Considering the fact that some satellite dishes point directly at brick walls, and I do have evidence, line of sight is garbage as far as space is concerned!
My 11-year-old and I regularly watch your content. Both of us believe it's brilliant. I am an old old technician plus from here in the United States. I have about got my son talked into getting his license, and content like this helps to spark his imagination and encourage him. Thank you very much for producing this.
These relays must be getting hopelessly uneconomic as the number of terrestrial TV users dwindles - at some point soon (if not already now) it must be cheaper to give anybody in these small areas who wants the service a Freesat dish/STB, or even a broadband IPTV service!
I owned several small private translator (our equivalent term) stations in the US and got to thinking about the difference in financing these. We have no license fees which would make such micro-stations even possible. So we have larger stations covering more area, which in my case, were financed by the insertion of limited local advertising. A small scale commercial venture.
OFCOM would have to get their thumb from up their fundament on rollout of fibre in the UK for that to happen, and Openreach are nobody's friend. There are large swathes south Lincs that hasn't had even much of a copper upgrade since the 1950s, let alone fibre. I'd assume the same can be said for many rural areas. I was involved in various dealings with OFCOM and Openreach in the very early 2000s, around updating leased line provision and the West Wales fibre programme (both EU initiatives) and you could barely engage Openreach when you were offering them large lumps of cash to do their damned jobs (not that I'm still bitter over 20 years later, you understand)
A service like Freely as it grows, will probably decimate the user base of the relays. Especially as it will potentially allow access to far more than the limited multiplexes covered by the relays.
Especially since the relays in general only broadcast the 3 PSB's ("Freeview Lite") instead of all 6 multiplexes. Hence why some people just try and use the main station wherever it is possible!
One thing that was popular int eh 1980s was "PIRATE TV". I bought a TV transmitter known as a "Video Sender" in the late 80s to transmit the output from a VCR around the house to TVs. I still have it to this day in a box and it still works! People would use them and then leave them on broadcasting films. You had to know about them or find them by chance when tuning around. There was someone local to me that did this at weekends and must have been using a computer generated test card. It was one film after another, no contact details. The output was only around 10-20mW on mine, so I suspect people were using amateur equipment for a bit of fun to amplify them. I never used mine this way as connecting it to a TV aerial wouldn't have got far, only at the back of all the other TV aerials ! In those days I knew nothing about RF, so nothing about UHF aerial designs and the Internet wasn't a thing then. It still does CH21-68 analogue with a video in and audio in plug. If I could have turned the aerial around to face everyone elses I might have tried it out. It was definitely possible to interfere with TV for a few houses nearby using the small telescopic aerial.
The level of research you do for your videos is impressive. For a future video can you give consideration as to covering radio communications used by the Royal Observer Corps. There’s plenty of ROC content on RU-vid, but very little on their coms network and equipment. 👍🏻
Great video again Lewis. I can remember back in the early 90's when i lived in Ringwood in the New Forest the estate i lived on received terrible tv signals that came from the transmitter on the Isle of Wight due to a large hill called Poulner Hill being in direct line of site to the transmitter. After years of complaints the broadcasting authorities deemed to install a relay transmitter atop of the parish church tower in the town of which you could see 2 antennas - one pointed at the IOW, the other towards the area affected by poor signal. I will say as soon as this relay went live it transformed the watching tv experience. Unfortunately for some who had invested large amounts of money with tv aerial specialists fitting 20ft or more masts and various boosters to get better reception then had to get it all taken off as their aerials now faced the wrong direction and got too much signal 😅. No pleasing some people (to quote Monty Python's Life of Brian - if youknow, you know 😉 ). Thanks again Lewis, keep up the good work.
Its really interesting seeing all this infrastructure for broadcast tv - what I wonder is, and as pointed out with the houses without antennas, how many are using it - I've not used a TV receiver in over 8 years now, mostly watching on-demand TV and of course youtube :D Brilliant as ever, and love the countryside around these antennas.
I cancelled our cable TV service and installed an antenna in our attic 3 years ago. If the signals are strong enough to get through the roof, I think this is preferrable to an external antenna. It's worked surprisingly well for me, even 45 miles from downtown.
Another option being Freesat (or Freesat from Sky until 2021), which can be simpler to install than an aerial in some locations, give more channels and better quality. It would be interesting to know how much Freeview is still used, surely that must be slipping into obsolescence around now.
Thanks Lewis. This makes me think this is a modern take on reading the transmitter site details that would appear in the back of the Maplin Electronics catalogues. Keep up the good work.
I worked at a radio station in the late 1980's that got its start in the early 1960's in a local man's garage. He had a 70-foot creosote (telephone) pole behind the building and had the antenna mounted at the top of the pole. The garage had been converted into a make-shift radio studio and I think it had something like 12kW. A few years later, in the late 60's, the station had been sold, got permission to move to a higher tower, change frequency and increase power to 50kW, where it remains to this day. I worked there in the late 80's and that stations history always fascinated me. That said, I love the use of wooden poles to mount antennas for installations like this. I wish I could afford to have a 50 foot pole in my back yard to mount receive antennas on. Someday... Thanks for the great videos. I really enjoy your channel!
I know of a location whereby, due to trees and other obstacles in the way, I would have no choice but to get a 50 or 70 foot pole put up with various receiving aerials on it!
If you want something you can put up and take down and only want to hold a wire, look at the telescopic fibreglass poles. DX Commander do one which is 18m (60ft) but that generally requires guy ropes. A lot of places do 12m poles including DX Commander, Spiderbeam, Spirit of Air, among others. Waters and Stanton/Nevada Radio currently have the Spiderbeam on sale for £110 and the Spirit of Air for £60.
This brings me back to the 70s, where we have 2 log pers near our caravan for the weekends. Receiving was so bad that we had to manually turn the pole all the time, even it was raining badly. It has something "romantic" now. But at the time it was a pain in the butt. 😂
In my city every major TV station has at least a dozen "translators" (that's what they call relays here) to not only fill in weak areas in the coverage area of the main tower but also to provide OTA television to small distant towns that wouldn't have any.
Interesting note that I've found out, some larger relay translator towers also have equipment for airing local commercials geared towards that community. At least for me in the United States, I can watch the main CBS ota feed in downtown or the translator a few miles North. They have the same content except for the ad breaks and E/I programming.
@@DGTelevsionNetwork That's an interesting point. Some translators here serve towns that are over two hundred miles away so it makes sense that they'd need to have local ads on them. In fact the translators cover the entire north of the state, an area almost three hundred miles from east to west! There are so many small towns that would have no OTA television without them.
Dear Ringway, another great video. Interesting on the wattages used, Few think about a microwave oven at 1000 to 1500 W using a cavity magnetron, which is the basis of RADAR. As for telecom lines of the past, Monkey Puzzle Trees ( araucaria) were used as they grow so straight. These trees evolved when dinosaurs were around, and their spikiness helped to deter predation. I now have one growing in my back garden. It must be an effective deterrent as I am not troubled by dinosaurs. As ever, all the best Phil Sharp.
Another fact about microwaves, hope it isn't classified, is that they were used to entice the enemy closer in order to attack them. Planes would pick up the signal and think there was something there... Door safety switches were messed with so the microwave would be left running with the door off and pointing in to the sky so it looked like a RADAR installation.
It's interesting that your wooden poles have climbing pegs, as these were outlawed in the USA and I think in Canada as well many years ago. Nowadays, all wooden poles are climbed with belt and spurs, with the bucket truck being the preferred method if at all accessable. Consequently, that's a way when exploring to identify very old poles indeed, always disconnected. Poles here are primarily made from Georgia Pine, though I see more concrete and galvanized poles. Quite an effort is being made to replace the medium tension lines with stronger poles, and beef up the grid infrastructure in general to stand up to our weather which has indeed become more severe, in combination with aging infrastructure. It would be interesting to know the type of trees and where the wood is sourced from for UK poles, and if efforts are being made there to beef up the infrastructure as well. One MUST wonder if Global Warming is playing a hand in all of this. All the Best! 73 DE W8LV BILL
They probably have climbing pegs all the way down because they're presumably on private land and so aren't deemed to be a hazard to stupid members of the public who might be tempted to "have a go" after chucking out time at the pub! They aren't telegraph poles as such and the actual poles carrying telephone lines along roadsides only have the pegs on the uppermost 12 feet or so and can therefore only be reached by ladder or, up until the 1950s, belt and leg irons. The poles are tested every 10 years and, if a pole is outside it's test date, it can't be climbed and a bucket must be used to access the lines instead. My dad was a GPO engineer and I still have his "Belt, Safety No. 1".
Canadian here. Global warming does not exist here. However, we are getting much higher, galvanised, poles, being put in, with much higher and thicker lines. The old poles are being pulled up and being sold to anybody through a surplus website. These new poles are being installed in very rural areas, also. But here, when a tree falls and breaks a pole, we could be out of electricity for a week, or more. All of the rural area residents in Northern Saskatchewan must have their own petrol or diesel generator for the brutal winters and the violent springs, we have here. By mid autumn, we must have a significant cache of diesel and petrol for the winter and spring. Hopefully the new, more robust, galvanised, poles will help with keeping electricity connected. It may make for smaller stockpiles of diesel and petrol for winter and spring. But, we must always have a stockpile of diesel and petrol for winter and spring. It is just the way of rural life. At least diesel is limitless and easy to store. Petrol is the one that is es expensive.
@@indridcold8433so if there's no warming (which is only one component of climate change btw) why are ships now routinely able to pass through the Canadian Arctic due to the recession of sea ice?
It would be interesting to know which relays are on frequency boosters and which use transposers to a new set of channels. Simple on frequency relays usually need well separated receive and transmit antennas, but are easier for pirate take-overs!
My grandad has a new build house, the tv antenna in newbulds are allways in the loft. Also note, new build houses dont come with a tv antenna installed, but have all the wiring for one that leads to the loft. Allso newbulds dont have a phone line into them, just a fiber cable.
I guess, that new housing estate could possibly have a centralised IRS system. These systems consist of a receive antennas and usually a satellite dish. The feeds are combined and amplified before being distributed to each property. This arrangement seems very popular on new build sites.
Lewis, it would be great if you could cover telemetry systems, such as those at sub stations and water pumping stations. I understand they still use their own RF system, in case the internet or mobile phone networks go down (due to faults or terrorist actions). Even the smallest of compounds has some kind of antennas installed - either a bank of Yagis or omnis.
Here in the USA all TV is horizontal polarization for broadcast. And we only use ch 2-36 RF and ATSC 1 with a smattering of ATSC 3. Power is way too low since the digital conversion. I wish we had digital relays for some of the local towns and even the city of Jamestown NY is not served except for cable and satellite TV. Fiber is limited but the damm rules on paying free over the air TV has been the most difficult part…. Average is 1-3 US dollars per channel per month per customer that is ransom from the cable/satellite companies😢😢😢😢😢 DE N2JYG
Here, normally the main transmitters are horizontally polarised and most of the relays vertically polarised. I was going to make a comment on that last one in the video as it is a horizontally polarised relay, which is much rarer than vertically polarised. G1YJY.
Your drone footage is just breath taking, Lewis. I'm not in the least nationalistic (really I'm not), but seeing your footage today brought up the words of that Will Shakespeare poem starting *" This royal throne of kings, this scepter’d isle"* through to * "This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England..."* I just love watching your videos.
In Australia, we are seeing large estates being set up that don't have Foxtel (delivered by satellite) or terrestrial TV signal antennas. They are all fibre connected and can pull everything from the fibre.. Seems that TV is being replaced...
There were two serving estates at the end of the M53, but I can't find the exact details. I think they were on the MB21 site. People were wondering why there were two TV aerials on a lamp post. One was a horizontal group C/D pointing at Winter Hill, and underneath was a vertical Group A pointing to two estates by J2/3 M53. This was analogue TV. Another filler repeater was by J1 M53 and outside a council tip on a lamp post, same arrangement, Group C/D horizontal towards Winter Hill and Group A vertical to local area or housing. The power output was only 1 or 2 Watts and 5 channels when in operation. Maybe anyone local can have a look or confirm this. The M53 J2/3 one was no longer required when the Storeton Transmitter (M53 J4/5) went on air. People could use that, including a lot of people in Liverpool who were line of sight and a mile or two away compared to Winter Hill. The only problem was they got S4C and not Channel 4 as it was installed to transmit to Wales, not Wirral and Liverpool. That might have changed now. Moel-Y-Parc still doesn't cover all areas despite it's presence. There were lots of these smaller TV repeaters about in the days of analogue, most not on big masts. One or two appear to have been unofficial, set up by people to help locals out.
Could that small dish part way up the Haughton Green tower would be part of the cellular service? I think seeing these relays is interesting. We don't usually have such things in the U.S. for broadcast television. FM radio broadcasters may use translators to extend coverage but they're usually mounted on existing commercial radio towers.
All the poor people “what happened to the signal? Oh, it’s back. Somebody must have flown a drone in front of the relay.” 😂😂😂. (Yes, I know that isn’t the way that works - would take a much larger Faraday shield to do that. But still - go get ‘em Ringway Manchester! 😂)
It's not even a very good site due to local hills completely blocking it to large areas. Maybe that's why it was chosen! It covers parts of Liverpool, Wales and Chester, and some parts of Wirral, but there are problems with the other side of the Bidston and Oxton Ridges, hundreds of feet ASL that block all coverage beyond them. I remember the news reports of when the TV transmitter was first switched on and locals were complaining they couldn't receive it. It was later found to be the type of aerials used that were firing the RF upwards and over local areas. Once it was all corrected it was fine. The radio stations that use it don't get out to Wirral or Liverpool too well because of the hills.
I wonder if wireless ISP is a thing in the UK(basically provide internet access using point to point WiFi) given such rich RF infrastructure profile you showed us.
National WiFi will never be a thing, the major cable companies do not want you to be able to come and go as you please. They want you tied to contracts. This is why you will never get decent 4G/5G WiFi or Broadband in your home in a City Centre. Many of the companies I contacted said I can have it on my phone, but not with a 4G/5G router and SIM. I would just at the chance to get shut of cable.
@@Bond2025 Wireless ISP is a different thing. It just use WiFi as a medium instead of fiber for remote locations. You still need a receiver to receive and distribute with another WiFi router in your home. Your phone simply cannot connect directly. Sometimes it’s not even strictly “WiFi”, just a P2P digital data communication. Protocols like Nstreme and airMax are good examples.
I remember having really poor radio reception in my room as a kid. So I scraped off some paint from the radiator pipe and connected some wire to it to get reception. It worked!. Shortwave was filled with chatter. What janky setups have you tried that worked? How good is the reception from your radiators?
Height is not always the key. Distance is not always the issue. Currently at my location we get relay signals, via a mid spec grouped aerial at roof height put thru a passive splitter giving around 2/3 signal strength. A friend of the family has the same aerial, at roof height, at half the distance to the mast compared with us…..but her location is further down in the dip….that antenna is not going thru any splitter or other device-goes direct into the recorder & tv. Her signal strength is also 2/3…..which means she’s getting less signal power than us despite being closer to the mast and despite not reducing the signal with a passive splitter
This is the problem that the Storeton TV TX had when it first went online. Locals got no signal and it was a big story in the newspapers, but a bit further away it was full strength. It was the wrong type of antenna in use. Once changed to tilt the radiation pattern down correctly, it covered the required areas. It was an example of poor design and understanding of RF. People think RF comes straight out and all around. It doesn't, it can be steered and set at different angles depending what the installation is for. That's why phone masts tilt the radiation pattern down to give a more blanket coverage with a lower range. The same for broadcast stations, you don't want a fancy 6dB colinear with a 30-35degree takeoff , you want a simple aerial like a slim jim, J pole or mixed polarisation dipole that will cover the local area and not win a DX award. Sometimes people will get NO signal or a very low one due to multipath interference, two of the signal arriving at the same time effectively trying to cancel each other out! That can be rectified by moving the aerial, or in some cases fitting two aerials and a splitter and messing with them. I used to have two very long Group C/D aerials pointing at Winter Hill to get OnDigital when it first come out. I tried them phased side by side, then stacked for more gain one above the other etc. To get shut of multipath I spaced them side by side and then moved one aerial back about 2ft and it cured it. I also fitted a masthead preamp to overcome coax losses. There are lots of interesting things you can do with aerials.
@@Bond2025 yep Couple of examples of where direction is important. Where I live the footprint from the tv relay is roughly egg shaped - with the max reach, reaching (just - outdoor antenna reqd) a nearby village some 4 miles further away. Reason is half that village is on the “wrong side” a small hill to receive from Mendip….but our relay is visible in the distance. The top of that village and the bit on the other side the hill have decent or good reception from mendip. Conversely, our relay broadcasts very little in the opposite direction…..because from top of that hill going south they have decent Mendip reception. Ex 2 A village called West Bay, near Bridport, West Dorset, has its own relay because of hills blocking Stockland hill mast. All good so far. However the campsite built on the slope going down from the relay, along the gully and up an incline the far side always had issues getting sufficient signal to those in the immediate shadow (closest) of the mast….but further away at the bottom and especially on the far side incline, reception was A1 condition.
@@Bond2025 there was, until recently a large building (unused from years ago, now demolished) in a dip in the next town. That had 2x big Mendip aerials on the roof, side by Side in a sort of cradle arrangement….i guess back in the day it was to try and increase the received signal strength. There’s still a few VHF antennas around too. Double 6 and Double 8?
Lewis. Much more rare are passive relays; unpowered. Setup is a receiving antenna that is cable connected to an unpowered transmit antenna. Practical theory says the induced signal to the R antenna is sufficient dB to rebroadcast through to the T antenna. Use on mountain tops where a power source does not exist. Side benefit, little to vandalize. Two locations I knew, Xanthi, Greece remote police station. Second, Missoula, Montana mountain top from TV Mountain to the Flathead Valley. A commercial application. Other benefits no telecoms fees or minimal Gov. regulation. Anything like this over there? Regards. Poulsbo, Washington
I know of one local hospital that used a passive repeater antenna setup to 'relay' their UHF area wide paging frequency into an area with poor reception.
Hey man, there seems to be a data link on 11175 yesterday night, it is not ment to be on that frequency. It is usually the USA nuclear codes or something! Thank you
We Brits are a funny old bunch when you think about it. We pay a fee to have the sh*t pumped away from our houses underground only to pay a licence fee to have a load more sh*t poured in from roof level. 😅
@restojon1...Too true sir. Tv is the first 'service' that i could easily do without, but 'er indoors' enjoys it, as at this moment.😛 I get far more enjoyment (and sense) from utube.😁
How are the transmitters powered? Did they trench a power line all the way into those fields for this- just for 500 homes coverage? What does that work out to in terms of cost per home covered? Seems a mad scheme to me.
Very interesting in my 40y I work for openreach my mine job was has a pole tester over the years I checked thousands every pole has a brand show who owns the pole the size and the new poles the depot were it was made and the year it was turned into a utility pole also the market is the depth Gauge to indicate how far in the ground in is there mark is 3 metres up from the bottom of the pole the oldest poles I have tested were up in Scotland 1883 two both badly decayed also I have found the years of the poles Correspond with the the time when the housing estate was built 8:07
@@Bond2025they can be found, if you hunt on the magic internet. The biggest problem, as i see it, is your local council. Generally, (uk) if over 4mt above ground level, you would need planning permission.
Is it still the case that areas served by relay only get "freeview lite" or have they now got the full array of channels? I'm fortunate enough that I've never had to rely on a relay having lived in Leyland, Chorley, Cockerham, and now Skelmersdale. Although the latter is served by both Winter Hill AND a relay.
So do I for versatility and not having to keep changing aerials in tests, but they have a lower gain than a dedicated aerial tuned to a specific frequency. I prefer the Grid Type antennas and used a 4 stack dipole array for years on TV. Far more reliable than a flimsy TV aerial, it also had around the same gain figures but had a wider acceptance angle and a cardioid pattern. Handy for picking up more than one TX. It was just a piece of mesh and 4 "X" shaped elements with a built in phasing harness. For horizontal polarisation the "X" elements stood vertical one above the other, so the longest side of the reflector was vertical. Vertical polarisation meant having it as [X X X X]. Great aerials.
Relays often use horizontal polarisation. I think it's to avoid cross talk with any aerials that could receive signals from both the main, and the relay sites.
I wonder why the logs are crossed, and now swapped over on the mount so they don't cross? I'd have thought being crossed would adversely affect the radiation pattern. And it seems strange to have the satellite dish at the top of the mast, vulnerable to wind. Maybe the trees obstruct the view from the obvious place - the roof of the buildings. Are these same-channel relays? i.e. tx and rx same channel? Not, I guess, if tx and rx and the same pol.
I was wondering if those TV relay towers retransmit on the same frequencies as the original signals, or do they all translate the relayed signals to different frequencies? I would think they would have to translate the frequencies in order to control interference. Anyway, thanks and great job on the videos!
Relays transmit on different channels than the main transmitters they receive signals from. Main transmitters send signals horizontally polarized and relays transmit signals vertically polarized
@@MrBillmcminn The last one in the video appeared to have a horizontal transmit antenna. Relays are mostly vertical, but horizontal ones aren't completely unknown.
There's a sinkhole in the middle of the field at 0:37, which usually suggests either a cave, or an underground ruin. More likely the former, especially if there's karst topography in that area, though it IS the U.K., which has been continuously inhabited for thousands of years... Megalithic ruins aren't outside the realm of possibility.
I'm not aware of such tiny TV-relay-stations for 500 homes in Germany. Neither in East-Germany or in the unified Germany, neither analogue or digital. 🤷♂️
I assume that the reduction in transmitter power from analogue to digital for TV is the same for DAB radio, which explains why it is so cr4p in the car. Going north from Leeds to Newcastle on the A1/M1, DAB really is appalling.
In the first 2 examples, the transmitter antennas are vertically polarized and in the 3rd example the transmitter is horizontal. Any reason for this difference?
@@RingwayManchester There were some very small analogue relays that were called "Self-help". I'd like to think they were put together by local hams and somehow got licenced by Ofcom, but I don't think it was quite like that. Perhaps you could research the subject.
Yes, Britain has had home satellite TV service from British Sky Broadcasting since 1989, it was small dish satellite that predates DirectTV and Dish Network by about 5 years
Its a little unusual in that it receives and transmits vertical, main stations transmit horizontal and most relays transmit vertical polarisation.....odd.
Interesting that they are attempting to give service into sparsely populated areas. Many companies want greater return on investment, and might not do it.
Most of these were installled back when the broadcasters owned the transmission network, for 625 line/Colour TV the network was split between the IBA and the BBC with each providing roughly half of the main and relay stations as was dictated by the government, they didn't want the mess of multiple antenna for 625 line TV and as all stations would be UHF it made sense to consolidate sites, the transmitters and RBL arrangements would normally be separate though but they'd share RBS antenna(s). Most main sites were pre-existing 405 line transmission sites (helped that due to ITV using Band III sites were generally separate from each other and so there was a good spread of them) though pretty much all relays were new as there were not that many 405 line repeaters due to the superior propagation characteristics of the lower frequencies used (a Band I signal travelled much further than a Band IV/V signal). Of course providing links to all these transmitters created some interesting technical challenges, places like the Shetland Islands and the Channel Islands had some impressive setups with remote receive stations that picked up off air signals and relayed them by microwave link, the Shetlands via Fair Isle and the Channel Islands/Jersey via Alderney using a quite impressive multiple antenna array and dish antenna. The Shetland setup actually lasted until after digital switchover and was reengineered for it. Another quite interesting fact France has had an off-air relay of ITV South at Digosville, though admittedly the output was a microwave signal. This was used to feed ITV South to the Channel Islands after they switched from ITV South West and I assume the site on Alderney wasn't suitable, used an IBA designed SABRE array like Alderney for receiving off air signals from Rowridge on the Isle of Wight. BBC National Radio signals also had an interesting way of getting to the Islands, off-air reception was always a bit flaky and that was made worse when international agreements meant that Rowridge had to have it's radio coverage pattern altered to reduce the amount of signal being transmitted in the direction of France (it's original slot antenna system was essentially unidirectional) and therefore the Channel Islands. This was solved by using a NICAM system that transmitted at a whole 250W erp (yes W not kW!) using a 10W transmitter feeding a set of four? Yagi antenna on Stockland Hill using a standard UHF channel allocation around what was used already for analogue TV (CH 30 in this case), this was received on Alderney using a dish antenna, to compare power levels required note that the analogue TV signals were 250kW erp!. The transmission gallery has articles on these links which are quite interesting.
