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Technical question (January 2012)

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NG
noggin Founding member
Steve in Pudsey posted:
Thanks for the info guys, fascinating as always.

Did they use UKI-1 for the downlink because they genuinely needed such a large dish or just because they wanted that photo?


I think there were concerns that both locations could have bad weather. South Africa had thunderstorms for most of the three days - hence most of the OB locations were inside, and there were concerns it could be a bit rainy in Macclesfield Wink which would have given you rain fade issues at both ends? Also the UK is quite a bit North and South Africa is quite a bit South - so there is more atmosphere for the signals to go through than if the two locations were closer to the equator.

The other option would have been two links trucks - or a dual-dish truck (but that would have had a smaller dish for SA - so probably less ideal)

Every bit of gain helps after all...
Last edited by noggin on 21 January 2012 6:45pm
T4
t4rdis
SomeRandomStuff posted:
Sorry no clue on the first question, but does anyone have any ideas what the theme tune is? ...if its library I'd still like to know the name.


I remember looking this up last year when the first series aired - the theme tune was composed especially by Darren Stone.
IS
Inspector Sands
Markymark posted:
If you were inspired by this series (and I must say, I think it was much much better than last year's) then I'm going to give Google a shameless plug here, if you have an Andriod phone or tablet, download the Google Sky Map app, fantastic little application (and when it's cloudy, you can see what you're missing !)

Yes, it's a great app. I read today that Google have spun it off to a university and made it open source
http://www.droidmatters.com/news/google-open-sources-sky-map-colaborates-with-carnegie-mellon-university/

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