Snooker transmission fault

"Leeds coverage" - well played, sir!

The Scottish Ceefax music compiled by our very own Mr Tony Currie I believe.

And talking of Mr Currie - here he is handling a power outage on an Autumnwatch OB a couple of years ago a lot better than his network colleagues did. Nice mix of music rather than the same old track and good informative announcements.

Not only does he get the wrong location he makes the mistake that lots of news presenters do and get to and from mixed up.... you've lost the line from York/Sheffield, not to it.

A particular bugbear of mine.

I am going to guess here and i suspect Eurosport will have been uninterrupted and this fault only happened at the bbc because someone there pulled the wrong plug out at source?

It would have happened on one and not the other as the two are totally separate productions for two seperate broadcasters.

Mine too!
When they say that on the radio "We've lost the line to the MP", I think how do you know whether he can hear you or not?
We cannot hear him, so it is impossible to tell.

I have booked lines (when it was a music in one direction for the quality on air circuit one way, and a control line for the remote to hear the cue in the other) only to discover with seconds to go that the programme was being made the opposite way to the booking request.
It is really not difficult to get the terminology correct. "From" and "to" are easy words to understand surely?
Grrrr.

It is really not often someone pulling a plug, although it is not impossible.
If it was a satellite uplink on site providing the feed back to the BBC Network, then that could have had any form of equipment failure, power breakers tripping, the high power feed into the dish failing - the signal is carried on waveguide which can have issues, the satellite being illuminated by someone else, wiping out your signal, or something on site changing blocking the path to the satellite.
The satellite could have problems, the downlink could have a fault, the lines from there to Network could too.
It is an endless list of "what ifs" that you deal with, and ultimately you can try to engineer separate paths that have no common point of failure.

One common point that is very reliable, but is not 100% is BT Tower. That had a major failure during the X Factor from Fountain Studios a few years ago. That affected the main via fibre and via Tower to ITV, but the microwave backup (via Crystal Palace and then to BBC TVC) was then fed by circuits to ITV via BT Tower too.
All major points are generally robust, but not totally.

I heard of one OB where the circuit went down shortly before TX time because a catering truck drove off, taking with it a reel of fibre linking the scanner to the BT links van. Maybe I'll compile a list of reasons from outage reports I've sent recently - 'someone unplugged the wrong thing' is mercifully rare.

I'd imagine the most frequent problem are power failures, and things tripping out ?

I know of one major international OB (on another continent far away) where the power failed. The crew assuming the generator was at fault, yanked the power feed out of the genny, and stuffed it into the stadium power board.
Unfortunately it was the OB truck's on board power system that had a serious issue, and they promptly plunged the entire stadium into darkness.

I was at an OB a few years ago, where a Producer was standing in the Satellite truck - leaning against the wall. He was holding onto the a rail in front of the breakers, and did actually knock one off - taking the programme off air! Luckily, it wasn't the circuit that had the satellite coder/HPA on it, and TX was restored quite quickly. It's been a talking point since!

At least now terrestrial SHF links are so rarely used you don't get fun like this story

http://wiki.tx.mb21.co.uk/index.php?title=The_Great_Weymouth_Ferry_Disaster

At least now terrestrial SHF links are so rarely used you don't get fun like this story

http://wiki.tx.mb21.co.uk/index.php?title=The_Great_Weymouth_Ferry_Disaster