TV Breakdown Appreciation Thread

I was operating UKI-1 for the London Olympics!
I think it is now used by SIS for downlinking at either Milton Keynes or Salford.
I agree that 1982 sounds about right for its first OB. The IBA had UKI-2, I don't know if that still exists?
Here is another picture of UKI-1
http://www.bmanor.co.uk/pics/UKI1_unloading_in_Africa.jpg

I remember now there was an SD reserve of BBC One FTA at 0.8w

You're assuming Ericsson had downlinking facilities at their site, very unlikely as that's not really their role.

The last part of your story sounds very strange - not that I don't believe it you understand, it's just the reasoning (?). ITN having a failure of two or more SPG's - I'd have just gone around to the spares store taking out numerous bits of kit capable of generating the pulses and simply over patched it in - all very strange, but obviously something had gone very wrong somewhere.

Re your last point - In the late 80's pretty much all the Itv stations would have had synchronisers on their incoming lines and synced ITN to them no matter what syncs ITN were generating- so still a sync roll I'm afraid!

BTW, we used to very occasionally compare our subcarrier SPG frequencies to the BBC's off -air signal (Just to make sure the BBC were still up to snuff he says tongue in cheek!).

Last picture I saw of it was in the satellite farm at Salford.

BT still have one earth station located at Madley in Herefordshire. That is its only one nowadays.

BBC Points West fell off the air as recently as 18 months ago, as a result of an 'SPG failure'. There's a video somewhere of the report they ran the following evening shot in the CAA. Difficult to tell what the problem really was, but the fact the camera pointed at main and standby Trilogy SPGs, with an Evertz changeover unit between them, I'd say the original c/o unit (presumably Trilogy's !) had failed.

I don't know what was happening at ITN, but remember that it was fairly close to them going on air.
They would have to have been struggling if they were ringing us, and there was no time for a chat!
As for the off air thing, maybe Thames just happened to be in sync with the BBC that night?

If it had been in the early 80's, ie before the widespread introduction of synchronisers, I could well imagine Thames genlocking to ITN who in turn would have been in sync with the BBC for the reasons you explain. (THS and LWT had permanent feeds of ITN for teletext distribution reasons by the way).

I guess we'll never know after all this time and it's hardly important, but an interesting story nonetheless - thanks.

As an aside, we had a number of 1U 'failure' units mounted in strategic places. The internal alarm outputs of numerous devices (certainly including the Trilogy SPG's) were hardwired to these units and in the event of a failure an audio/visual alarm would go off on the monitoring panel. It was very useful - if you heard an alarm go off, you looked at the panel and it would tell you straightaway what piece of kit had initiated the alarm.

The panels could be daisy chained so, for example, the first panel alarm might simply indicate a failure in a particular area, you'd go to that area and the alarm panel there would tell you the precise bit of kit generating the alarm. Very useful in a big technical set up. Still made by someone I think, although quite a few will be coming up as second hand units later in the year!

How did that work logistically? Were there permanent circuits from the BBC to ITN or was there a very quick lines booking made with BT?

A UK Gold one here from 2003, fault occurs at 2:23

https://youtu.be/jHTuAuZlPtY