The Newsroom

The new NEW Central West and BBC Midlands thread

(January 2013)

This site closed in March 2021 and is now a read-only archive
SP
Steve in Pudsey
Discussed on the previous page. I suspect the vision mixer crashed so they dropped out of circuit while it rebooted, then opted out again with network and the wrong Astons on the output before cutting to Nick.
MW
Mike W
Whoops, couldn't see it amongst the CNS chat!

Something required a new motherboard to be fitted from reading some of the tweets from the crew:


CI
cityprod
Whoops, couldn't see it amongst the CNS chat!

Something required a new motherboard to be fitted from reading some of the tweets from the crew:




Bloody hell, that’s good work. New motherboard in and back in operation in 6 minutes, is kinda like those amazing tyre changes you see in Formula 1 races. They should never be able to be that quick, but they are.
SP
Steve in Pudsey
I may be reading too much into this, but having a spare motherboard on hand seems a little curious to me - were they perhaps experiencing issues and had ordered one in ready to swap over at a convenient time?
MW
Mike W
I may be reading too much into this, but having a spare motherboard on hand seems a little curious to me - were they perhaps experiencing issues and had ordered one in ready to swap over at a convenient time?

That and BBC English Regions BSC are 2 floors below and have spares in stock and technicians always available
MI
m_in_m
I may be reading too much into this, but having a spare motherboard on hand seems a little curious to me - were they perhaps experiencing issues and had ordered one in ready to swap over at a convenient time?

That and BBC English Regions BSC are 2 floors below and have spares in stock and technicians always available

So had this happened in another region the disruption would have bern longer presumably? Do that team cover all English regions or are there teams at all sites?
IS
Inspector Sands
Reacting, diagnosing the fault, changing a motherboard and getting the thing rebooted and up and running in 6 minutes seems a bit quick.

I suspect he's just using the word 'motherboard' incorrectly and it was a card in the mixer that was replaced.


So had this happened in another region the disruption would have bern longer presumably? Do that team cover all English regions or are there teams at all sites?

Not necessarily, other regions have engineers and would likely have spare parts for various bits of their kit
SP
Steve in Pudsey
To be fair 6 minutes to leg it to the pres gallery (I assume the Mailbox has one?) and get on air from there would be pretty good going!
MA
Markymark
I may be reading too much into this, but having a spare motherboard on hand seems a little curious to me - were they perhaps experiencing issues and had ordered one in ready to swap over at a convenient time?


The motherboard is usually a PCB, that all the other boards, (in a vision switcher/mixer a dozen or more) are slotted into, and is deep in the back of the crate. It would take a few hours to swap.

I suspect it was something more like initiating a spare CPU card, which (normally in routers, but other kit too) there are two; one active, the other powered up in standby in redundant mode. In that case nothing physical needs to be done, the time consuming bit (and 6 mins sounds about right) is a reboot and re initialisation.
NG
noggin Founding member
Whoops, couldn't see it amongst the CNS chat!

Something required a new motherboard to be fitted from reading some of the tweets from the crew:




Suspect that is someone not understanding what was going on. Some broadcast kit takes almost that long just to boot up fully when powered down... (I was involved with a test where a gallery was catastrophically de-powered to test this. The last bit of kit came on line 4'00" after power was restored...)

Either - as others have said - it was a case of swapping over to an installed hot-spare (which is not unusual in some broadcast kit) or it was a card swap rather than a motherboard swap. (Cards can - in some equipment - be hot-swapped)

The BBC usually spec a reasonable number of on-site spares for mission critical equipment - though not everything has an on-site replacement on-hand.
Inspector Sands and Mike W gave kudos
MI
m_in_m
In the case of some kit I wonder if obtaining spares is becoming an issue.
MW
Mike W
John Hammond doing the Midlands Today weather this evening (in the Birmingham studio) - his last BBC NC broadcast was back in March last year...

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