The TV Question Amnesty Thread

I do have one question not Stricly TV but has the BBC ever tried to take over Manx Radio and make it part of the BBC network.

Why would they do that? It's the commercial operators that buy out the smaller stations, not the BBC.

Though people forget, the BBC was originally formed by the GPO initiating a shotgun marriage of wireless manufacturers, to create a single entity to administer the scores of licence applications from groups wishing to start radio stations?

Yes I had to do that. But rather than turning off the emergency tape which would leave the silence detector alarming after 2 minutes it was done by plugging tone into the silence detector itself. Making sure you went into the correct couple of jacks, and didn't feed tone into the listen jacks of the distribution.....

I'm presuming when you see transmitter coverage maps like this one of Sutton Coldfield post DSO:

(From MB21 , uploaded to Metropol - click for bigger)

The shapes are based on the geography of the region as to whether the signal can get through?

Yes, or of course some patches donote high ground where the signal is also good

That's an old IBA map, the less saturated patches indicate a good signal, but a better signal is available from elsewhere

Officially Grampian is/was the largest region geographically. However due to the terrain there's quite a lot of parts of that region that doesn't have a TV signal and not enough people living there to warrant them.


Although unlike a region like Central they aren't surrounded by land so whereas their coverage area in terms of how far the transmissions go will be a lot larger... most of their overspill is sea!


Yes, the higher the frequency the worse radio signals cope with obstructions like hills so they travel less far.


Hence a station on long wave can cover the whole country, but radio signals on higher frequencies like microwaves are line of sight.

To give itself a presence? The Isle of Man is more populous than Guernsey which has it's own BBC Station.

How do TV schedules handle the clocks going back? Is it just an extra hour of programmes? I know Bingo Night Live had some issues once. Could that type of issue happen with any of the playout systems?

[quote="Inspector Sands" pid="119257]
Officially Grampian is/was the largest region geographically. However due to the terrain there's quite a lot of parts of that region that doesn't have a TV signal and not enough people living there to warrant them.


Although unlike a region like Central they aren't surrounded by land so whereas their coverage area in terms of how far the transmissions go will be a lot larger... most of their overspill is sea!

[quote]

Yes, you could receive Grampian's TX Durris down the English North East coast.
I'm told it just about managed to reach some North Sea oil rigs?

Yes it's just an extra hour of programmes in the autumn, or programmes that look like they're an hour longer than they are in the spring. How listings handle this varies, the BBC Four schedule for yesterday is a good example, there's two programmes scheduled for 1:25am:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/schedules/p00fzl6b/2019/10/26

In terms of playing out the channels, I remember years ago when I worked in playout that programmes were scheduled to run across 2am/1am and the duration adjusted accordingly.

So if there was a film on that was 1 hour 40 mins long, in the spring it would be in the computer as 2 hours 40 in the spring or 40 mins long in the autumn. Then the automation system was put in 'hold' across the clock change in case it got confused and did something odd.


I suspect that the systems today cope a lot more reliably with the change, but you'll normally notice that a lot of channels don't schedule programmes to start at 1am/2am so they straddle the time change

Does the Isle of Man have any variations in what they receive. I don't think they do but whenever I retune I'm given the option to select Isle of Man as the region.