This was one of my favourites the voice of vrillion, you do wonder how it was done, suspected it was someone nearby, interuption of the audio carrier, sounds like they had to inject something into it, video was unaffected.

Back on analog days, link from main transmitter in bigger city to the second transmitter was always somewhere on UHF band, sometimes even just a regular relay from main transmitters signal.

Someone just needed simple analog tv rig, nice amplifier and long yagi setup on a hill or a rooftop near secondary transmitter, but at the direction of main transmitter. Turn rig and amp on, maybe "beep the receiver" and ask your friend at home did you get over that transmitter, if yes, just trow your own show from VHS casette.

Back in the day, they did just turn tv transmitters off for night time here. Someone maybe had an scanner an tape deck on a hill, listening audio carrier and waiting digital beep, that turns transmitter on at morning. When you did get it to the casette, you had the keys to turn that secondary transmitter on. Thats the "beep the receiver". Diffrent beep was used to turn transmitter off.

Remember, on cases like this, aluminium on antenna has cheapergain than amplifier

radionortheast wrote: ↑Mon Sep 01, 2025 6:22 pm This was one of my favourites the voice of vrillion, you do wonder how it was done, suspected it was someone nearby, interuption of the audio carrier, sounds like they had to inject something into it, video was unaffected.

Northeast you probably already know about this, there's a podcast on the subject called "The Interruption" which you can find quite easily online. A colleague of mine told me about it 2 or 3 years back thinking I might have been interested. Not sure why, as he didn't know I had an interest in radio, I'm not religious or into alien phenomena (and in my opinion at least, I don't look much like one...)

Doesn't start getting down to the real business of what happened until way too late on but overall I enjoyed it, I think you'll like it if you haven't heard it before.

The alien thing is probably related to some nostalgia here for the 90’s, Roswell, was a lot about it on energy 106 adverts, there was a fun factor to it, maybe people found it fun further back too. It featured a lot in music at the time too I think, with a popular video of someone dancing on mars, maybe mentioning it, effiel 65 blue, independence day, the aliens coming over the tv station, alot of this is dorky.

I’ll have to look out for that podcast, I rarely deviate from wikipedia youtube, I don’t agree with using subcription based things, I do see the podcast icon, does seem like its there on apple.

There was the maxhead room incident is another too, i think it was more sophisticated, sounded like he had to be on a building intercepting the beam, what it was about is hard to understand, seemed abit disturbing too, it happened during an epsoide of dr who. They never found who did either, ringway said these things were happening to on the radio before, I don’t know if they were meaning fm, radio 1 didn’t start on fm until 1989, must of been meaning radio 2 or something.

EFR wrote: ↑Mon Sep 01, 2025 8:19 pm Back in the day, they did just turn tv transmitters off for night time here. Someone maybe had an scanner an tape deck on a hill, listening audio carrier and waiting digital beep, that turns transmitter on at morning. When you did get it to the casette, you had the keys to turn that secondary transmitter on. Thats the "beep the receiver". Diffrent beep was used to turn transmitter off.

Wasn't there a case a few years back where a (swedish?) band recorded the shutdown tone and used it in a song? When the song was played on air the whole network shut down

jvok wrote: ↑Thu Sep 04, 2025 3:48 am

EFR wrote: ↑Mon Sep 01, 2025 8:19 pm Back in the day, they did just turn tv transmitters off for night time here. Someone maybe had an scanner an tape deck on a hill, listening audio carrier and waiting digital beep, that turns transmitter on at morning. When you did get it to the casette, you had the keys to turn that secondary transmitter on. Thats the "beep the receiver". Diffrent beep was used to turn transmitter off.

Wasn't there a case a few years back where a (swedish?) band recorded the shutdown tone and used it in a song? When the song was played on air the whole network shut down

Quick Google search returned Finnish MC Kemppainen & Lindelltronics and their LP Rappilan Hatavara, song was Maan Tapa on B-side.

That rap song seems to be blacklisted on whole country back then.

I wasnt able to find it.

Ah! Here it is at the end!

You do get alot in songs were it says this is test, I like these kinds of songs have a few, they might go and test the left and right channel, the one I have has a deep voice. The doppler one is old now is from all the way back in 2007, used to go out through my stereo encoder all the way back then, sorry anyway didn't mean to inflict this anyone.

"Borrowing" transmitters was a regular game in the late 70's and early 80s. In the earliest (analogue) days of Sky TV, some folks actually used spare bandwidth on the satellite's transponder for a link for a clandestine political station in Eastern Europe. There was no chance of the authorities finding the source of the uplink! The station only lasted for a couple of months, but its aims were achieved with the complete collapse and replacement of a hated Communist regime.

One hack - carried out by a bunch of broadcast engineers from both the Big Broadcasting Concern and their commercial colleagues - involved hanging aluminium foil in front of a receive dish up a tower near Twyford, and injecting a stereo radio signal on each of the (then three) Wrotham frequencies at an RBR (re-broadcast receiver) site near Oxford. The entire up-country network was "borrowed" since the Oxford site went to RBR mode in the event of Microwave PCM loss and provided onward feeds. It had to be done on a Bank Holiday, to ensure that there were few staff working that day. The interruption was only done as "proof of concept" and only lasted a minute or so, but it worked.

Of course the "powers that be" discovered what had gone on, and more security steps and redundant PCM paths were introduced, so that particular attack wouldn't work these days!

When the BBC set up the Guildford relay of Radio 1 (on 97.7) it was fed off-air from the Wrotham transmitter (on 98.8). At the time, Radio 1 was off-air overnight and for some reason the relay in Guildford remained on-air but broadcast white noise. It was super simple to set up a transmitter on the Wrotham R1 frequency to feed into the Guildford TX, which then happily re-radiated the signal at 4kW overnight. We did this a couple of times until at some point the BBC realised what was going on and fixed the TX so that it switched off overnight. Happy days!

Many years ago, I built a rig for a Christmas broadcast that was much higher power than that station normally used. We tested it during the night when it was installed up a particularly high South London block, and got phonecalls from friends a several parts of southern England because we'd managed to fire up the RBR repeater chain! The frequency they used was 92.4 MHz - the same as the Swingate Radio 3 repeater, which was being used at the time as the source for the RBR chain as Wrotham was on reduced power!

We "borrowed" those rigs for a couple of nights leading up to Christmas, but the BBC got wind of what was going on, and added security tones decoders to the RBRs. It took me three days to work out the control tone sequence, and the fun began again until New Year, when Wrotham went back up to full power, and the PCM distribution system was repaired.