Bendigo and Geelong are the same as well, the latter have newer installations especially around Ocean Grove where there seems to be a big blackspot for Mt Dandy because of terrain, there are some antennas even pointed towards Colac!
I do see some houses in Bendigo still have old rusted antennas that are around 20 meters tall but I wouldn’t think they are used anymore, down in West Brunswick there are some antennas pointed towards Mt Alexander (the transmitter), I dunno why they would be pointed that way even tho there is LOS to the SFN.
Geelong is in the Melbourne licence area? So is Ocean Grove? There is the Highton transmitter for blackspots, but not sure why it’d be a surprise Geelong people have their antennas pointed to Mt Dandy.
I used to live in Pakenham and had two antenna, one toward Mt Dandenong and one twoward Mt Tassie. The good thing about that was when there used to be a blackout of the cricket after the First couple of Hours with One-Dayers and Test…Watch it on Win. If I miissed the 6pm News on Nine, I used to wait till 6:30pm on Win and watch it then.
I used to able get Win TV when I lived in Cranbourne.
Now that I am living in Northern Victoria, I see quite a few pointed South from Nagambie. I seen one and wish I had a camera to show you, Near Nagambie, Had 3 pointing Mount Dandenong, Mount Major and Mount Alexander(30 or 40 year old tower).
Not surprised that people have their setups pointed towards Mt Dandy but I have seen a increasing amount of Highton / Lookout Hill setups.
Even in Kensington, there is one antenna that is pointed towards Mt Alexander (The Transmitter) and digital ready has one part as a marginal signal strength. I can get Mt Alexander from Kensington but it’s very weak and cannot be decoded at all.
WIN and SC9 would be good on the Geelong setup because of the Local News and the new Sky News channel, It would have been fantastic to block ACA out and replace it with WIN News because a certain family member likes to watch it but WIN is now affiliated with Ten.
Geelong is in the Melbourne TV licence area but IMO, should be setup like the Gold Coast where the affiliates and the metro feeds are transmitted.
All I find interesting about out of area transmissions are the fact that they are odd.
Would be interesting to look at the old analog setups compared to the newer setups that would be wrecked with amps and junk. I did hear that when TV was first a thing and it was in analog, there were field testers that went around Geelong to see if it needed it’s own station and found that Melbourne was coming in quite good so that idea was abandoned. Therefore, WIN or any other regional station never made it in Geelong.
I think what I was previously talking about is probably suited to it’s own thread.
I can’t locate it but I have seen a 1940s document online outlining the proposed Geelong channels, one ABC and one commercial. I feel like saying they were slotted in at 4 and 11.
Source: Australian Broadcasting Control Board 8th Annual Report 1955-56
Although apart from the capital city channel assignments (2,7,9,10 in most cases) very few of these proposed channel allocations seemed to become reality. A lot of this plan probably changed when the VHF dial expanded from 10 to 13 channels in 1961.
As in the current Geelong digital transmitters? No.
But a theoretical commercial TV network would have been easily receivable - likely across most of the Melbourne metro area, if people thought their programming would be worth tuning to.
The would likely have similar issues to what WIN faced early on - none of the Melbourne networks being willing to share programming as they’d be competitors - rather than being seen as a regional station.
That said, I’d expect Geelong would have given them a much poorer commercial basis to operate on and they wouldn’t have had anything like WIN’s success.
Ah, my favourite Media Watch presenter of all time.
That wasn’t the first time Littlemore had taken a dig at Ferguson in that way. He had likened Ferguson to a David Jones menswear model in a previous edition of the show.
I think you would have found that the so called Channel 5 Geelong station would have competed with HSV7 and GTV9 at the time. And made it more difficult for ATV0 to launch in the 60s.
I still think it would have been a very healthy and profitable station with the likes of WIN and NBN.
The response from The Canberra Times’ TV guide editor (in response to the segment about Ian Warden’s review of the ABC program Holiday) is something to see:
Personally I wonder if that got a mention by Stuart Littlemore on Media Watch…
