wmartin@brl-tgr.ARPA (Will Martin ) (07/19/84)
On the evening of Tuesday, 17 July 84, at several intervals during the period of 1900-2000 (7-8 PM) CDT, all three of the major television network (NBC, CBS, & ABC) program feeds were simultaneously lost here in St. Louis, MO. The outages lasted for periods of 5 - 10 minutes, and when programming resumed, the signals seemed normal, until the "trouble on the network" slides re-appeared. In the brief interval before the slide appeared, the signal seemed to vanish abruptly and completely, leaving nothing but snow with no audio. This affected all three networks simultaneously each time, until the third (or so) occurrence, when it affected only two networks (I believe that it was ABC that came through OK that time, but I may be mis-remembering.) When it first happened, I assumed that the problem was that a satellite went out (I thought that all three networks feed using the same satellite for a given region -- am I wrong in this assumption?). After all the ASAT discussion in net.space, I then thought that we might be at war. When "Foulups, Bleeps, and Blunders" came back on, I was reassured as to the latter possibility... We stopped watching TV at 2000, so I do not know if these interruptions continued past that time. Anyway, I am posting this to ask: 1) Did this happen nationally, or at least regionally (midwest)? Or was it local to St. Louis? 2) Does anyone know of satellite problems, UFO's appearing between the Earth and geosynchronous orbit, mysterious electromagnetic fields, or other phenomena that would explain this unprecedented (in my experience) situation? (I thought that each local network affiliate had their own earth station, so simultaneous trouble on all three would have to be caused at the source [or by a well-coordinated guerrilla attack...].) 3) Was anyone watching cable channels, such as HBO, which are also satellite-fed, and did they suffer similar outages at this time? (We have no cable available yet in St. Louis City, and couldn't check this. Local independent & PBS stations continued to broadcast during this time.) 4) Am I totally off-base about this being satellite-related? (That is, are these feeds via microwave or landline, and maybe some local or upstream interference caused the interruptions?) Anybody have comments or experiences related to this, or similar, that they wish to post? Will Martin
jlh@loral.UUCP (Jim Harkins) (07/24/84)
Jeez, aren't you lucky. Why doesn't anything like that ever happen in San Diego?