorded on a magnetic tape, the tape was stuck on to a alloy drum about 12 inch diameter.
In those days they where still using vacuum tubes for amplification and the exchange was very toasty.
I remember the "You need dial only the last seven digits for calls within the London area. Please redial omitting the figures 0 1." Announcement. Heard it so many times it's committed to memory for ever
everything about that era of telephone exchanges was chonky, the tech and the buildings that had to support it. There is one in NYC that looks like the building was designed to survive a nuclear war. 33 Thomas Street in NYC. But there is a reason that the analog era of the landline phone had endless tropes about everything else going wrong but the phones still work.
@@filanfyretracker That was a means for the Bell System to milk their monopoly. Like utilities such as the power company today, the Bell System was allowed to take profits for their investors as a percentage of their cost (cost-plus). Increasing the cost, by making heavy phones and heavy buildings, increased their profits. When they were broken up, equipment costs dropped by half overnight, and nobody cared that their phones were lighter and were made of plastic. It was all something pushed onto ratepayers by AT&T.
@@filanfyretracker All the exchanges in Italy are like bomb shelters, with thick concrete walls and big steel blast doors dotted throughout, most of which seem not to have moved for many years. One site I worked at was even built into the side of a mountain and looked like a James Bond villain's lair.
When I was at school, my favourite show on the telly was Do Not Adjust Your Set - it was amazing, funny and .. er - amazing. I remember racing home so I wouldn't miss it, turning on the TV, and when it warmed up, half the screen was black and half was white. I thought my mum had broken it, but it turned out that the Emley Moor transmitter had fallen down (that could also have been my mum's fault). I wondered for years why I didn't just see 'snow', why it was a black and white screen, and this goes some way to explaining it. Very interesting video!
I was in the same situation! - it was 19th March 1969. No ITV or BBC 2 signal. VHF BBC 1 from Holme Moss was still on air. I was sure the TV had failed and had the back off rattling the tuner and aerial connections around - then my mother heard the news on the radio 🤣🤣
I can assure you that there was no signal at all from Emley Moor, the antennas were very much grounded! and our television only had snow. If yours had a black / white band I suspect you were tuned to a repeater from Emley Moor and the repeater signal loss had switched in, or you had a smart TV 😂.
@@barrieshepherd7694 Good thought re the repeater - I was in Scarborough, so quite a way from Emley Moor.
Love Ringway Manchester, just discovered his channel a few months back and cant get enough!
Its always so cool you see two of your fav channels unexpectedly do a collab. Ringway does such a good job with his channel.
I never really thought about radios and transmitters until one day i found out about the secret number stations transmissions which Ridgeway has a couple very entertaining and informative videos so much so i instantly subbed, binged all his content and found the subject matter to be fascinating!
Working within broadcasting in Denmark, it bring back lots of memories how we used to do this the "BBC Way".
There are a group on the web founded by ex BBC engineers from BBC Wood Norton, they know all about the way the BBC was working.
The Wood Norton site, was the main center for education of BBC technicians, and many of the guys there was the BBC guru within television and radio.
Been there several times for tech training, funny place. It was in the old times the main backup site for BBC outside London, if the BBC main site in London was hit during WW-II.
The site are still there, but not able to tell how much its in use now. 🙈🙉🙊
I have had a truly horrific week, and this was just the sort of... mental poultice I needed; right at the intersection of intellectually interesting/stimulating, and calming with zero opinions, snark or sarcasm. Thank you!
Thanks for opening that time capsule Mat and a big thumbs up for the collaboration with Lewis, another of my favorite YT channels. Love the antenna shots @RingwayManchester!
Thank you SO much for this Mat! It was a *fabulous* trip back in time; in technology, and also to hear good diction and enunciation! This should be a training tape for ALL new announcers!
I've always loved the BBC Radiophonics workshop sound. At Philips they used to house something similar in their NatLab back in the 50s and 60s. Dick Raaijmakers and Tom Dissevelt used to work on some wacky music before synthesisers were even a thing. They just cut tape and banged on spools to get the sounds they wanted.
I've been to the NatLab before and it's mainly a theater nowadays.
I was a volunteer at a community radio station. In the early 1980s. Our studios were located several suburbs away from our transmitter. The studio would transmit our audio to our transmitter via a microwave link. Should either end of the microwave link fail, then the transmitter site would detect the silence and automatically play music to announce the problem. I never saw the transmitter site so I'm not sure how this was done. But I imagine it was based on real to real tape. As we used tape for pretty much everything. We also used a looping tape inside a cart. For the 7 second delay, you need to have when you received phone calls over the air.
I was listening to talk radio a couple of weeks ago on an analogue radio and suddenly it went dead for about two or three minutes. Then it suddenly came back on. There was nothing like this that kicked in so does this mean that the system is no longer in use?
Sorry, talksport not talk radio.
@@trevorbrown6654 It means the transmitter failed completely, so nothing could be broadcast. The antenna tower being struck by lightning is the most common cause of this type of failure. When power goes off at the transmitter you will get noise ("static") until their emergency diesel generator starts up and takes the load. This can take a couple of minutes.
The backup system that plays from an onsite recording (tape in years gone, it's digital now) is still in use. It is considered essential as silence will cause many listeners to find another station, and they might not come back.
At the commercial station I worked at (as a technician), music was played from discs. CD's and digital hadn't been invented then. There was a backup at the transmitter that played automatically on loss of studio audio. It was a long playing cartridge, not reel to reel. But if the technician/engineer advised the fault would continue (ie it was beyond his control) a presenter (in Britain, = announcer) was expected to grab the shift's carts (for other readers: carts = tape loop cartridges that played the commercials, station ID & jingles, news preamble & the like - same sort of thing as the old Lear 8 track cartridge once used in cars, but 2 track or single track and much better quality), jump in his car, and hightail it to the transmitter, where there was a basic console, mike, turntable, and cart player and a stack of records so he could broadcast his show, somewhat makeshift, from there. If the technician was already there or arrived first, and there was nothing he could do to fix the fault, he was expected to play records and a "we apologize" cart on the console but was not permitted to broadcast his own voice. Trust me, you don't want my voice coming out your stereo speakers!
Everyone hoped we would get studio programme back on air before the next presenter's shift, otherwise we would have a long day and a non-technical boss hell bent on conducting an inquisition. Those advert revenues and the probable loss of make commercial station bosses very toey.
In case of legal disputes or squawks from the government regulator, commercial radio stations had to keep the last 30 days of transmitted audio. This was done on a special reel-to-reel tape recorder on which the half-inch wide tape moved so slowly you could barely tell it was moving. One tape was good for 7 days of 24 hour programme. God knows what the replay audio quality was like. I never witnessed a replay.
So, this isn't one of those heart-pumping, thrill-a-minute tape deck repair videos?
I too was disappointed by the sedate nature of this video. I yearn for the drama of finagling a bit of new foam backing into an exotic tape cartridge, and the breathless anticipation of replacing a small rubber belt. Will he have a belt of the correct length, and will it even be possible to install? We can hope next week will be a return to the action we crave!
This brought back memories of a big ITV screw up when they first transmitted the Inspector Morse episode of "The Silent World of Nicholas Quinn" back in 1987.
Morse enters a classroom for the deaf with sign language being used. But because it was completely silent for about 30 seconds it must have triggered a silent transmission warning which caused the transmission to stop & the announcer to apologise for the breakdown in service. After a few minutes the programme continued with probably a lot of red faces at ITV!
HEY!! Two of my favorite Brits; Mat and Lewis! Thanks guys...
That song always reminds me of George Orwell's 1984. Seems weirdly appropriate for a set of 1960s announcements.
Being extremely interested in radio and being a radio ham myself, I'm actually subscribed to Ringway Manchester. Great to see him on the channel.
Yet more fascinating insights into a world of engineers that we (mere) mortals seldom hear about. Thank you!
In my days of youth when I was an avid Radio Hallam fan (194 FM in Sheffield and local areas) they used to turn off the tx at midnight when programmes finished and play what I was told were 'Engineers Noises'. One night I taped the 'noises' from around midnight until the C120 ran out or required turning over (thinking of thin tape as a C120 was really thin to enable 2 hours of recording time). I'd heard the music played as I used to listen to the last show upto midnight when I went to bed and invariably fell asleep and was woken (or dreamed) of music in the middle of the night which would be these tunes playing to keep the transmitter awake, I presume until Johnny Moran spoke to the world at 6 am with the start of the breakfast show.
There's still one tune I have never heard again, except when Jimmy Young once played part of it as an up-to-the-news filler one day and he never back-announced it so to this day I don't know its title! In the years since then I have discovered the delights of Jean-Jacques Perrey and I think it'll be one of his tunes which are wonderful and dated and cheesy but really really good tunes. I need to wade through more of his catalogue and I feel I will find it.
On a similar note of Engineers Noises, I recall (again in my dreamy state before needing to wake up for school) hearing through the ether a wonderful tune which I later found out was (again) a George Martin composition, called 'Theme One', played as a station ident before the radio channel came to life with talking and music. This tune haunted me for years as I could never find out what it was until I located it on a Circle of Sound Sampler (12") and there it was. Theme One. (ua-cam.com/video/0EVpvrDeVg8/v-deo.html ) I love that tune. Thanks to UA-cam I can hear that whenever I want and also the two tracks of Ray Cathode, 'Time Beat' and 'Waltz In Orbit' (the latter having similarities to the original 'Ask The Family' theme tune, a programme which incidentally I was on twice in 1969 and 1970 c/o my sister writing in to volunteer our family as participants!)
I hope you keep finding these super items from the past, they're endlessly entertaining 😊👍
Matt, You really have become an integral part of my Saturday morning routine.
A cup of coffee in bed on a Saturday morning watching your latest video is a great way to start the weekend and, regardless of subject matter, never ceases to be entertaining.
Keep up the great work and I hope you never have 'reduced power' or a 'standard breakdown'.
This! I love Saturday mornings with a cup of Tea and a good Techmoan video to watch.
Love these gems, as a musician the voice sections are so useful for electronic music “The names have been changed to protect the innocent” Cheers Mat :-)
That tape player used in the video is gorgeous, what a piece of kit!
I was a BBC Transmitter Engineer from 1980-1990 when moved to another department and left altogether in 1993. I don't quite agree with everything Lewis said, however this tape would have been used on the 405-line network. At Crystal palace we still had this equipment in the old control room until 1982 before the new MIC (Monitoring and Information Centre) was implemented there. There was a slide scanner to display a still picture and a tape player, this would have been used at Crystal Palace in case of failure of the Post office "tubes" (co-axial cables) that brought the vision to the transmitter site, the sound was brought over by a post office music site. The 405-line transmitters at CP were Marconi units and consisted of two parallel sound and two parallel vision transmitters. This was most unusual, most sites has a main transmitter and a separate backup "CG-1" transmitter. When the UHF roll-out started the main stations were all of the parallel design. Medium Power stations (like Ridge Hill, Heathfield, Sandale (BBC2 only) and the like used a unique "multiples" design, normally they would operate as a single-ended transmitter with 2 klystron amplifiers (sound and vision) and if an amplifier failed a "multiplex" (sound and vision) signal would be fed into the remaining good amplifier that would operate in linear mode at about -7dB. It was an interesting design from Marconi as it reduced the capital cost quite significantly. In my day the only "silence detection" system used was for Local Radio, TV broadcasting audio integrity was maintained with a 23kHz tone and that tone would pulse if the transmitter was carrying a regional opt-out to prevent it being used as a reserve feed for a transmitter in another region. When I was at Crystal Palace the 405-line Transmitter was fed from a 625-405 line standards converter, we had both an analogue frame store device and a newer digital converter, this was standard practice across the network by then. Interestingly I was STE Antennas for the SE area (included Sutton Coldfield) back then, so I might just have know the rigger who had that tape. In the 1980s the Sutton Coldfield 405-line transmitter (build by metropolitan-Vickers) was the oldest TV transmitter still in service in the world. I just about remember it, the space was used for re-engineering the Band II FM transmitters in about 1984. I ran the projects for the Re-Engineering at Sandale (Cumbria)and Tacolneston (Norfolk) between 1985 and 1988, Sutton Coldfield was identical except it had Pye 20kW amplifiers (2 x 20kW) where as my stations had Marconi Amplifiers. During my time I did have to visit Sutton Coldfield as part of an investigation into valve reliability, my colleague from head office at Grafton house and I (representing Capital Projects) discovered the issue and re-wrote a maintenance procedure as a result. The reason the tape advises turning up the contrast would be because the positive vision modulation of the 405-line system and relatively poor performance of the AGC circuits of television sets of the day. The advice on sound would have also been correct as the sound modulation was AM. Remember that the BBC Alexandra Palace transmitter had gone live with a public service only a year or two after the invention of FM and by that time it would have been too late to change.
They used oranges and lemon because it's the only London related nursery rhyme that isn't based on a disater of some sort. It was either that or London's Burning or London Bridge is falling down.
It's not all that great with oranges and lemons because someone is still owed 5 farthings and has no idea when they'll be paid back.
Its always awesome to see one UA-camr you like feature another UA-camr you like. When I heard you say Ringway I nearly spat out my drink.
I remember hearing about one time Radio 3 wanted to broadcast John Cage's 4'33", and they had to effectively bypass the silence detection system so the piece wouldn't be interrupted by an apology message!
For a time, "Don't you know who I am?" by Happyland was among the most played songs on Triple J because it was in moderately high rotation at the same time as being the first song on the emergency CD. Around the same time, Song 2 by Blur was similarly highly played because it was short enough to fit in before the hourly news.
In the long gone days of AM Top 40 music stations, playing a bit of an instrumental track to fill in a minute or 90 seconds before the network news at the top of the hour was a well established thing. I recall hearing airchecks doing this with Classical Gas, Soulful Strut or instrumental version of Grazing In The Grass. Good stuff.
Too many comments to check, so sorry if this is repeat information. The BBC Television Service is BBC1, before it was called BBC1, so that dates the tape to before April 1964. Hope this is of some use :)
It was BBC1 before it was BBC1?
The (slightly later) rack mounted "audio silence detectors" were called "Programme Fail Monitors" in BBC parlance. Nobody has said anything yet about the 78rpm "Teddy Bears' Picnic" record by Henry Hall and his Orchestra that was used as an audio source for broadcast test at BBC AM radio transmitters in the "early days". Every radio transmitting station had a copy! This recording eventually became SO popular, it was often a favourite on children's record request programmes!
Thanks for sharing this audio find. What a nice surprise to hear Lewis over here too.
"Reduced power" or "Standard breakdown" "sounds like my typical week". Made me laugh out loud. Cheers mate.
Well, that was quite exciting - maybe there should have been a trigger warning after all :) . Interesting to hear the advice on the tape about increasing contrast in the case of a weak TV signal. This was from the days when we had a TV system with positive modulation (VHF/405), so the picture went grey rather than snowy if the signal was weak (as would happen with UHF/625, a system with negative modulation). At least, that's how I understand it (and I can just about remember seeing it happen). Obviously, someone who knows what they're talking about could explain it better.
Yes. I latched on that too and also the advised turning up of the viewers TV volume control. Never an issue for later UHF/625 line FM sound carriers, but applicable maybe to old 405 line TV's with AM sound. Presumably, the very basic 1950's BBC only fixed channel TV's (TV's sold in the SC service area were pre-tuned to band 1, channel 4*) would not have had, nor really needed, any sound or vision AGC circuitry.
* No, not Channel 4!
When I was a child , my father gave me many reel to reel tapes for my tape recorder. There was a piece of music on one of them that has stuck in my head since which I thought would be virtually impossible to trace . Now, after 50 years, you have given me the answer in Time Beat by Ray Cathode . Brilliant , thank you so much ! It is now in my Spotify library. I had a similar experience on your channel a few years ago by rediscovering Frank Pourcel and The Days Of Pearly Spencer which was featured on my favourite video of yours so far ( the Kenny Lynne cart saga) . I love this channel so much 👏🏼
I appreciate the fact that mr. Mat thought of the sampling folks out there and supplied a clear recording of the potential sample. I know that I sampled it, but I don't know if I ever make something with that sample good enough to share. I would love to hear some bass house or something with that sample...
I love the Ringway crossover. Great video!
I love how you preserved the style of Lewis in its segment, with all the photos and captions.
I LOVE Ringway! This is like a 2 for 1 bonus video. Great and informative video. Thanks for posting. You never fail to find sometbing cool to talk about. =)
The difference between the fault announcements then and those we sometimes hear now is really interesting. Quite apart from the accent and the more formal manner of speech, there seems to be a lot more information as to what is going on in the 60s tape. I really like that (particularly on the low power side) they went to the effort to explain what was causing the fault and some of the technical aspects. These days we’re far more likely to be left in the dark (literally and metaphorically) with a simple “whoops, there’s a problem. We’re trying to fix it so stay there!” As a technology fan I’d quite like for there to be an option to hear about exactly what they think is causing the problem. I’d certainly prefer it to some of the music selections they choose!
I detest the stupid error messages that software and online services tend to use these days, along the lines of "oops, things went all silly", trying to make the technology "human" and in doing so actually making it seem like we're all dealing with imbeciles.
In those days, TV and radio was the only form of live information and entertainment at home, and the sole source of video. Remember, BBC is governmental and had a near-monopoly on TV _and_ radio in the UK. Frequent outages would induce calls to end their monopoly and license fees, so they had to take a very formal approach. (Same thing happened with AT&T, GPO and similar phone monopolies, they made a big fuss over reliability) Today, we have many more alternatives, e.g. going to a different streaming service, putting on a VHS/DVD, arguing on forums or playing a video game instead, trying to watch on your phone.
@@paul_boddieThe problem with providing more information is that "normal" people get terrified when they hear something that might be technical, so it's a fine line between telling the nerds what's wrong vs traumatizing the rest of the audience.
I could not agree more. It seems that, in the late 20th century, things devolved from where you were expected to know your ground wire from a hole in the ground, to not wanting to frighten anyone with a technical phrase, to treating everyone like drooling toddlers. This coincided with a move to keep all the gory details behind the curtain, and present a polished image to the outside world. I absolutely hate it.
Luckily, while the dumbing-down is still prevalent (in lieu of actual personality -- which, IMO, is totally different and quite OK), I think we're drifting toward a turning point in transparency. Here's hoping, anyway. Although, if being honest about faults has any ability to get the organization in question in trouble, our litigious society will ruin that _right quick._
I always come away from your videos feeling a wee bit smarter and better informed. Also, aware of something that I wasn't aware of previously, or thinking about something I knew of in a different light. I can't give a greater compliment than that. Thank you! And thanks for the link to a Ringway Manchester - I hold great interest in radio communications history, numbers stations, etc., so this is a goldmine for me lol.
I'm in Sydney, Australia. A commercial broadcaster here - 2GB - had a similar system. I remember hearing the broadcast stop and maybe 15 seconds later a backup tape started with station ID and music. I must have heard it quite a few times as I got to recognise it. The commentators mentioned that this had to be bypassed when there was a minutes silence for a memorial etc. Cheers.
I assume you are from the future?
Sydney here too and 2GB still has that. I haven't heard the emergency tape start in a while on 2GB but around 20 years ago it started with an ID then a message that they were experiencing "technical difficulties" - the first song on it was Breezin' by George Benson. But same system, although the silence detection now kicks in after 30 seconds of program fail. They also now feed a low tone to the transmitter during the 1 minute silences for Remembrance Day and Anzac Day to avoid it triggering.
The reference to Oranges and Lemons in '1984' always had me wondering what the tune and cadence was, well now I know!
I remember as a child here in the states in the 1980s that there would be a still slide shown which read something similar to "Technical Difficulties/Please Standy By" with no audio other than a voice every so often that said the same thing as the slide text but also added "not the fault of your set".
I love things like this. It's just fascinating hearing these old messages. There is something almost eerie about hearing it now. These videos are like therapy, something about them is very nourishing to the soul.
One of the problems of playing content locally at a transmitter site was getting out of the tape and back to the main programme. Easy if someone’s on site but impossible if the tape was triggered by silence automatically and there’s no one to switch away from the tape back to the programme. As time went on, money needed to be saved so transmitters became unstaffed.
Systems became more sophisticated and tones were used to detect the presence of the main line from London. On AM these tones were mixed over the top of the programme on the lines to the transmitters but were filtered out so the listeners didn’t hear them as the top audio frequency on AM in the UK is 4.5Khz and the tones were above this. If the transmitter detected the loss of the tone, it went to its standby and automatically returned to the main feed once the tone was detected again on the main feed. This was a much better system than silence detection as silence could be broadcast without transmitters switching over (eg during the 2 minute Armistice silence).
In late 1980's Finnish Artist Tommi Lindell made track "Maan Tapa" that had some kind of signal in the end, that caused radio transmitters to shut down. It was banned from radio after first play.
Ringway Manchester is awesome! Everything you ever wanted to know about number stations!
So wonderful to her Lewis! Ringway Manchester is brilliant!
In the US it was prohibited to broadcast dead air for a long amount of time. They use a silence sensor circuit and would shut down the transmitter. Use a lot with remote transmitter. Thanks for the video.
This must be from before April 1964 as the announcer refers to the 'BBC Television Service' which was a typical way to describe BBC Television before BBC2 was launched.
I'm glad Ringway Manchester explained how we were able to hear the tape if the transmitter was down!
I suspect these are actually personal dubs made by Mart's relative rather than the actual tape used at the transmitter site. It wasn't normal BBC procedure to use half-track mono as it didn't meet broadcast spec, they would have required separate full-track mono tapes for the Transmitter Fault and Reduced Power reels, which would also have been far more operationally convenient as there would be no need to flip and rewind for the Reduced Power one. An individual making their own dubs, on the other hand, would be far more likely to try and economise by putting both on a single reel in half-track mono.
My thoughts exactly and I doubt if the BBC would use thin tape for this purpose. I'd think they would use standard tape (I thought that was all they ever used) as it was robust and was easier to cut/join in an editing block if needed.
I agree. The tape is marked as a Master, so this tape would not be loaded at the transmitter but full-track copies made from this master would be loaded up ready to go.
@@bradmcmahon3156 I'm not convinced that "master" in this sense means anything other than it being the first personal dub. There's no official BBC identification or other markings on the tape, no cue sheet with the music copyright details etc. The actual masters would have been supplied on individual reels (almost certainly metal spools) with their necessary paperwork, and wouldn't have been on such thin consumer-grade tape.
It's also unlikely that the tapes would have been routinely sitting on a machine on standby; transmitter issues were never *that* much of an emergency that breakdown tapes needed to be ready to play instantly, and having two expensive tape machines at a transmitter site would likely have been considered financially unjustifiable. Once any fault had been noted, investigation would be carried out to see if it could be fixed without needing to go into breakdown mode or radiate any apology announcement.
This reminds me. In history and archaeology it's not the big events with the famous people that are the most concern necessarily when it comes to research. I mean sure, that gets the press (and often, the funding) and whatnot, and the events are important for context, motivations, and time tracking, but often the most troublesome and culturally important stuff is how day to day people lived, what they used; little cultural artifacts that nobody thought to preserve because they were so mundane. What's mundane now will eventually be of great interest to future historians. Everyone (figuratively speaking) knows about the major kings and wars, but how did the Johnny Regulars and Mary Mundanes live, what sort of standard of living did they have, what tools did they use, and techniques were standard? What were the regular people being taught; how did they communicate with each-other? What about the cultural practices that weren't big spectacles? What sort of tools the average person used say more about how most people in an area lived, rather than how their fancy swords looked and were used. The fancy sword tells one story, yes, and can give hints about the wider culture at the time, but most people didn't have fancy swords. The way the average person lived and what they knew tells more about the culture than the exceptional events but unfortunately there is often very little preserved knowledge and evidence of normal day to day material. For the same reason you don't write out a detailed description of every last boring task you and your family do, never mind preserving it carefully in the event that you do record it (say, as a list of chores; somehow I doubt that will be preserved in a family history scrapbook).
So yes, mundane stuff like this breakdown/low power message and how those systems worked is interesting in that context at least.
Ex BBC engineer here. Oranges & Lemons was the formal Station Ident signal, originally mainly for the Long-wave radio Transmitter of the BBC, but later used more generally. These appear to have been from a TV transmitter. The audio ident was a system predating RDS and digital station ID systems using Vits or whatever, and was intended to allow someone listening in to easily positively ID the station. Originally such Audio Ident tunes were played out at set times of day so that someone listening on a schedule could quickly verify the station.
CAMEO FROM RINGWAY MANCHESTER! AWESOME!
Love both of your channels
I worked at Wenvoe in the 1970s as a Technical Assistant so am speaking from experience. There are a number of inaccuracies in this, the TV service was not 24 hours, so the transmitters were not staffed 24/7. The original 405 line transmitter main stations were all manually operated, there was no automatic changeover or switching from silence detectors, the main and reserve transmitters were always co-sited, and shared a single aerial with changeover switches at ground level. Later installations (e.g. Wenvoe ch13 for BBC Wales) had 2 transmitters in parallel rather than a main and backup so there was no break in transmission in the event of a failure on one transmitter.
My fire alarms kept going off after I thought they were fixed, this video helped calm my heart down after that ordeal.
immediately after hearing the Techmoan lost tape disclaimer "if you're looking for something that's going to get your adrenaline going, well this is not the video you're looking for..." my adrenaline got going. This was awesome, thanks!
Fascinating as always. Thank you so much for sharing.
Great video, Excellent collaboration with Lewis. Kudos to both of you..!!
Fascinating video Mat, and good to hear Lewis - I immediately thought of him when the 'reduced power warning massage played 😀. I guess Sporadic E played its part in reducing the relay picture quality back then too.
interesting that in the UK they'd say "we have a breadown", whereas in the USA it's "we're experiencing technical difficulties"
Here comes your nineteenth nervous breakdown.
Cool seeing Lewis on here. I found his channel about a year ago, and thanks to him, i know that i have TWO! of the old Skyway Relay microwave towers near me. One a couple miles from work (one county over), and another right in the middle of my home city's downtown. Satellite shoes they still have the giant horn antenna on them, and the other I've been driving by for years but didnt know it was some old, unused sustem.
RingwayManchester is a great channel. Glad to see a crossover!
Here in Adelaide, the ABC will use the sound of the flag fluttering in the wind when they have "a minute's silence" to prevent the silence alarms going off in master contol. I thought that was a clever choice