TV Breakdown Appreciation Thread

Would that have meant that, in the example given above from the Granada region, an RBS system for ITV and C4 could've meant that viewers would've got Border TV, who may have been showing something else, and also carrying adverts for businesses who had only paid for the Border TV area, but who were getting free exposure in another ITV region? Hence why there wasn't much RBS for ITV and C4

This talk of transmitter outages has reminded me of the times outages at Crystal Palace made the BBC News site:

January 2002:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/tv_and_radio/1785432.stm

And February 2003: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/tv_and_radio/2728425.stm

Which is probably why in 2005, the BBC asked Arqiva to install standby analogue transmitters at Croydon. Something ITV/4 had had since 2001

Had such a system been in place at the time, theoretically yes. Although I suspect Winter Hill would have relayed Emley Moore or Sutton Coldfield, so viewers would have been more likely to see Yorkshire or Central rather than Border.


With regards to ITV I imagine the major complicating factor in setting up an RBS style system, besides the different ads and programmes, was that each region was it's own company and license. Therefore the system would only have been able to use other transmitters from the same region, which for most regions would have made it useless. Unlike the BBC which had no issue automatically taking the next best region.

Obviously regions could have made agreements between themselves to use each other for RBS, but between the contractual compications of it and the cost I imagine the general consensus was to not bother.

Today it's a very different matter, as now it's all consolidated in to ITV they have no issue putting other regions to air if it means continuity of service. As we saw last year when STV had a power problem that knocked out playout, even they are now happy to put ITV to air if it means something's going out.

More or less yes! C4 RBS for Hannington was Mendip and not the far stronger Crystal Palace, purely because Mendip carried the 'right' regional ads

In the 1980s, I imagine that TVS and HTV would've been two companies that could've used an RBS system. Obviously, with HTV, if a transmitter in the south of Wales went, a feed from the HTV West region could've made it over to Wales by RBS, and vice versa.

Yes, from the mid 00s, ITV transmitters used the Astra 28E feeds for RBS. And for the last 18 months of Westcountry's time on analogue, that was the primary feed for their transmitters, prompted when their Plymouth studio centre was shut. On that occasion the feed was maxed up to 704 x 576

Was the c4 RBS system automatic? I don't ever recall hearing of them testing it.

I'm surprised that there weren't RBS facilities within regions. Eg Belmont being able to RBS Emley.

MSNBC at 2PM ET had a bit of a melt down, the hour started with the host at her home studio and was going to interview a correspondent. They cut to the correspondent early and you could see he was getting ready. For some reason rather than rolling a package or going to something else they threw to a 2 minute commercial break and 10 minutes worth of promos. I don’t know what went wrong, it seemed like the video circuit worked but the correspondent wasn’t cued. If I had to guess the correspondent was ready you could see him standing there but I think he wasn’t hooked up to the IFB. I don’t see why that required 13 minutes of lost air. Maybe there was minimal staffing onsite and took a while for them to troubleshoot the problem.

There also was a bit of an echo in this one anchors home studio. Don’t know if it was technical or if it’s natural as many home studios are in basements.

When I had a tour around the BBC/Crown Castle bit of CP around that time they told us about a big outage one evening in the mid/late 90s. They'd recently replaced their original 1960s transmitters with smaller more modern ones in a new room..... and one evening they all went off.


The mains power to the site was still there but something in the power infrastructure for the new set up had failed. Cant remember howningnitnwas off for but it required an engineer to have to drive to the site to get it back on.

The issue was fixed but.after that as a precaution they had a backup set of transmitters in a container outside and a generator. The feeder for that went through the wall and into the old transmitter room and to the aerial patch bay where it could be patched onto any of the banks of aerials. That way they had a totally seperate system just in case any other oddities to the new set up were found

If only.......
the BBC , being a loose confederation of warring tribes , had all sort of internecine wars about thus... not helped by deals being struck between regional management and BBC transmission without "London" knowing.
On the whole network programmes were maintained under RBS, but there were a few regions who felt that a black screen was better than the regional programme from an adjacent ( usually larger/more urban ) region.
....... the whole thing was compounded by assorted bits of clockwork that had been added over the years which held off going RBS for say two minutes..
And some sites not checking both the incoming line and off air RBS for the source ident .... and then variable rules in what to do if they differed one way or the other. ( again with clockwork delays) ......
in the mid 1990s the "new" one line ITS gave an opportunity to change the decoders which enabled the clockwork to be thrown out and the additional visits to do stereo meant that odd tweak could be done...
And things regularised ..
Although there were the things like the switch at IF at Douglas IoM , between Caldbeck as the main feed ( long time in glorious mono) and WinterHill so they got the Manchester local news ( mono studio but radiating NICAM) ....

I had a poke around in the C4 PIE bay at Hannington in 2012, there was a automatic changeover unit between the Rowridge and Mendip receivers. The only practical way to test that would have been to have gone to site, and pull out the U Link from the Rowridge Rx which presumably they did now and again.

I see no logical reason why Belmont C4 shouldn't have had an RBS standby from Emley, even pre 1993.I'm not sure C4 wasn't RBL Emley away?

Because C4's RBS was restricted to the Macro regions, there was no possibly of a national BBC style test