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SHF link across the Scottish Highlands


Nick Flowers

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I came across this article (page 30).

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/40718050/Rosemarkie-Eitshal.pdf

It tells how BBC engineers in the mid 1970s constructed an SHF link system across the Scottish Highlands from Rosemarkie, near Inverness to Eitshal on the island of Lewis in the Outer Hebrides. Pretty small beer for those who live in countries with hundreds of miles of wilderness, but about as remote as it gets in the UK.

It might provide some interest - there again it might be a cure for insomnia.

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Yes,Jez. I have a link to the index for all those BBC Engineering mags....somewhere. I will hunt for it when I get back from beautiful downtown Ipswich, where I am shooting a corporate for Fujitsu today. This is the high life.

 

Hey! I found the link in the first place I looked - a record. yur tiz:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/rd/publications

 

 

Edited by Nick Flowers
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More fodder for obsessives:

http://tx.mb21.co.uk/library/

This is a site devoted to people who are interested in transmission in the UK. It is as full of facts as a fact-filled thing.

 

And while I'm here I will mention how fascinating I found the planning and operation of OB links before the days of satellite relays. Southern Television and TVS in the South of England had some Land Rovers fitted out with microwave dishes. They would drive to the top of hills and receive and pass on signals from the OB - audio also went by Post Office music line (one sound mixer I know always called the Post Office engineer who turned up to connect the scanner to the phone network "Posty", to their intense annoyance). The Chief Engineer had a map of where all the hills suitable for this purpose were and sometimes more than one or two hops were necessary. When we began to send ENG rushes back to Southampton from Brighton a 'temporary' link was set up from the roof of the Brighton Conference Centre, where our offices and studio were, sending up to the top of Truleigh Hill on the Downs above Shoreham, from where they were relayed to Chillerton Down on the Isle of Wight. Truleigh Hill had been a transmission site years back and had mains power available: Chillerton was a transmission mast superseded by Rowridge and was used, amongst other things, for receiving signals that passed through cables back to the mainland.The state of the tide sometimes played havoc with this arrangement, with multiple path reflections. Eventually a fibre optic cable replaced this system. But I always rather fancied the job of driving a Land Rover up to a remote hill and setting up and operating the video link - rather like those far off days when optical telegraphs were in use before the 1840s when the electric telegraph made them redundant.

Edited by Nick Flowers
Correcting typos
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