YouTube: Digital Transfers
Watching this really shows you how much Australia has changed since then.
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2 January 1988: Imparja Television begins transmission in the remote central Australia region through the Aussat satellite and some terrestrial transmission sites. It is official opened on 15 January.
This is a program schedule from 1989:
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5 January 1979: Sir Eric Pearce retires from the GTV9 newsdesk and introduces Brian Naylor, who moves from HSV7 to anchor the early evening bulletin from 8 January. Here’s the ad published on The Age about Sir Eric’s departure.
BONUS: an excerpt of that night’s National Nine News with the complete goodbye message from Sir Eric. Peter Hitchener appears here reading the weather.
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5 January 2018 Hoda Kotb replaces the disgraced Matt Lauer full-time on NBC’s Today Show following Lauer’s firing in November the previous year.
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5 January 1986: SBS ceases transmission from Channel 0 in Sydney and Melbourne, making it Australia’s first UHF-only network. The network had been promoting UHF television for years but that didn’t stop the station and the Department of Communications apparently getting hammered with calls the next day from people who suddenly couldn’t get SBS.
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What happened to him?
Google Matt Lauer
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We didn’t call but that was us! Our old Rank Arena like this one only had a VHF receiver.
Photo from The Age. Ours was a lighter timber finish but that same model going by the controls.
It wasn’t until we got a hand me down HMV around 1989 which wouldn’t have been much newer than the Rank Arena that we could get SBS again but only in the “good” room, so us kids were left out.
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And I think that’s Peter Mitchell standing behind Arthur Higgins (sports presenter seated to Pearce’s right) when the reporters and crew come out.
I thought we’d be in the same boat as our push button had only VHF channels, or so I thought according to the numbers beside each button, but then Dad realised how to change one of the presets from VHF to UHF, and voila! we had SBS
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SBS-28 was notoriously difficult to receive in some parts of Melbourne. Some suburbs (eg. Hawthorn) you couldn’t receive it unless you had a tall UHF aerial pointed towards Mt Dandenong. I lived in various blocks of flats in inner Melbourne in the 1990s and not one of them could receive SBS-28 even with an inside antenna. This problem was remedied after the analogue switch off in Melbourne in 2013 when SBS moved to a more powerful transmitter and frequency (VHF-7) and older antennas can receive it again. Most Melbournians didn’t bother updating their antennas to receive SBS until they got the rights to the 1990 FIFA World Cup soccer from Italy, at that time there were advertising campaigns by antenna companies to install UHF in time for this event.
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using an indoor antenna in a block of flats in the inner suburbs would not be very conducive to picking up a UHF signal AFAIK.
When I lived in a block of flats later on, even with an antenna on the roof, IIRC we still needed a booster attached to get UHF. And this was in inner west Melbourne.
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It likely that the distribution amp in the block of flats that amplified and shared the TV signal around the flats only amplified VHF signals, so even an upgrade to include a UHF antenna wouldn’t have helped. What some complexes did was install the UHF antenna but then convert the UHF signal to a vacant VHF channel and insert it into the feed to the units.
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Down Geelong way we could never get SBS clearly, even down in Queenscliff which was across the bay. The signal was shithouse, I remember trying to watch South Park through a snowstorm.
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13 January 1991 10 TV Australia refreshed to TEN and their famous “ten” word mark logo which was in use for 27 years.
14 January 2008 Nine dropped the 3D Cube with dots on the side package from 2007 after losing the ratings that year with a new logo with flying discs and the slogan we <3 tv. The dots weren’t used in WIN O&O’ed NWS Adelaide and STW Perth.
National Nine News also had a refresh which was the worst on-air presentation for any news service in Australia which lasted until October that year.
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16 January 2006 Tracy Grimshaw made her debut hosting A Current Affair a role she held onto until last year when she announced her retirement.
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In direct competition with Naomi Robertson who later that year (2006) retired from Today Tonight.
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Robson was only on the East Coast with state based TT in Adelaide and Perth
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Yes, but she was the main national presenter for the show.
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