Pirate TV

[Inspector Sands]

Here's something interesting I stumbled across yesterday. 

Thameside TV was a pirate TV station that broadcast to London in 1984/5, one of a handful of attempts at pirate TV in the UK. It was a spin off of a long running radio pirate Thameside Radio and the website in tribute to the station has uploaded 3 of their broadcasts, although the 3rd never went out as the station was raided.

https://thamesideradio.org/tsr/tr_progra...41007.html

There's not much in terms of original content but those continuity announcements are one of the few examples of UK pirate TV, albeit taken from the master tape not off air. Here's some more details about Thameside 
http://www.curiousbritishtelly.co.uk/202...e.html?m=1 

The other vaguely successful pirate TV station was Telstar TV in Birmingham, it broadcast on BBC2's frequency after it went off air. I remember it getting a mention on Newsround at the time, although it seems by the time it made the news it had already ended - the people running it informed the media
There's no footage, but here's an interesting forum thread about it including a long post by someone who was involved

https://www.thepiratearchive.net/forum/v....php?t=187


I wonder how many people actually watched these. Unless you had a rotary dial TV set we weren't used to tuning around the TV dial. Telstar probably caught a few people who left BBC2 on after closedown in the small area of Birmingham they covered. Thameside had the advantage of an established radio station to promote it, and the TV audio was transmitted on 90.5 FM.

[Neil Jones]

There's a link in the forum thread re: Telstar that has long expired, but lives on in the Wayback Machine and it looks like a type-up of a newspaper article:
https://web.archive.org/web/201604180157...e%20tv.htm

Viewership I would have thought would have been peanuts if that particularly for Telstar. Apparently it took eight weeks for the authorities to notice the illegal broadcasts...

London had another Pirate TV station a couple of years later:
https://web.archive.org/web/201211250038.../index.htm

And of course Caroline TV (related to Radio Caroline) was tooted but never appeared. Apparently would have been broadcast from an aeroplane.

[Humphrey Hacker]

This article has a brief explanation of how it worked including how TSW was caught up in a scandal surrounding “adult material” What would Gus Honeybun have thought?!
https://www.amfm.org.uk/tx/tx15/piratetv.html

[Neil Jones]

This article has a brief explanation of how it worked including how TSW was caught up in a scandal surrounding “adult material” What would Gus Honeybun have thought?!
https://www.amfm.org.uk/tx/tx15/piratetv.html

That's just a jamming thing, that's the same sort of concept that lead to the Max Headroom incident in the US in the 1980s (and I suppose Captain Midnight).
Southern of course fell "victim" (for want of a better word) to an audio-only intrusion in the 1970s which it is suspected was because of the open-nature deisgn of the relay used. In all these events nobody was ever IDs or caught.

With regards to the TSW thing, well if TSW weren't broadcasting when that went out (pretty sure either they or the IBA would have known when TSW stopped airing anything), then it can only have been a pirate broadcast. But never let the facts get in the way of Mary Whitehouse in decrying this.

I think the Inspector's point is that the pirate channels mentioned were actually broadcasting, I think the first mentioned London one was being effectively relayed from Crystal Palace, but the one for Birmingham would have been far more local I would have thought (as I think it was only received in parts of the west Birmingham area as the linked thread suggests it was sourced from Bartley Green which is South West of Birmingham and I don't think there's ever been a TV relay there)

[Humphrey Hacker]

I was trying to find a Sixty Minutes clip about Telstar TV which was active in the midlands for a while but I found this instead:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b9gzNW9cRN4

[Inspector Sands]

This article has a brief explanation of how it worked including how TSW was caught up in a scandal surrounding “adult material” What would Gus Honeybun have thought?!
https://www.amfm.org.uk/tx/tx15/piratetv.html

That's just a jamming thing, that's the same sort of concept that lead to the Max Headroom incident in the US in the 1980s (and I suppose Captain Midnight).
Southern of course fell "victim" (for want of a better word) to an audio-only intrusion in the 1970s which it is suspected was because of the open-nature deisgn of the relay used.  In all these events nobody was ever IDs or caught.

Yes that's different, that's interrupting an existing broadcast
 With regards to the TSW thing, well if TSW weren't broadcasting when that went out (pretty sure either they or the IBA would have known when TSW stopped airing anything), then it can only have been a pirate broadcast.

 
I'm pretty sure I heard that it was a group of engineering students on Dartmoor, though whether they were doing a signal intrusion on a microwave link or overwhelming a relay I don't know. The latter was made impossible at some point when the broadcasters put in a system that identified the incoming channel and shut down the transmitter of it wasn't the correct one

I think the Inspector's point is that the pirate channels mentioned were actually broadcasting, I think the first mentioned London one was being effectively relayed from Crystal Palace, but the one for Birmingham would have been far more local I would have thought (as I think it was only received in parts of the west Birmingham area as the linked thread suggests it was sourced from Bartley Green which is South West of Birmingham and I don't think there's ever been a TV relay there)

Yes the London one (and another mentioned I the AM/FM article above were both based in Crystal Palace which of course is the best place to do it. 


The thing that fascinates me about these (although they'd have freaked the bejeezus out of me at the time) is that when you think of pirate TV you think of something a bit clandestine, a bit anarchist.... but in reality the Thameside TV example is a well spoken young man playing pop videos and a Beatles film. The Birmingham one was run by a video rental shop presumably to promote its wares. Mind you the pirate radio of the time was often very mainstream, stations like Radio Jackie ran full time, played contemporary pop and did their own news bulletins read from Ceefax.

[Markymark]

The TSW incident was someone hijacking the input of the Plympton relay (which serves a big chunk of Plymouth) after the main station at Caradon Hill had closed down.

It was a far more impressive affair than the Hannington audio only hijacking in 1977. Same principle, turn up at the transmitter site with your own low power transmitter, and blast the signal into the broadcaster's rx antennas. The Hannington incident was done at 5pm on a Saturday. Because analogue TV sound employed FM (rather than AM) modulation, you can take advantage of what's called the Capture Effect, where providing the signal is 1 or 2dB higher than than the other one, it will completely replace it. After that incident the IBA watermarked their TV audio with a 23 kHz embedded signal, so any main station that was off air fed from another (in the 70s that applied to the majority of main transmitters, BBC and IBA) would mute any audio that didn't have the 23k signal. That was fine for stations like Hannington, but not the smaller relay stations like Plympton that were 'dumb' terminals. They just (and still do) , spit out what they receive.

The perpetrators of the Hannington hijack also placed a fake job ad in Wireless World for the post of 'Head of Security' at the IBA. The same group were also thought to be responsible for hijacking BBC R2 from Rowridge after closedown one night, and thanks to the BBC's RBS system, the output ended up on Wenvoe, and North Hessary Tor. In other words, all of Southern and South West England, and a big chunk of Wales