BBC DSAT channels off air on Friday Morning?

Theres a problem on news 24

See the newsroom.

Yes - the rain was so heavy that the basement of TVC had an inch or two of water in some places.

That was an entirely unrelated power failure, which knocked out rather a lot of lighting and air con in most of the building.

If was simply a satellite uplink problem due to rain, I'd have thought the BBC would have a backup uplink site for just such an occasion (far enough away to have different weather or if the main site got knocked out for some reason). Don't channel 5 run two separate feeds to the transmitters via two satellites for this kind of thing. You'd think the main BBC Astra feed would be considered kind of important. Or have the bean counters been there.

The 'basement' below ground floor or the real, real basement?

I'm sure they do have some other arrangement, but it wouldn't be a thing whereby they could just flick a switch and put the thing into action. It was a very short outage and of course the problem with such events is that those at the uplink site don't immediately know whether they are off-air.... is it your receiever that gone or your uplink?

Channel 5 is a diffrent case - those satellites are the *only* feed to their analogue transmitters (no idea if they have diffrent uplink sites) . In fact a few months after it launched they suffered from the rain problem and they went off air in London. Since then the Croydon Transmitter has had a line feed in case it happens again.

I thought that had been dismantled? Is there some method of BBC Jersey opting out Fremont Point more directly to show an apology caption or standby filler, even if it was only on one channel, and even if that method was to drive to whatever is left of the old studio in the ex-garage at Fremont.

Don't know. Pictures taken this year of Alderney still show the SABRE troughs in place, though that's not saying there's anything active. The IBA themselves only used the site as a standby feed between 1984 and 2001, because in '84 CTV changed to TVS as their network sustaining service. This meant a new SABRE looking at Rowridge at a site in Cherbourg. Also I don't think the Beeb used the Alderney SABRE until well into the 1980s, until then they used a simple array of logs, as seen in Fig 7 here:-

http://tx.mb21.co.uk/features/sabre/sabre-threeth.shtml

Recent Alderney shots:-

http://tx.mb21.co.uk/gallery/alderney.shtml

I think it was initially just the basement - the drains were entirely overwhelmed by the amount of rainwater and started overflowing from toilets and sinks, and a couple of fire exit stairwells apparently aren't watertight.
By the time I got down to have a look, facilities management people (in wellies, seemingly kept in case of such emergencies) had lifted manhole covers in the corridor and were sweeping the water down into the sub-basement.
I then went outside and had my lunch in the sunshine. And here was me thinking that Glasgow's weather was changeable.

and then who had to clear out the sub-basement?