Comments by "Bond25" (@Bond2025) on "Ringway Manchester" channel.

  1. One thing that was popular int eh 1980s was "PIRATE TV". I bought a TV transmitter known as a "Video Sender" in the late 80s to transmit the output from a VCR around the house to TVs. I still have it to this day in a box and it still works! People would use them and then leave them on broadcasting films. You had to know about them or find them by chance when tuning around. There was someone local to me that did this at weekends and must have been using a computer generated test card. It was one film after another, no contact details. The output was only around 10-20mW on mine, so I suspect people were using amateur equipment for a bit of fun to amplify them. I never used mine this way as connecting it to a TV aerial wouldn't have got far, only at the back of all the other TV aerials ! In those days I knew nothing about RF, so nothing about UHF aerial designs and the Internet wasn't a thing then. It still does CH21-68 analogue with a video in and audio in plug. If I could have turned the aerial around to face everyone elses I might have tried it out. It was definitely possible to interfere with TV for a few houses nearby using the small telescopic aerial.
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  2. I don't use DABradio as the quality of the audio, even in the car, is rubbish. It is like listening to AM mono radio compared to FM stereo. When i first heard tests on DAB in the 2000s the audio was over 200Kbps, now its mono at as low as 32Kbps.
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  3. In 1994 there was an attack on a radio communications tower in Delamere Forest in error. The tap was known about, but not exactly where it was located, someone tried to knock the tower down! I only know because of a building survey as an emergency to make sure cracks and damage would not cause too much of a problem. The area had a no-fly zone which was handy. As for vans and other vehicles used by intelligence services, they have a whole fleet of vans and uniforms from every company going. Facilities Management companies are a favourite as people get in to sites and are often left alone to do their "work". There is a training site in Ellesmere Port on the industrial estate if any of the auditor people want to go along! See how long you last. Residents were not told to keep quiet and never provided with double glazing or anything else, that is rubbish. A lot of the computer equipment and people operating it was in the houses in the road next to it, not the bungalows.
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  4. I got told my amateur radio aerials were causing my old neighbours to be really ill. There was nothing on the other end of the coax as I had been decorating for months.
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  5. All of them are without warrant, how do you think GCHQ and NSA operate. All your internet traffic goes through them for processing. That includes what you THINK is secure. They run multiple sites and operate VPN companies too.
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  6. At 9:15 my samsung phone woke up with the Gemini AI thing i don't even use and started asking how it could help me...
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  7. The Lindenblad type aerial, awful things in my opinion. 4 dipoles in parallel at 45degrees means a huge MINUS dB figure and having to use fairly big power amps to overcome the loss and achieve a reasonable ERP. I really wouldn't waste my time with one as coverage is nowhere near as good as a stacked dipole arrangement or stacked circular polarised aerials. Why put 600Watts in, waste all that electric with much bigger power amps, splitters and coax and have less coverage than using 4 times less to get the same coverage for stacked circular polarisation aerials OR 6 to 8 times less through a single dipole! I've never understood why people want circular polarisation now anyway, vertical is how most people have aerials. Even horizontal has died out.
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  8. The neighbouring houses were full of computer equipment and people processing it. I drove up there a few times for work purposes and was always watched!!!
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  9. Quite a few aerials up there, well worth a look.
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  10. I was working in a BT exchange in the middle of Chester and each time I walked past one rack I could smell burning. I got one of the engineers and he had a sniff around and come back a few minutes later with a board to replace the burnt out one with. He looked at it and laughed saying, "that's half of Chester that's been unable to make any calls". This was the time when more and more computers were being installed and you needed huge rooms with aircon plants in them. That's all changed since and most of the old equipment replaced. I can't even remember the road, but it is off a main road right in the middle of Chester, a fairly big building.
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  11. Do you know about mics they install on certain buildings to detect and record things like gunshots and to triangulate them! This was tried in the 80s and then about 10 years ago. London started it off. The Special Constable network is widely used as people are from various jobs and backgrounds and can get info the police need warrants or production orders for and need a genuine reason to access - mostly without any trace or suspicion. examples are info from BT systems, NHS systems, banks, credit reference agencies, DVLA etc - depending on where different Special Constables work - don't say it doesn't go on! They also have access to buildings to install equipment that wouldn't usually be allowed, so quite a resource to have.
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  12. A real shame as most DABradio station audio quality is worse than AM, and a lot is in mono anyway.
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  13. Quality of DABradio is pathetic in the UK and it is mostly MONO. On one car I have the DABradio aerial is built in to the back window. Unfortunately the rear car camera and wiring used to generate quite a bit of "noise" and de-sensitise the radio on DAB, so I had to get a different camera that linked the rear to the front camera using mini coax. This happens a lot and people often wonder why DABradio and their normal radio starts acting odd. It might not be anything to do with this in your case. It means my aerial is effectively horizontal, so reception is limited compared to if it had been vertical. Poor design on the car manufacturers part. A lot of broadcast stations are mixed polarisation, but I always think that is a waste of time, money and power when most people use vertical polarisation at home.
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  14. Well, there is a reason "AM" is used on aircraft frequencies and why it was used extensively by police radios fitted to cars, fire engine radios, also a lot of PMR from the 1970s and 1980s... Now it is just aircraft using it. In the late 80s I used to have a Uniden 2830 in my car and used that on USB mobile with friends on CB frequencies! AM was far better than FM when driving around. It just seemed to be clearer and louder.
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  15. The disused 68-88MHz would have been ideal for DAB and the coverage is really good on those frequencies. It works a lot better than 200MHz! I am not sure why they went for near 175MHz to 225MHz, I used a PMR service called Dolphin TETRA in Band 3 in the 1990s. Coverage was OK, but it was single digital channels in use on a shared repeater system from Winter Hill. No one wants DABradio now because of low audio quality, low bitrates and mono, all the stations playing the same music in a different order with continual adverts and silly announcements... People prefer to use their phone and stream audio as it is more convenient and sounds a lot better.
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  16. Also known for Solicitor Robert Broudie, the brother of lightning seeds singer Ian Broudie, jumping off the roof in 2007 around 11am one morning. He left £5Million in his Will, with £3Million of it to charities, including those for people with mental health conditions.
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  17. Another fact about microwaves, hope it isn't classified, is that they were used to entice the enemy closer in order to attack them. Planes would pick up the signal and think there was something there... Door safety switches were messed with so the microwave would be left running with the door off and pointing in to the sky so it looked like a RADAR installation.
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  18. WOW, lots of services used 88-108MHz as commercial radio never went past about 98MHz. British Gas used 106.2MHz AM. Fire Service used just below 88MHz, also AM.
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  19. It was a great hobby in the 80s and 90s, now all people hear is aircraft, marine, amateur and PMR. There is nothing else and they all get boring. Don't waste your time and money. Mobile phones killed off PMR companies in 1994, shared repeater use vanished. Low cost radios for shop security are mostly digital now. Why would you want to hear aircraft or marine! Everything else of interest is digital and encrypted so you will never hear it.
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  20. That wouldn't have taken much power. If you think about a room of people shouting to each other, if you have someone next to you, you will hear them louder than others further away. That's how transmitters work. 50KW 10 miles away can easily be blocked by 10 Watts for a mile radius from the transmitter. It doesn't mean he had more power, it's just that he was closer.
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  21.  @TheSpotify95  I used to listen to KISS on DABradio in the car, it was brilliant at 192Kbps. Then it dropped to 160Kbps, then 128, then 112, then 80 until it sounded absolutely rubbish. That happened to a lot of DABradio stations. It turned in to a massive public con. We were promised high quality clear sounding audio with no interference. remember all the misleading adverts that had to be changed. People happily went from FM Stereo to DABmono/low bitrate/no dynamic range audio. Local radio become nothing more than the same music collections in similar orders with different adverts played over them, some announcements thrown in and a bit of talking and news. I don't listen to much radio now. In the 80s and 90s, Pirate Stations took off as they give people what they wanted. Everyone in the North West should remember the stations Radio Merseywaves, Storeton Community Radio, North Coast Radio, Radio Julie, Lazer UK and many others. Many broadcast for years on MW and VHF with good coverage.
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  22. It is quite interesting to experiment with things like this. I have stopped in Wales and loaded up a wire fence through an impedance matcher on HF. On 160M and 80M I was getting loads of contacts. That was on 5 Watts. The fence must have been a mile long on a hill. I am very much in to "stealth antennas" and have a full set up for HF to UHF, no one spots them unless they really know what to look for. I've even used a wire clipped on the back of a gutter around as house as a loop antenna on HF. I also tuned up a length of 75ohm coax going up a wall to a pole and TV antenna on 10M. Aerials don't have to be high up for HF, you can run them 2ft off the ground and get great results.
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  23. I used to watch the helicopter downlink and the council CCTV cameras! No one knew at the time and companies mis-sold a lot of equipment.
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  24. I bought a Pro34 in Novemeber 1988 when they were introduced. £249.99 and it still works to this day, even after modifying to listen to POCSAG in the late 90s. Nothing on it now apart from marine, airband and the odd PMR. In the 80's and 90's it was quite interesting to listen on! Years later I used a Kenwood TH42E after extending the TX/RX to cover 400 to 470MHz... programmed mainly for my 70cm use, but one or two channels with split RX/TX were interesting! That Kenwood lasted about 6 years and broke, cheaply made junk. I got it through a company I was doing business with, Kenwood sold all the radios at 40% of retail to companies, so I got a real bargain. You get ripped off at amateur radio dealerships.
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  25. That's what I was thinking of, I called it an aircraft locator! I keep meaning to go and have a look at that when I am over there next.
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  26. No, use Drone Assist and it will show no-fly areas and the drone should not take off anyway to protect the user. I would be more worried about the RF knocking it out of the sky! I had to go to a number of radio sites in the 90s and one car I hated taking was a Land Rover. There was no way of getting up a steep hill and path without it, but when it was locked, it refused to unlock or start in some areas. It had to be unlocked with the key and pushed down the hill before it would come back to life. We did once try driving up a steep hill in Wales in an XR3i and got it completely stuck to half way up the wheels. Some transmitter sites are often remote or well hidden. One was by a Country Park at the top of Hope Mountain in Wales, but the aerial was disguised as an actual tree ! Amazing bit of design, it took me ages to find as I was looking for a mast.
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  27. It's to stop the locals breaking in and either pinching stuff or causing damage or worse to themselves. A few of the MW pirates probably thought about hooking up a TX to that tower. The Medium Wave and Short Wave pirate scene is still fairly big in the UK of you know when and where to listen. With bigger stations vanishing, it leaves the bands available.
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  28. He is probably referring to CAVE RESCUE RADIO systems. A little known fact is that only certain frequencies are any good for cave rescue! VLF too. They are often tested in old mines and caves for ground penetration. Idea for another video there!
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  29. So do I - around 100MHz AM. They also used 154MHz AM by me for many years.
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  30. What really annoys me is fancy mixed polarisation aerials - often set as a beam on a 45degree angle or 4 folded dipoles at 45degree angles on 4 poles or those X shaped ones with 8 or 12 elements. All of them are a total waste of power, stations are having to pump in 4 times the power to get any coverage because they are inefficient. I looked at the old JUICE FM TX in Liverpool a few years ago and they were using a compromised antenna with 100Watts and gain of -2.5dB, so were allowed to turn the RF up to around 140Watts to give 100W at the aerial to overcome feeder loss. It was a dipole that had each element bent out so it was part horizontal, then vertical. It only give a combined H/V radiation pattern with 50Watts in each plane in theory. They would have been better using two dipoles - or just using vertical polarisation. I am not even sure if it is still in the Cathedral. You can go on the roof for a tour of the cathedral in Liverpool most days and look at the transmitter room if you're lucky and all the aerials on the roof. There are PMR, police, mobile companies, coastguard, taxi service and radio stations.
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  31. It is a thick tar like substance that sticks to skin and clothing and is extremely difficult to get off. It puts people off climbing on or near it.
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  32. I remember Gordon! That's going back to the early 80s. He wasn't just in Manchester, he went all over the North West with Malcolm!
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  33. I've got a 20Watt amp that will work on 868MHz and live on a hill with views to Manchester and Wales and beyond, so it will be interesting to also run a preamp and see how many people i can contact. I will be using a home made Slim Jim type antenna to keep the radiation angle low. Many 1/4 and 5/8wave designs tend to fire upwards which is of no use for distance. They might have more gain, but less blanket coverage.
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  34. It's the aerial they allow to float on the surface of the water, it's extremely long and can't be detected.
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  35. In the mid 1980s, Radio Julie in Merseyside used a very clever solution. Andy the engineer used those Tandy mains intercoms to link the studio to the transmitter. Then he found that he could send audio down old Rediffusion cables between flats and this helped on one raid. The DTI man run in to the flat and followed the lead from the TX to a plate on the wall ! One of them even had a heart attack running up the stairs int he flats. Sadly, Andy is no longer with us. He would have approved of 10GHz links and what people got up to in later years like DIMENSION FM 92.2 in Telford. When they put their TX on The Wrekin TV mast and linked to the caravan studio in a barn, we could hear them clearly in the North West and often as far as Southport and Chester.
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  36. It is!
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  37.  @RingwayManchester  When you returned from the toilet, your table had gone! Most people went at night when it was dark, but it still give great views. You can go further along the Strand in to the hotel and sit right at the top of it.
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  38. There were two serving estates at the end of the M53, but I can't find the exact details. I think they were on the MB21 site. People were wondering why there were two TV aerials on a lamp post. One was a horizontal group C/D pointing at Winter Hill, and underneath was a vertical Group A pointing to two estates by J2/3 M53. This was analogue TV. Another filler repeater was by J1 M53 and outside a council tip on a lamp post, same arrangement, Group C/D horizontal towards Winter Hill and Group A vertical to local area or housing. The power output was only 1 or 2 Watts and 5 channels when in operation. Maybe anyone local can have a look or confirm this. The M53 J2/3 one was no longer required when the Storeton Transmitter (M53 J4/5) went on air. People could use that, including a lot of people in Liverpool who were line of sight and a mile or two away compared to Winter Hill. The only problem was they got S4C and not Channel 4 as it was installed to transmit to Wales, not Wirral and Liverpool. That might have changed now. Moel-Y-Parc still doesn't cover all areas despite it's presence. There were lots of these smaller TV repeaters about in the days of analogue, most not on big masts. One or two appear to have been unofficial, set up by people to help locals out.
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  39. It sounds better than DABradio. The problem is often to do with sound compression and overdriven clipping audio in the fight between stations to sound the loudest. Sadly, DAB stations are doing this now and with very low MONO bitrates, it sounds absolutely rubbish.
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  40. every single PMR install i have seen since the 90s has the same problem with brackets.
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  41.  @ianmason.  You should see how many nuclear fallout shelters there are! I have built and installed lots of equipment in them since the 80s. If anyone is in the North West, there is one under the council building extension in Ellesmere Port town centre. Access via a door from the car park that looks like it goes in to the offices, or via a manhole in the car park that has a 5ft diameter concrete tube running about 20ft on an angle. Inside is a submarine door as I call it - the room is tiled and has a brush with hose attached on the wall ! Down there is a command and control centre, air/water purifiers and storage and a diesel generator and storage. There is a room with bunkbeds and a kitchen, toilets and storage. This was completed in around 1991. Access down the main stairs leads to a thick door hinged on the right. On entering the shelter, rooms to the right are beds, then the escape tunnel and tiled room with showers, toilets and a kitchen area. On the left after entering from the main door are air purification, water treatment and storage, generator. Straight ahead is a large room of about 20ft by 25ft with various computer equipment and radios. This has all been updated since. Some of the aerials on the council buildings were connected at one point. Many shelters existed like this, but were demolished. One or two still exist.
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  42. No one uses KM in the UK, we are still in Miles and Miles per Hour, we also use GBP or £ as currency, not Dollars or $ as people from the UK often start quoting incorrectly.
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  43. You would have to look at the efficiency of the transmitter, modulator and amplifier, then any additional equipment in use. I would guess that site has a 3phase 415v supply and a 1.5KW AM TX and all the equipment probably takes 4 times that. How about 7KW ? It would be like leaving a shower on all day!!! Expensive. Over £100 a day.
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  44. On 70cm i can get the Isle of Man using 5watts in to a 8dB vertical. I'm around 100miles away. On 2m i can get further than that. It depends on height. With Meshtastic on 868MHz my range is less than a mile in some directions - but i can get people mobile on Winter Hill from 40+miles away using a 5dB aerial on a bedroom windowsill. Another person is 5miles away 200ft up in a flat.
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  45. When I was about 14 I started messing about with building TXs using a PCB kit from Tandy. I bought a Pantec Hobbykit, which was a push-pull oscillator on 106MHz using 2x 2n3055, later replaced on my own bigger printed circuit board with 4 x 2n3866, fed in to a dipole. It was HORRIFIC, no RF filtering, never knew about that then, plus loud splattering audio. I managed to block a whole streets TVs and used to talk to friends on a Multimode 2 CB, which also could be heard over everything. The problem was, two CBers lived within 300ft, one with a Sigma 4 and another with Sirio type aerial, so they were getting watched. What I didn't know at the time was the Radio Amateur 4 houses away was going to get a very unexpected call one Saturday night as I was playing music. A Rover 3500 police car and transit van turned up and the people kicked his door in. He was a bank manager! I had to hide the board between the lagging jacket on the tank and pull the dipole in from a back window. I later went on to get a Class A licence, qualifications in RF & electronics engineering and realise how bad all those kits were.
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  46. So do I for versatility and not having to keep changing aerials in tests, but they have a lower gain than a dedicated aerial tuned to a specific frequency. I prefer the Grid Type antennas and used a 4 stack dipole array for years on TV. Far more reliable than a flimsy TV aerial, it also had around the same gain figures but had a wider acceptance angle and a cardioid pattern. Handy for picking up more than one TX. It was just a piece of mesh and 4 "X" shaped elements with a built in phasing harness. For horizontal polarisation the "X" elements stood vertical one above the other, so the longest side of the reflector was vertical. Vertical polarisation meant having it as [X X X X]. Great aerials.
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  47. I would love 29mpg all the time in the town. For a relatively "small petrol turbo" I get between 28 and 30. It is so annoying as the fumes out of it are way more harmful than my diesel which gives 50mpg in town, but then takes 2 gallons of diesel to burn off all the soot, so a false economy now. All part of the plan to try and make cars less efficient, more expensive to run and to try and get people buying milk floats.
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  48. My kenwoos th42e was brilliant with wideband mod!
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  49. It's not the same thing, you need to consider they are only around 100mWatts RF output. On 868MHz that doesn't go far in a built up area, it needs to be high up or using a really good aerial, or both. Walkie talkies can be 5Watts RF and work down nearer 440MHz. RF at different frequencies works very different in different locations. My favourite band in 4M or 70MHz for base to mobile coverage, nothing beats it! DABradio should have used that band.
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  50. Doesn't matter that much as you will not hear anything of interest. RG213 is fine as an aerial high up without obstruction is more important. You need to consider what you will be listening to and make sure the aerial covers the frequencies.
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