That is too bad, you would think these could be kept active for historical purposes. But seems these services are all being turned off even though I heard a few were very useful in this day and age.
That is too bad, you would think these could be kept active for historical purposes. But seems these services are all being turned off even though I heard a few were very useful in this day and age.
IIRC, their operation relies on enormous vacuum tubes that the BBC can’t get replacements for any more.
In some way it is short-sited, as radio is a good backup medium for global communications in case the entire Internet ever goes down.
Vacuum tubes also aren't vulnerable to nuclear weapon electro-magnetic pulses.
However, other than ham radio enthusiasts I guess no one listens to analogue radio anymore.
This transmitter doesn't really have the range for reliable global communication, it's optimised for covering the UK. For the global communication usecase, there are other networks of military transmitters (DHFCS) that are much better suited for the job, and they aren't being shut down any time soon.
What it did provide was a simple but reliable way to maintain emergency broadcast to general public within Britain. And it probably should have been kept online just for that reason.
Except nobody has a radio any more, certainly not one that receives LF. People have cellphones, and cellphones have a mandatory feature that lets the government display a message on everyone's screen, usually accompanied by loud and scary beeping. That's the new emergency broadcast mechanism. It's not as simple, but at least people actually see it.
Very few radios can pick up long wave now. My car certainly won’t.
Even when they can most people Wouldn’t have a clue to listen to it.
There’s a reason LW isn’t critical national infrastructure.
I got my RTL-SDR to see what I could listen to, and by the time I tuned in, nearly all the short wave stations I could tune to were just broadcasting evangelical religious stuff, or other crazy conspiracy stuff. It's remarkable that these powerful stations spend most of their broadcast day transmitting that content.
They still broadcast on FM.
... on a patchwork off different frequencies across the UK due to the poor propagation of VHF
Doesn’t RDS mostly solve that for the most common case where frequency changes becomes an issue (car radios).
Yup, and DAB also still works.
Umm mostly. IMHO DAB is a failure, at least for vehicles.
I listen almost exclusively on dab in the car. It auto fails to FM but it’s rare I go somewhere where that happens.
It’s probably highly variable depending on location and the quality of your radio/antenna. It’s useless where I am.
It's actually a private company that operates the transmitters. The BBC have been paying for access until now.
It's hard to believe that civilisation has lost the ability to build longwave radio transmitters.
It's like the moon rocket. At any time we could have restarted that program from scratch and run it again, but what would the point be? We don't have the direct ability to make one but we have the ability to gain the ability to make one.
If we did regain the capability it would probably be solid-state.
I don't think it's like that at all. I bet you could build a perfectly serviceable replacement at home without needing to spin up any special manufacturing equipment, using off-the-shelf components.
For that matter I'd be somewhat surprised if you can't simply buy a ready-made replacement.
A 500kW LF amplifier? Things do have to be designed to their individual requirements, you can't just buy a car stereo amp and turn it up to 1000.
Maybe something like https://www.nautel.com/products/am-transmitters/nx-series/ ?
Thanks for sharing this, it surely blows the theory about the lost art of building powerful transmitters out of the water.
We do spend out quite a lot here in the UK for the BBC. They could easily dump a couple of expensive presenters and use the savings for vacuum tubes, if that is what is needed.
No idea where vacuum tubes were invented but I'm sure the BBC could find someone to make them.
> No idea where vacuum tubes were invented but I'm sure the BBC could find someone to make them.
The BBC has just cut its budget by £500 million, in an apparent attempt to limit the damage from the latest charter renewal process - which determines its funding. The new director general (ie ceo) is an ex-Google person, and they seem to be pivoting to become a social media content provider. So I'm pretty sure that spending licence fee money on making vacuum tubes to broadcast a signal that nobody under forty listens to wouldnt get past a value for money test.
(I like the BBC and its radio output, and I'm one of those weirdos who still pays the licence fee despite never watching tv or any of the stuff that the licence fee is required for. But it is becoming increasingly lost to me: focussed on triviality and politically cowed. Sadly, I no longer expect it to last.)
I thought the license fee was a tax. You have to pay it, except in extremely specific scenarios that are basically just the bureaucracy's way of saying it's technically optional even though it isn't. AFAIK you have to own no devices capable of receiving BBC broadcasts - this includes most phones and computers since they broadcast on the internet.
You only need the license if you watch live TV (on any service) or use BBC iPlayer.
If you only watch DVDs, or stream movies etc, you don't need a license
When did they change it from if you could watch to if you actually watch?
Technically the rule never changed. If a licence inspector sees a TV connected to an ariel socket then you're breaking the law.
But there's virtually no inspections any more. There were a lot of bad newspaper headlines about poor single mothers going to prison for getting caught (and refusing to pay the fine, but that bit usually got left out), so enforcement basically ended.
In about 2008 it was OK, my flatmate let the "TV licencing" people in to see a TV connected only to games consoles and a DVD player.
These aren't just any vacuum tubes. They are each the size of a small fridge, and extremely specialized for use in radio broadcasting.
> They could easily dump a couple of expensive presenters and use the savings for vacuum tubes, if that is what is needed.
I bet they're kicking themselves over not just renewing Jeremy Clarkson's contract.
I'm sure they could, but sourcing people willing to manufacture heavily equipment/processing intensive speciality products for tiny runs will be MINDBLOWINGLY expensive.
This isn't about the little tubes that go in a guitar amp... we're talking about tubes that may well be too large for a single person to lift.
What's more, everyone who knew how to build things is either dead or in a retirement home. You'd have to re-engineer much of it from scratch.
At least you already have some working tubes to start from. Some guy did it with Nixie tubes, of course those are a lot smaller.
Exactly - and look what those cost despite being produced in relative quantity. Now scale up to something that's 1000 times the size with 1/1000th the production volume. Wouldn't surprise me if the per-tube cost was in the millions.
Nixies are also cold cathode, low current devices. Radio broadcast tubes can be handling tens or even hundreds of thousands of watts.