Dave Buckley
Concerning GPO frame rooms, at Woodstock Grove there was a large cupboard housing a frame room that connected TVC – KH telephone circuits as well as WG telephones (which were all KH68XX). The WG studio vision and sound circuits (2 x vision and 16 interstice pairs) also terminated there with the sound circuits going on to TRU in KH.
If anyone moved offices, and wanted to keep the same extension number, a quick call to Al Degado (the resident BT engineer at the TVC PABX) to obtain the jumpering for the extension and one of the studio engineers/technical instructors would do the job without worrying BT. This was OK so long as Mrs.Plumb, the PBX supervisor in KH was told, otherwise she got a bit upset to find that an extension wasn’t where her records said it was! This happened to me one day when she phoned and said, “Who’s been moving phones again. Extension XXX should be in Room YYY yet I’ve been told it’s somewhere else!” “Not guilty, M’Lord”, was my reply, “TV Training hasn’t moved a phone in months”.
One circuit that came through the frame room and gave problems was the General News Service (GNS) PA feed. From time to time, sound maintenance would phone the TVTs technical office and say that the GNS feed wasn’t working in room XXX in KH. Usually it was found that someone had turned the gain down on the amplifier, but on one occasion there was a fault, and I had to trace the route through the WG frame room to prove that the signal was at least getting to the frame room in KH. A call to PBX to ask that the next time a BT engineer was in, could he look at this circuit, found that a jumper had been removed in KH.
Happy days.
Mike Jordan
Once upon a time long long ago, I had to go from BH to LG to sort the Gippie Joe (GPO) lines. The lines termination room was off Studio G (through some office – forget what it was) and I was directed there OK.
Next time I came and could not for the life of me find it as the door was hidden in the sound acoustic covering in the wall (north side under some stairs?)
GNS (General News System as opposed to SNS – Special News System) also had a teleprinter system using 80-0-80 volts on a line with relay repeaters around the place which we in BH used to look after feeding all the teleprinters in sport at LG and News at AP.
Happy Days as you say and much easier to find faults with lots of volts than this fibre/digital stuff!
