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Bits and Pieces.
It is sun fade time again.
For those living across the bottom of Australia The sun is in alignment
with your antenna and satellites in the Clarke belt.
Time to check your dish alignment.
A NORMAL person goes home at night and consults the TV programme
in the local paper for the evenings entertainement.
The fringe people most of whom read this column check satco dx for the
latest additions to any feed or satellite and look up a table of frequencies,
bearings, elevations and other sundry info in order to see what is coming
through the snow. Normal people do not understand this.
All this is beamed to us from the depths of outer space
where no one can hear you scream!!!
The rest of the family usually doesn't care except
when they see a commercial advertising
A Carribean cruise in the Bahamas for $349.
Or a
Treasury of folk songs from Time, Life for $29.
My wife wanted to go until she found that she had to get from Adelaide to
Florida first.
This generates a certain atmosphere in the home watching CNN, SCTV, NBC, NHK
and all the other satellite realys we get as satellite viewers.
The most common reaction I get is, Oh! you have cable.... Noooo! is the reply,
Satellite.Normal people do not understand. They have sky tv or GALAXY.
We all know about jet lag, but what about satellite lag?
To put it in perspective, Adelaide is 1/2 hour behind Sydney Australia.or
+ 9 1/2 hours GMT. I assume you watch a lot of TV that is time shifted
orbroadcast in another time zone. In Adelaide we watch RFO in Tahiti & French.
What gets tricky is midday Adelaide time on a Saturday
they are showing childrens programs and other weekday fare. Of course!!!
you say,
it is about 4.30 on Friday afternoon over there. And thats it.. Satellite
lag.
Tahiti being about the second to last place on earth is still in Friday
mode and
we are well into the weekend. I still can't get used to watching the
Friday night 18.30 news at 14.00 local time Saturday.
In Adelaide it is raining, cool 12 deg C, and 25kmh breeze.
In Tahiti, the sun is setting 25 deg C. 5kmh breeze and natives in grass
skirts.
Coconut palms, I could go on and on.But then again it is yesterday.
To see this you look at Intelsat 701 at 180 deg E or W.
The sumo wrestling is on again.
NHK on Pas 2 at 19.00z weekdays .
Biology Now!
You may or may not be aware that in general Asian people are of a slighter
build
than most Europeans. I have learnt that if you play basketball in Indonesia
you must grow up to look a lot like Michael JORDAN..
He is a famous american basketballer I am told.
I think they hire their basketballers from the same country as Australia.
A new international match here.
American Indonesians Vs American Australians.
I wonder what a chinese basketballer looks like?
You can see this type of event on Palapa c2 on most Indonesian analogue
channels.
Over the last week we have had the death of a princess to keep us watching.
The first news came via CNN and this provided material for the next week.
All types of interviews and analogies of what was going on.
BBC 1,2,and 3 were seen on feeds at one time or another
as were NBC, ABC, CBS and Fox.
Other countries had special feeds as well and the satellite providers were
kept busy.
A lot of those colour bars were turned into special feeds and there was a
lot to
choose from. Mother Teresa Died in India as well and
this is what the news men do not want... Too much news.
India has authorised satellite uplinks from the country for her funeral on
Saturday.
Some brief statistics now for Princess Dianas' funeral.
Over 100 cameras and 19 OB vans in London.There were 44 cameras in Althorp
alone.
Other cameras covered the motorway and North London.
When the funeral started I had a check of the various satellites
BBC world and CNN were there for most of the proceedings and others followed.
On I 701 RFO, CNN and Worldnet all had coverage.
There were a couple of asain feeds as well.
On Pas 2 both CNN and NHK had some coverage.
On G 30 EMTV had a feed not necessarily from Ch9 Aust.
Palapa c2 had the most.
ANTV, CNBC, CFI, SCTV and TVRI all had coverage from a couple of different
sources.
It is understandable that ABN and MTV asia did not cover it and I noticed
the shopping channel selling merrily on and the ABC AUST with a rugby match.
It appeared most irreverent at the time.
I give TVSN a boquet for suspending activities for a couple of hours I thought
that was generous .Australia Television however I would heave a brick at as I
think viewers would have at least liked an acknowledgement of what the rest of
the world was doing. It would have been a nice thing to do. Maybe rugby
has to go on at any cost.
On AS 2 China managed with its' usual spectacles as Saturday night
appears to be concert night or something like that.
There was no acknowledgement of even the death of a princess.
It was as if it did not happen.
There were feeds on WTN and the EBB had DW, RAI, TV5 and spanish tv.
All had the funeral.
What I wish to illustrate here is the mass coverage of such an event.
It is said that all those old enough to remember know where they were
when President Kennedy was assasinated and now another generation will probably
remember what they were doing when Princess Diana died..
For President Kennedy there was 20 seconds of 8mm movie and film coverage
of the funeral. How things have changed. What of the next 30 years?
Some other things now.
On just about any satellite you can hear local radio stations and they
give you the local flavour of the target audience. NAU FM and YUME FM
(pronounced You me fm) on G30 as part of EMTV has local PNG flavour.
The European bouquet on AS 2 has a lot of radio stations and you can
certainly think you are living in the local region listening to them.
The reason I have given you bits and pieces is that nothing has happened
or else the world has passed me by.
Until the next occasion.
Cheers for now.
Bevin BODEN
Adelaide
South Australia.
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