General TV History

You could drive around Brisbane and listen to ABDQ 3 on 91.7 MHz. DXing of distant TV stations audio signal was also possible. GTS 4 was a good catch.

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I remember thinking that because I could hear NBN on the FM band that I should be able to hear Channels 7, 9 and 10 in Sydney on FM too. I got a big shock when I found out that I couldn’t!

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We used to have ABNT3 on FM 91.7 which is now the spot occupied by ABC Northern Tasmania when they switched from 711AM to FM. So still the ABC, just a different version.

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I remember listening to The radio simulcast of ABCTV in mum’s car back in the day. Kinda handy if you wanted to see the end of Sesame Street but you had to go to preschool

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ABC TV in Gippsland was originally on channel 4, its sound frequency of 100.7 MHz (from the same transmitter) is now occupied by ABC Local Radio Gippsland.
Growing up in Shepparton we used to receive ABC TV channel 3 on the FM dial at 91.7 MHz and on a good day you could receive AMV4 (Albury) sound on 100.7 MHz.

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And which used to come well into Melbourne more than the vision frequency ever did.
i.e. I could always hear Channel 4 on 100.7 FM but never see the Channel 4 signal on TV.

Without knowing the link between TV and FM at the time I used to just think the FM reception was just some weird reception from Channel 2. It was years later before i realised it was Channel 4 from Gippsland.

Similar used to happen on holidays up north of Victoria where I’d get Channel 3 from Shepparton on FM. And driving back from Albury one time I’d be listening to Wheel Of Fortune from Prime, then on AMV4. And I tell ya Wheel Of Fortune is bloody hard to follow when listening on the radio!!

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The vision carrier for Ch 4 was a buzzing tone at 95.0 IIRC - Channel 3’s vision was below the FM band at 86.0 The vision power was 100Kw for most stations at the time and the audio was always one tenth at 10kW. The actual frequencies for audio were 91.75 and 100.75. The car radio at the time could tune the 0.05. When stereo sound came in, there should have been a second audio frequency at about 2.5 MHz above each of those as well.

I think that the NE Tasmanian channel 3 may have been on 92.7 - not sure as I only received it via DX. But I think it was offset by 1MHz to avoid interference with other Channel 3’s in Victoria. If it wasn’t that station, it was one of the channel 3’s down that way.

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At least we didn’t go with the idea of allocating FM radio to UHF - “You’re listening to Five Hundred and Seventeen point Four, the Fox”

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I noticed that with ABC 3 in Townsville too when it was on air… The audio carrier was at 92.75, compared to 91.75 for other VHF 3s.

I’m not sure how TVs were able to handle this eg. how did they know how to go to 91.75 or 92.75 for the audio carrier when the vision carrier frequency was presumably the same. Unless that was also 1 MHz higher too…

Here in Hamilton you could be up ABC 3 from Ballarat on the FM dial as well when I was a kid.

The vision carrier was different as well.

and also in regard to ABLV4 (ABC TV Gippsland) they had their own Gippsland-only Regional News bulletin at 6.55 back in the pre-ABC National days when ABC TV regionals had such a bulletin. Other parts of Victoria in the North and West had a combined Regional News bulletin. Both were pre-recorded at the ABC TV Ripponlea studios and sent out to the regional feeds. They are very similar to Southern Cross Austereo’s local noodle news bulletins on SC10 and SCTV Seven Central/Darwin.

5-minutes for the whole state (exc Gippsland) seems hardly effective. Would it have killed ABC to do separate ones for each region? They were only 5 minutes :slightly_smiling:

Has anyone ever seen video of those ABC local updates?

There was a Queensland one on Youtube a while back, it may still be there. I think it was specific to one region but i can’t recall for sure.

This is one for ABRN 6 I recorded - their bulletin came from Brisbane.

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A few weeks ago, Media Watch played a clip from one of the last bulletins broadcast.

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Next month will mark 20 years since the Port Arthur massacre, so I though I would add to the current YT coverage.

This is the opener and first story from Ninghtline on 29 April 1996. It was one of the few occasions (one of the first) when Jim Waley was out of the studio, seen reporting live from Port Arthur. Hugh Riminton presents the first story (not sure why he looks so grainy in close up).

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Hard to believe it’s been 20 years, despite living in Tasmania all my life I’ve only been to Port Arthur once about 10 years ago and it was hard to walk through there after what had happened.

I remember on the day it happened my Dad and I were loading the trailer on the way to the tip and they mentioned right at the end of the ABC radio news that there were unconfirmed reports of a shooting at Port Arthur and it was just a sentence or two and then straight into the Grandstand football coverage. It was only when we watched the Southern Cross News that night that things started to become clearer but even then there weren’t a heap of details as things still just seemed too unreal and events were still occurring. By the next morning all the national media were in town. I can’t remember if Seven had a special bulletin or not as it was during the Agro era when Today was the only morning news show.

International coverage of the Port Arthur massacre on NBC Today. Anne Fulwood appears during a live cross to Sydney

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