Top place looks like it may have been a house, but has been added too or changed & is now separate units, tiles are different colour halfway across & I think I see 2 electricity supplies coming in, plus 1 aerial phone/cable connection? At a guess there maybe more than just 2 separate units there & each has it’s own separate TV antenna, not to interfere with any modifications being done to the antenna to add or change someone’s connection, but then having 2 separate electricity supplies coming in, indicates it’s Torrens Title, so they are individually owned & you cannot cross into the other property/roof space as it’s technically not yours & is a totally different property?
Also being split into separate units may have meant different rooms need a separate antenna as it may not be possible to cable through the roof & install a splitter?
the area around Colac in Victoria is the same. Lots of CA16s pointed towards Mount Dandenong even in lower-elevated parts of town. In addition to antennas pointed towards Lookout Hill to receive BTV Ballarat (which comes in handy during MCG cricket).
there are pubs in the outer-west of Melbourne and Geelong that had antennas pointed towards Lookout Hill for the purpose of showing all of the MCG cricket. Some installations for example at the Lara Hotel are still there today.
Geelong isn’t in an overlapping market like the Gold Coast so there’ll only be one set of commercial channels.
That said, they could theoretically call them 9HD Geelong etc. and have dedicated Geelong advertising and even local news.
One problem might be that a lot of people may still have their antennas set up to recieve TV from Mt Dandenong. However, the same would be true in the Gold Coast.
Maybe get some mass advertising out on billboards and on radio, so then it can get through people’s minds. TBH, Seven and Nine would do a much better job providing local news for the Geelong area than what K-Rock would offer. And at some times, there’s no local news present on 95.5 FM.
Time for Seven and Nine to step in and offer a bulletin for the area. I would like to see Geelong have its own service on those 2 networks, have Geelong-specific advertising and local news. If there was a 6pm news hour for Geelong on both networks, that would be nice.
Channel Seven shows up in Geelong at the start of every new year for coverage of the Cadel Evans Great Ocean Road Race, so I would like to see Geelong have its own local TV service. The bike race, local news and the ability to reach massive audiences with advertising is worth it, it’s just that the networks aren’t doing anything about it. Geelong is the odd one out when it comes to TV.
Are you also saying that residents on the Gold Coast are choosing to receive their television directly from Brisbane? Looks like the citizens of the Gold Coast don’t want their local 5:30pm news if that’s the case…
I hate to yuck someone’s yum but the idea and desire for Geelong to get its own localised feed with a local news bulletin and/or have Ballarat channels officially broadcast in the area has to be the most ridiculous fantasy on this forum in a long time.
What desire and what fantasy? Also, it’s not ridiculous, because the picture quality of Melbourne in HD is horrendous, as is for every capital city station, as they all carry MPEG-2. We’ve all talked about it before here on the MediaSpy Forums.
With regional stations being so fast to upgrade to MPEG-4 HD, comes improved picture quality. Most regional areas have MPEG-4 HD channels now on Seven and WIN (Nine) stations. I saw the quality of the MPEG-4 HD service on 7HD and 9HD Wollongong on my Apple iMac, and the results were impressive, making regional TV 10x better than metro in terms of picture quality.
Years ago, I recall someone suggesting a similar thing for Werribee and Frankston/Bayside as well as Geelong, in that Seven or Nine should have UHF relays there as well with local news bulletins.
But have to agree, Geelong isn’t big enough or important enough to the licence area to warrant it. It’s about 1/3rd the size of the Gold Coast and the Melbourne stations aren’t about to let Ballarat into part of its licence area.
I feel like the idea of Geelong having its own services might have been a viable one 15 or 20 years ago, when the digital TV transition was underway.
Unfortunately the state of the free to air television market these days means that we are more likely to see existing transmitters switched off rather than new transmitters or relays switched on.
It’s an interesting hypothetical and what if scenario, but given that FTA TV is on a declining trajectory (with the broadcasters themselves pushing people towards their streaming apps), it’s one that would no longer be feasible in todays world.
Unfortunately picture quality doesn’t dictate television broadcasting licence areas. Nor does it change the fact Geelong having its own feed and local news bulletin simply isn’t feasible. Nor does it justify broadcasting two sets of channels into an area, further fragmenting a declining advertising market with a population of under 300k.
It simply doesn’t make any sense.
No, not really. Lookout Hill signals drop right off once you come down Mt Moriac into Geelong itself. Some of the elevated areas around Bell Post Hill do get them, as well areas on the Bellarine where Melbourne signals are historically poor. Though the Geelong UHF translator has helped address that issue to an extent.
As a kid I tried swinging existing rooftop aerials at our house(s) in southern Geelong towards Ballarat with no luck. You really needed a high mast, high gain antenna and probably amplifier to even have a chance, and even then it would have been sketchy. The digital transition will only have made that even more difficult.
No, I’m saying that residents used to receive their TV direct from Brisbane and Northern NSW before there were repeaters in the Gold Coast, but since then I don’t now to what extent those pre-existing setups had been moved over to the local transmitters.
There are many more people in the Gold Coast now than in the 1980’s when the repeaters came online, as well as a few more local transmitter sites, so presumably a larger proportion of viewers have used the repeaters over time.
Another reason would be that the local Gold Coast transmitters would offer:
The Gold Coast news bulletins
The Northern NSW channels’ programs would be in standard time in the summer rather than daylight saving time as in Northern NSW
The Northern NSW channels would have some Queensland oriented programming (e.g. news bulletins from Brisbane rather than Sydney) rather than some NSW oriented programming for Northern NSW.
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