Do not adjust your set!

[Martin Brown]

There can't be many northerners here! The big news this week is that the Bilsdale transmitter serving most of Yorkshire and the NE went up in flames on Tuesday and is now dead in the water. Off air indefinitely.

TV shops have sprouted notices explaining to customers that there is nothing anybody can do and without a signal to receive there is no TDTV picture. Mending a 500kW UHF power amplifier isn't going to be quick. It also seems to have torched the entire base station building and chimneyed smoke and fire up through the 1000' mast - not good!

It is putting a huge load on ISP live video streaming over internet!

I'm OK on satellite and didn't even realise there was a problem until a neighbour mentioned no TV picture and wanted me to fix it!

[newshound]

Where did I put t'ferret?

[Nick Odell]

We've got a spare mast over here at Emley, if anyone wants to borrow it.

Nick

[JNugent]

Amazon Fire Stick?

It provides live TV.

[williamwright]

What's more the media coverage in the affected areas has been pathetic. TV local news has given out little or no useful info. Ditto the local papers.

Bill

[Jim GM4DHJ ...]

haha no great loss then ...

[Chris Green]

It was quickly reported and discussed at length here on Usenet in uk.tech.digital-tv.

[Ian Jackson]

On the day of the fire, it only got an "Oh, by the way" mention on the BBC1 Look North local news. I suppose it was a case of "If you're able to watch this, you're not affected, so don't worry about it - and if you're not able to watch this, there's no point wasting our time trying to tell you about it".

[Martin Brown]

I must have missed the coverage on the local news. If I had known it was on fire I would have taken a look. I can see it from my garden!

D&S is out today. I expect it will be front page news!

[NY]

Funny you should say that. I've seen suggestions that as soon as the temporary mast at Emley Moor is no longer needed, once work on the concrete mast has finished, it is shipped over to Bilsdale ASAP.

I'm lucky that I live in an area served by Belmont (though it supposedly also has Bilsdale reception) but I'd have been stuffed at our previous houses: one had a Sky dish so that would have been fine but the other near Leyburn has only an aerial... and lousy broadband so iPlayer etc would be a non-starter.

[Robert]

Good business for satellite dish installers !

Seems a bad design to have the transmitter buildings etc so near the aerial mast base. Fire in these building was always going to be a risk and damage to the mast was always going to be a major problem.

[wasbit]

Great. No repeats.

[NY]

There may be interference issues if the mast is some distance away from the transmitter building(s). One of the problems with transmitters is that the connection isn't an solid/stranded wire. It's a waveguide: a hollow cylindrical or rectangular-cross-section tube. And that unfortunately seems to have served as a conduit for smoke/flames in the transmitter room to vent up the mast as if it were a chimney.

[Harry Bloomfield, Esq.]

Martin Brown has brought this to us :

That would be our local transmitter, were we using terrestrial. Away in the caravan and using sat. Touring the area, I pointed out the Bilsdale mast to SWMBO about three days ago, as we drove past it.

[Harry Bloomfield, Esq.]

Out of curiosity, I let the TV scan for channels at the beginning of the week - it was quite a poor reception, but there were at least some channels. Now there is nothing at all on terrestrial.

[Ian Jackson]

While waveguide is sometimes used, AIUI it's usually semi-airspaced coax. However, the 'semi' is considerably more than the literal 'half', and as a result there is usually an open path for air to pass through the coax - and (as you say) this can provide a conduit for smoke and flames.

[Andrew]

Oil companies protect themselves from an issue like like by installing a blowout preventer down on the seabed which basically uses a pair of hydraulic rams to shear or crimp the oil pipe shut. Something similar that squirts intumescent foam into the waveguide muight have prvented damage to the mast.

[mm0fmf]

You are aware of the technical issues involved in running 10's of kW of UHF RF any kind of distance over cable? No, I thought not.

[Jim GM4DHJ ...]

the big farmer was ...

[Brian Gaff (Sofa]

Yes we know from the other groups and indeed even national news last week unless you were asleep. What has been done is to turn up the power of a lot of small relays and try to cover as much of the area as possible in that way, but most will need to point their aerial and change its polarity accordingly. It could be that a temporary mast at the original site might be viable if the damage has been too great. I hope they were insured! That is what the did at Emley Moor back in the old analogue days when it was brought down by ice and high winds. In the meantime some of the radio services have used some high local buildings to get coverage too, but no idea of how good it may be as I'm darn soarth. Brian