1960s BBC TV Transmitter Breakdown tape

what's the opposite of a trigger warning because whatever that is this video should contain it right from the off because this is a video that is not going to rile you up it's not going to get you excited in fact the whole thing runs at a rather sedate pace so if you're looking for something that's going to get your adrenaline going well this is not the video you're looking for now today we're going to be taking a look at a reel of audio tape and I'll say we because I've got a special guest star in this one but I think we should take things right back to the beginning when I received an email from a chap called Mart hi Matt I have something which might be right up your street a reel of transmitter breakdown announcements and music from the early 1960s I inherited a pile of tapes when a relative of mine recently died in his youth he was a lineman his job was to scale terrifying Heights to fix problems at the top of telegraph poles and transmitters which I think is how I come to have this tape it's a five inch reel of double play BASF tape and it was made to be played out from the transmitter when there was a local breakdown it probably came from Sutton coldfield transmitter well as you can imagine that caught my attention so he sent over the tape here it is and let's take a nice leisurely look at it okay well first off let's see what the box tells us about the tape that's inside well clearly it's from BASF that's the Barden aniline and soda Factory and the tape is an LG s26 in the LGs range you could also get a 35 and a 52 the number refers to the thickness of the tape in micrometers or microns the 26 therefore is the thinnest of the tapes which means it will hold the most on a reel of this size compared to the other ones it's referred to as a double play tape if you got the 35 that would be a long play and the 52 would be the standard play the fact they've gone for the 26 tells me that they wanted to get the longest play time out of this size of tape which might indicate that the machine that they were playing this back on couldn't hold larger tapes so they had to use a five inch tape which is what this is but use the thinnest type of tape on it now on this side we can see what's on the tape we've got a standard breakdown sequence that put 28 minutes on here and a reduced power sequence on side two 29 minutes 30 so it's approximately a 30 minute tape and it's running at seven and a half inches per second which therefore tells you that they wanted it to have a decent quality otherwise they'd run it at a slower speed but they also wanted to try and get around about half an hour out to each side now on the spine here on this sticker is printed M9 and that is also mentioned on the front there so some kind of cataloging system no doubt and finally before I open it up just one thing to mention at the top here it says breakdown announcements and holding music now I used to deal with telephone hold music systems and we always refer to it as hold music but I now realize that's an abbreviation really of holding music which makes a lot more sense like a holding pattern for an aircraft right well let's open this up it's one of these hinged boxes one thing I think you might find interesting notice here it says cassette number which means box number cassette meaning small box of course this is from the days before the cassette or at least the type of tape is but you can see where we've got the terminology of cassette from because it's the box for the tape talking of years this particular style of tape this was made between 1958 and 1969 so it does narrow down the year a little bit we know it can't have been recorded before 1958 but of course it could go all the way up to 1969 so it doesn't narrow it down too much but I suspect it is really the earlier part of the 1960s reduce power or standard breakdown sounds like my typical week but anyway we've got our tape here now so let us spool this onto a tape player and have a listen to it okay so that's on there we're going to be playing side one standard breakdown and we'll select the tape speed of seven and a half inches per second now I'm just going to start off by listing through this monitor speaker and then we can hook it up to the PCM recorder and copy the whole thing across so we'll just listen to the start of this make sure the volume's turned up we are sorry that we have we had and we shall rejoin the advertised program as soon as possible okay I've got it all hooked up ready to record so I'll rewind it in a second but did you notice there that the announcement kicked in right at the start so no doubt this thing was queued up ready to go as soon as something went wrong this thing was sprung into life and the very first thing that it did was play that announcement to say there was a fault there was no delay or as minimal delay as possible okay so I'll just rewind this back to the beginning and we'll get the recording going now I did notice in some of the sections I was playing there in the background there was a little bit of distortion there was perhaps some wall sections of the tape so bear that in mind when I come to play some of this back but I'm sure it'll be quite interesting to have a listen to so I'll just wait for the counter here to get back to zero we'll start off the recording and I'll record the whole thing across flip it over and then record the other side as well okay so I've got everything recorded across just fine and I think the first thing I should do is play you a nice clean direct dub of that first announcement because it reminded me a little bit of the Boost as a journey into sound that you're dead all over the place at one point and I think this would be ripe for sampling so I'll play that first of all and then after that's played you'll hear the first track that comes in straight away on the tape and I'll talk about that in a bit more detail but here we go press play and record now we are sorry that we have a breakdown we are trying to put things right just as quickly as we can and we shall rejoin the advertised program as soon as possible [Music] now that piece of music carries the unmistakable sound of the BBC Radio phonic workshop and indeed that's where it originated this was an interval signal created by Madeleine fagendini and after hearing a broadcast of it a pre-beatles George Martin rework the tune into a music single released as time beat in 1961 under the pseudonym Ray cathode Madeleine has started at the radiophonic workshop in 1959 so that narrows down our tape as being put together sometime after that date but since it's the original version on here rather than the 1961 remix this is the closest we're going to get to a firm date the rest of the tank contains a variety of light music that no doubt comes from the BBC archive likely music that was recorded in-house it's clarinet's heavy but some pretty Pleasant tunes on here as well there is one reoccurring piece of music though [Music] baby for anyone unfamiliar that's oranges and lemons a traditional tune with the earliest printed version dating back to 1744 and it can't be a coincidence that both this and interval signal relate somewhat to clocks while the 30 minute tape runs out the music refers to the passage of time something the engineers working on fixing the fault were probably all too aware of now here's the breakdown of the breakdown audio as a waveform I'm going to color code it to make it easier to show the progression and the repetition so it starts off with the announcement in red and then there's the radiophonic workshop interval signal followed by two pieces of calming music then back to the same announcement again followed by oranges and lemons and so on the pattern in this Center section repeats however besides oranges and lemons each music track played here is different but you can see that these start and end follow a different pattern to the center section these are the only times when the in interval signal piece is played and I've got to think that this was used as a way to identify where the taper got up to purely by listening to it the public would be unaware of this but if an engineer heard the interval signal followed by oranges and lemons he'd know that the half hour tape had nearly been played out and perhaps it was time to spool up another one interestingly each of the five Snippets of oranges and lemons is performed in a different style have a listen [Music] foreign [Music] [Music] hahaha [Music] so that's how side one of the tape finishes by which point I'm sure that everyone involved had hoped that whatever had caused the breakdown had been resolved so after that I flip the tape over and recorded the other side the reduced power sequence okay so that's the second side recorded across it's just running through the end of the tape here there's a bit spare at the end but um it's raised a question this one you see I understand how you'd use the first side of the tape it was all queued up ready to go as soon as there's a problem it could play that announcement this side is different it's a Tails out recording so that means that you first have to wind it onto a different reel before you can play it and you really don't want to be winding tapes across when you want to play something immediately I don't know whether this was just a backup recording because in a real situation it would make more sense to have the same thing on either side of the tape so it doesn't matter which way you've ended up with it you can just put it in a machine and play it and have a different recording for the low power situation on a different tape having different recordings on either side really doesn't make a heck of a lot of sense yeah more questions than answers I'm afraid as you'd imagine this site contains a similar sequence of announcements interspersed with music of course the announcements here are different and also a little bit more in depth I decided to tell you that we suggest that you increase the volume of your sun and also adjust your vision contrast control we shall return to normal service just as soon as we can repair the fault so here's the sequence of audio this time and whilst as before the same announcement gets repeated multiple times you can see here that there is a longer version at around the 18 minute Mark so let's have a listen to this one in full [Music] this is the BBC television service here is a special announcement the television picture seen by viewers in this part of the country are received by radio from one of the BBC's high power transmitters and then rebroadcast from your local transmitter for various reasons outside the control of the BBC reception of the picture sometimes deteriorates to such an extent that it cannot be rebroadcast when this happens we Fade Out the picture completely and replace it on your screens with a local test signal which appears as a vertical white bar we radiate this so that you may know it is the rebroadcast which is at fault and not your set there are also occasions when the picture received at your local transmitter Falls below standard but is not Port enough to switch off altogether in these circumstances so that you may again know the fault is not in your set we shall in future radiate the white bar for two seconds every three minutes until the picture returns to normal now I'm sure you've noticed that I'm not an expert in anything I never claim to be I'm just a chap who knows a little bit about a few things but when it comes to things like this I've completely exhausted my own knowledge and yet I want to know more about it where and when would this taper been used I need to speak to someone who knows all about radio telecommunications and transmitters and that whole field and the person that spranked him out immediately was Lewis from the ringway Manchester channel here on YouTube so I got in touch with him and he kindly agreed to have a listen to the tapes and here's what he had to say about it hi Matt thanks for having me on the channel I've taken the time to listen to the tapes you sent and there's material here for two eventualities the first being the service outage and the second being reduced power both of these mainly relate to the use of a backup transmitter so they're obviously from around the 1960s so would have been standard practice at all major television and radio transmitting stations starting with the service outage tape and viewers may ask how do they play a tape with a service outage well that's where the backup transmitter comes in on the main transmitter there would have been what's called a silence detection system and their design and level of technological features has advanced over the years they work on a basic principle however they detect Silas on the air in their simplest form by analyzing the audio signal and comparing the amplitude to a set threshold if it spots a dip it'll trigger a warning or a backup transmitter after a certain amount of time has passed let's say for example Crystal Palace Main transmitter goes off the air the silence detection system could be an important part of getting the backup transmitter in Croydon on the air very quickly there are although more complex ways of doing this today but it's a feature you'd commonly find being kept awake for want of a better term on something like a state funeral or Big Brother where there's long periods of Silence if you cast your mind back to when the housemates would be asleep at night you'd get bursts of Birdsong and aircraft going over well that's to stop the silence detection triggering it's a state funeral the same bird song or another source of audio would be played on the signal the method of playing these tapes varied from manual and automatic reel-to-reels tape players and later CD players with again more modern systems in use today what's worth noting is back in the 1960s there was far less redundancy and automation so these large broadcast sites were manned 24 7. this means there would be a good chance that a silence detection system was beaten by an alert engineer moving on to the second tape the low power message and this has a more simple explanation transmitter sites such as sudden coldfield Alexandra Palace and Crystal Palace all the big ones and indeed many smaller ones have reserved transmitters some are located on the main site and some are located nearby if work needs to be carried out on a main antenna the reserve is switched on these are often lowered down the mastan sometimes emitter weaker signal so to save swarms of angry listeners phoning in to complain a lower power message would be played on the reserve transmitter to explain why the signal is weaker that this isn't always done in the case of a main transmitter outage either if maintenance needs to be carried out nearby on the Mast and the main transmitter can be left on they'll often reduce the power to a safer level for workers so as not to expose them to extremely high levels of RF well that's something I've learned I always knew that in broadcasting dead air was undesirable but I had no idea that if it went on for too long it might trigger some automated backup process if you enjoy learning facts like this and anything related to radio telecommunications I really do recommend that you visit the ringway Manchester Channel I'll have a link in the video description I'll pin something in the top comment as well or just search for ringway Manchester here on YouTube and thanks again to Lewis for sharing that information and on this one I know he wanted to fill me in with more information about the playback side of things it was weighted on some chapter come back to him but unfortunately that fell through he never heard back from the fella I think it was some guy that used to do this for a living so maybe it's just getting on in years but look if you ever worked inside one of these transmitter stations you were in charge you're messing around with the tapes and you had to press play or put it on a machine just put some information in the comments it'd be nice to hear a little bit more about this now this whole video would not have been passed possible without the original tape being sent over from Mart and I've got to thank him for sending this across because even those relatives gone the stories lived on because he stole this tape for all those years perhaps nobody's heard this for 60 plus years so it's a really fascinating little piece of History not a greatly significant in its own right but it just opens up a little window into a particular time and place and a piece of our history so thanks to mark for sending this one over but that's it for the moment as always thanks for watching [Music] thank you [Music] foreign

Channel: Techmoan

Views: 255,036

Keywords: Techmoan, 4K, BBC, transmission, breakdown, tape, transmitter, broadcast, vintage

Id: 3ENRbOWDXmI

Length: 19min 19sec (1159 seconds)

Published: Sat Jul 01 2023