21285 - SCTE Broadband Dec2021 COMPLETE v1

14 Vol. 43 No. 4 - November 2021 Issue scte long read essence, all you could do was saturate the airwaves and map the RF distribution you were achieving. Forget needing a specialty receiver to check signal qualities, you could practically feel it in your gold teeth. But how many kilowatts could you really afford to throw at the situation? Monitoring simply wasn’t a priority – and what did it matter anyway: if Jane in Weston Avenue, Surrey wasn’t receiving Eastenders in all its full-colour glory, you could guarantee she’d quickly be on the phone telling the BBC about it. At worst, you’d lose her to ITV for an hour or two. In theory, of course, the setup of an analogue network was much more straightforward than today’s systems; there were really only two things that could go wrong, thereby further reinforcing the view that monitoring broadcast quality didn’t carry much value or importance. Either the broadcast antenna wasn’t working, or alternatively, you as the viewer had a problem with your box, in which case – well, poor you, basically. Your options were to fiddle with your antenna a bit and decorate it liberally with aluminum foil, give the box a good whack, or call out the engineer. And if the problem was with the antenna, then broadcasters tended to take a ‘show must go on’ attitude. Broadcast quality was considered to be a much lower priority than making sure the broadcast got out. If the content was there, that’s what viewers cared about – they’d endure a lot of snow and distortion to get it. Of course, you could also afford to wait to perform your fix, because broadcast networks were full of much more ‘downtime’. Imagine, turning on the TV and finding… no content. Nothing to watch! These days that simply wouldn’t fly - the 24/7 approach of modern broadcast means there’s no ‘suitable’ time to fix things. But back then, you could afford to endure a system problem for a few hours, before pulling things apart at the midnight hour. It is also worth remembering that audiences back then had much longer attention spans and far lower expectations; these were the days of 3 terrestrial TV channels, routine power cuts, frequent industrial action and crossed telephone lines. You couldn’t even go shopping on a Sunday back then. It was a different, much slower time. Of course, in reality, the ‘it can only be broken in one of two places’ mentality was highly simplistic. Tracing errors within the station carried its own issues – was it simply user error, had somebody cued a tape wrong, or had a bird decided to build a nest in a particularly inconvenient place? And then outside of the station, any number of things could be happening. Individual faults in user equipment would affect whether single viewers suffered problems, but bad weather could impact transmission of a signal for whole neighbourhoods. This at least was temporary and largely unavoidable, so you