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Unintended BBC analogue broadcasts of Top Of The Pops from Rusholme, Manchester.
Richardcoulter
Posts: 30,547 Forum Member
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This post from the 'Hearing strange noises' thread thread intrigued me:
This was my reply:
Does any techy people here have any ideas as to how TV audio could be picked up on a radio?
As per my reply, I can understand the poster receiving the off air audio from BBC1 (or was it just ITV that could be picked up on a radio??), but not the unintended broadcasts of the Top Of The Pops rehersals!
Jaycee Dove wrote: »Back in the early days of TV when Top of the Pops first started it went out from an old church in Rusholme, Manchester - long, long before it had a Curry Mile.
We lived about a mile away and I delivered papers to the studio and so used to know when they were rehearsing etc.
By accident we had discovered that if you hand tuned our old fashioned radiogram (where you had to lift up a lid to access it!) you could tune in to these sessions and listen to rehearsals and the actual show.
It was fun for a while until they moved out to a proper studio once the show became a big hit.
This was my reply:
Richardcoulter wrote: »I could listen to ITV in the radio in my bedroom (possibly BBC1 too, can't remember) when they were broadcast on 405 line VHF.
ITV sticks out because I remember listening to Coronation Street to keep up with the storyline when I was confined to bed due to illness as a schoolboy.
Not sure how you heard the rehearsals though, I wonder if they had a form of wireless microphones in those days that you were picking up?
Does any techy people here have any ideas as to how TV audio could be picked up on a radio?
As per my reply, I can understand the poster receiving the off air audio from BBC1 (or was it just ITV that could be picked up on a radio??), but not the unintended broadcasts of the Top Of The Pops rehersals!
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Which if your radio had the right frequency range might have been able to pick it up.
The TOTP thing may have been due to some sort of wireless mics in use, but I don't know if that was feasible back then,
From what I understand a lot of early (pre digital units, even some digital ones) used a frequency set that anyone with the right receivers could pick up. Some of those frequencies are/were near or inside ranges used for other things (in the deliberate gaps to prevent stations interfering), but because of the low power they could be used.
Rather like these days video senders and wireless can work in the same ranges, or things like CB radio's worked near the frequencies used for some RC gear.
It could also have been something like your speakers and amp simply picking up the signal strongly enough from the wiring acting as an aerial (the reason a lot of gear uses ferrite ring, especially computer cables) - I used to pick up fragments of CB/mini cab radio's on my headphones going back 15 years if the conditions where right (it really really freaked me out when it happened whilst I was playing system Shock 2 once*)
*That game was bloody atmospheric and scary, especially in surround when you were in the cargo hold hearing all the androids in boxes all around you.
The sound and camera crews had talkback from relevant galleries delivered to their headphones (cans) by wired connection,
the floor manager and assistant floor manager had production talkback delivered to their cans by VHF radio,
this is almost certainly what was picked by the domestic receiver.
This was the case in London studios, I had a colleague who lodged in Lime Grove and told me he listened to LGS studios talkback on a domestic radio receiver.
Gallery talkback would be a mixture of the voices of the director, the PA, and occasionally the vision mixer together with programme out sound that they were all listening to.
I must have spent thousands of hours of my life listening to, or at least hearing, production gallery talkback!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ckg4RsQXmqs
Thanks for clearing this oddity up ☺
Of course every police car seems to have a TV crew in the back now so you hear them a year or so later on one of the many TV reality shows!