Originally published at: These four minutes of BBC TV from 1938 only still exist because of weird atmospheric conditions | Boing Boing
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At 2:00, I thought Lenin was already dead.
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Court room drama?
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Doctor Who, the very early years.
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In LA, on hot and humid days, we can often pick up Mexican radio stations that originate hundreds of miles away. It’s probably the same phenomenon and I think it’s called an ionosphere reflection or bounce.
Watching that video minds me of how, as teenagers in the early 90’s, we used to try to watch the scrambled cable tv pay channels late at night on the weekends in the hopes of seeing an unclothed body part. Lol
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One summer day a few years back I picked up a Jacksonville FL, NPR FM station up here in central NH. strangest thing ever.
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Season 4 of EastEnders looks like it was awesome.
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Enkwife and I used to have fun in the early days of cable with the whole “did you just see THAT?” and we’d flip back and forth to see the blip of only-slightly scrambled signal. We used to call it “Picasso Porn”
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Aw, I was imagining that the transmission had been bouncing back and forth in the atmosphere for the last 80+ years.
I know that’s ridiculous, but I’m still a bit disappointed.
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I got a Canadian NPR station in GA once. Came in clear as a bell. It took a while for me to realize it was NOT my regular station.
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Same thing with mine. I figured the normal announcer was out. Until they gave a beach forecast and traffic updates.
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I remember driving across Iowa one night in the mid/late-1980s at around 3 in the morning and picking up some Los Angeles AM station. Crazy.
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AMs a whole different story. When I was a kid the local sports radio 1020 AM would go off the air at sunset and I’d get to listed to KDKA out of Pittsburg. Kinda cool, but I wanted to listen to the Red Sox, not the Pirates. Nobody wants to listen to the Pirates.
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As an amateur radio operator, I’m really curious to know what frequency this transmission was on. Due to the atmosphere being just fascinating and capable of amazing feats, lots of bizarre radio propagation events happen all the time. Shortly after I got my license, I was playing around listening for stations on my 2 meter radio with the homemade 1/2 wave antenna I had just put together when I heard stations from northern Minnesora communicating with stations in Texas. 2m is normally only ‘line of sight’, but there was a ‘band opening’ which can cause all kinds of interesting reflections due to the ionization of the Ionosphere (sort of how it gets its name).
I didn’t manage to reach anyone, but it cemented my interest in the hobby!
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Would be curious to see what an AI could do in cleaning this up further. Too bad there’s no sound.
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Well, at least until those aliens from Contact send that broadcast of the opening ceremonies of the 1936 Berlin Olympics back to us. (I’m in no rush to see it anyway)
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Fortunately they cut it before the girl with the long hair crawled out of the well.
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The BBC 405 line transmissions from Alexandra Palace were broadcast on Band 1 VHF (47 to 68 MHz).
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