The Yorkshire and Lincolnshire Thread

The official reason was that they needed the money to spend on more reporters in the field. Look Ull & Look Leeds started with the one budget split roughly in half. The start in Ull was a pigs breakfast, to say the least. Even after moving to Queen's court there were hardly any journalists with TV experience & no money to hire any. There was a lot, & I mean a lot of viewer criticism, with the service labeled amateurish. Helen Thomas used this criticism to drag more money out of BBC England's central pot. They were using a clapped out old satellite truck & if I remember they got a new one of those too.
Of course not replacing Ms. Fospero was very good for another person's ego - not that it had anything to do with that of course. however subsequent editors would find out how much power they actually had before someone started sulking and another editor would be found.

Didn't they get a dedicated Lincolnshire reporter out of the money saved by Fospero leaving?

The fact they didn't have one to start with proved a great deal to me that this was Look 'Ull by another name.

Cambridge used a radio studio for the first studio for the Cambridge sub-opt.

The first iteration of the Look East Cambridge 'Close Up' sub-opt (which started in Jan 1997) was from a set installed in the local radio centre studio at Radio Cambridgeshire in Hills Road. You wouldn't really have known it was from a radio studio on-screen. (Once the Radio Newsroom at Hills Road had joined the TV newsroom in a solicitors office next door, the Radio Cambridgeshire radio newsroom was gutted and the space turned into a more permanent TV studio)

Unlike the Hull sub-opt, which used the Leeds Pres gallery (with the Hull studio working into it), the Cambridge sub-opt had an on-site gallery (and two edit suites) That made things a bit trickier in terms of transmitter and BBC One 'not-quite-network' routing for Cambridge ISTR.

I seem to remember that the route to carry it from Cambridge to Norwich was by microwave links via a few towers and transmitters sites. But the dishes were part of a network of contribution feeds across the region with a couple of dishes on the roof at Norwich and some steerable ones that changed which location it pointed at

Problem was that when they started the Cambridge opt-out one of the routes tied up with that. So if you wanted a tape feed or down the line interview from somewhere like Northampton you had to do it by 6:20 as they needed to turn a dish round on somewhere like Sandy Heath away from BBC Northampton to BBC Cambridge for the news.

I remember conversations with the engineers there when trying to get feeds negotiating when they could fit us in. I never quite understood the layout of the routes but always thought it sounded a bit antiquated, but charming in its own way

That's right ...the "network feed" was Norwich output via microwaves to Sandy Heath,
There was a microwave feed to Hills road which either took that or a feed from the ENG dish which could take Northampton etc .
There then was a different microwave which took the Cambridge output back to Sandy Heath ..
This carried a signal in Teletext to do the opt switch at the transmitter and to select if Norwich or ENG was fed to Hill road .
The Ceefax and datacast etc was bridged from the incoming feed from Norwich to the feed to the transmitter down stream from the opt switch actually all of this was in the SIS domain .

When the BBC moved to Cambridge Business Park Cowley road ..... there was a feed of pure (digital) network there ... so the opt switch was replaced by a Sky DSAT receiver and Ceefax etc bridged in down stream of that ( and a NICAM modulator added )
The picture quality improved very noticeably ..... and there was no hard switch /opt
Northampton and Luton feeds were video over Ip codecs, ENG went satellite ..
The BBC saved a fortune in the cost of microwave links and the near impossibility of moving them
And Siemens who architected this ( based on analogue tv in Channel Islands ) got little recognition ...
Also the change over was easy ... as DSAT (and DTT) was via Central code and mux , it was just buddyed over the change over weekend .... no need to move "analogue"

ITV/Arqiva copied the idea when Westcountry ITV closed their Plympton studio, and was trasferred to Bristol.
The analogue transmitters were fed by Westcountry's D-Sat transmission (which was suitably pumped up to 8 Mb/s, and to 704x576 (as someone in here pointed out a few weeks ago)

Interesting stuff, it's even more complicated than I remembered.


I don't quite understand the above though. Do you mean that the 'pure (digital) network' brought in BBC1 East and then took the Cambridge version back to London and up to satellite? Then the Dsat receiver (in Cambridge?) fed the distribution to the analogue transmitters?

I can't think why the DSat receiver would be at the studio rather than at the transmitter site? Seems a waste of a circuit, unless there was a Ceefax related need.

ISTR that leg was fibre, not microwave? (Hadn't all the microwave slots already gone - ISTR Anglia had some)

There was VBI signalling that controlled :

1. Whether the microwave feed from Sandy Heath to BBC Cambridge at Hills Road carried the output of the FRV receiver dish (which was also used for Luton and Northampton microwave contributions from radio station DTL positions - and usually passed-on via fibre to Norwich), or the feed of BBC One East incoming which was fed to Sandy Heath as part of the distribution system. This was to allow BBC Cambridge to have 'BBC One East' as a source, which they then genlocked Hills Road to, to allow for a 'soft opt'.

2. Whether the Sandy Heath transmitter was fed from the received BBC One East feed (locally received at Sandy Heath via Microwave) or a synchronised version of BBC Cambridge (received via fibre - and which had the VBI signalling on it) The synchroniser was, ISTR, a PAL composite (not decoded PAL) Tektronix model (which could have more latency than just a frame - but avoided decode/recode artefacts when the BBC One East feed was round-tripped via Hills Road)

Unfortunately the VBI decoding at Sandy Heath was pretty conservative, and defaulted to opt-back (which was discovered on the opening night - as opt-backs were repeatedly triggered by Norwich's vision mixer cuts...)

I read it as the D-Sat receiver was at Sandy Heath, (it had to be really )

Yes the DSAT receiver was at Sandy Heath .. DSAT has video audio and tetletext subtitles .. which is just what you need for the analogue programme ..and you add Ceefax etc at the transmitter.

There were TWO different microwave routes one in the other out if Hills Road
one went via addenbrookes hospital for some reason !!
and neither was that easy to repoint to the new site.


On the opt switching .. the slgnalling was once a frame with a 3 frame window / hysteresis ...
And was also used at Bluebell Hill / Tunbridge Wells ..

Ahh, I took 'replaced the opt switch' literally. Yes makes more sense to be at the TX site.




What did that signal? Surely Cambridge could just put themselves nice and cleanly into Look East using their mixer/router

Also with at least two regions using DSAT receivers for their TX feed how did network recall work, if indeed it still existed then. And aspect ratio switching, the DSAT version would have been different to the analogue - no 14:9