Switching control to Birmingham

And by the time the pictures reached Northern Scotland apparently they were far from pretty...

The MHP page mentioned is at http://www.meldrum.co.uk/mhp/testcard/bbc_test.html

I think the final time Pebble Mill took over transmission was with the broadcast of 'Goodbye Pebble Mill' one Sunday afternoon in 2004.

You could tell it was being transmitted from Pebble Mill due to the low picture quality that Pebble Mill produced right up until the studios demise.

I'm pretty sure that that would have gone via the London presentation area, rather than the scenario we're discussing here. It might have been played out from Birmingham if it was being edited too close to transmission to get the tapes down to London.

Indeed, a playout of a tape to the network was always via a circuit to London, rather than the network being originated from somewhere else.

I'll have a look at the documentation and see how much of it I can share. Although a lot of it is now of historical interest rather than containing operationally sensitive information, there is a lot of personal data in it (names and phone numbers etc)!

Although that was an extreme case, unlikely to actually be required unless there was some form of dire emergency. RBS was routinely used if there was local maintenance going on, or if the usual feed transmitter had failed, in those situations there'd be no or little loss of quality, because it was just a single hop RBS feed from an adjacent region.

Indeed my local transmitter normally receive BBC 1 and 2 by off air reception of Rowridge. Its RBS feed was Crystal Palace, and actually you could tell when it had kicked in because the quality improved (and of course Ceefax suddenly became the London version )

Yep the tests were done in that way for convenience. RBS was intended for the JCB through a cable scenario affecting one or two transmitters rather than a way to run the whole network.

This is in contrast to radio where the whole lot on RBS is a contingency plan for the NICAM distribution collapsing (eg when the main and reserve circuits both go through the same apps room with dodgy aircon).

I can't believe that was 8.5 years ago

Gory details here :- http://www.lamont.me.uk/broadcast/

By..bye Cable&Wireless then!

You can see why the BBC have come home to BT Broadcast, with their safe low-latency and predictable Juniper routers.

Better keep SatBack as well.

I may be sad, but then I'm a big fan of British Industry. It is sad that Cable&Wireless went the way that it did, with all the business, financial, technical and logistical failings along the way. I can remember buying serious network from them, the our C&W business mangers were spot-on, but ended-up being embarrassed and pulling teeth within their own company, just to reach the basic promises.

Well, Cable and Wireless are of course now part of Vodafone, so it really is a marriage made in heaven !

There's quite a few threads in the archives here from previous RBS tests, with some screengrabs still working. Worth a look.

Did ITV ever use RBS? I recall seeing LWT's text service in the Central East region on P6xx one Saturday night in 2000/2001.

Not in the same way, but ad-hoc arrangements were made on occasion. The politics of ITV (and the IBA) made it less viable for the way ITV worked.