Disconnection of analog satellite TV: 4 years later (part 2)

Hello again to everyone!

4 years ago, the broadcasting of analogue television channels from the Astra 19.2 ° E satellite constellation was completely stopped. These were the last satellites in the world, which at that time still broadcast TV channels in analog. This event could not pass me unnoticed, and I decided to use the equipment I had to record the maximum number of disconnections of TV channels. How I did it and what came out of it can be read in a series of two articles.

In the first part of the article, I told a little about myself and what preceded the mass disconnection of TV channels on April 30, 2012.
In this part, I will directly touch on the chronology of switching off TV channels, as well as technical issues related to the equipment used and the recording process itself. There will be more technical issues, there will be photos and, of course, a lot of videos.
Who cares - welcome under the cat :)

So let's go!
April 29, 2012, Sunday, train Minsk-Brest. I arrive at 21:42 and run loaded with suitcases with all kinds of iron, wires and cassettes I fly home. As expected, the Big Analog Shutdown should occur on the night of April 29-30, German time. It was almost 5 hours in stock. It was necessary to connect all the equipment, twist both plates to 19.2 degrees east longitude, prepare tapes and ... wait.
At that time, I had two satellite dishes, two analog receivers, five VCRs, three of which were with HiFi sound and support for LP and two televisions.

Tract

The tract was built in a rather cunning way. The Nokia receiver does not have such an OSD in order not to completely overlap the picture. Simply put, I could not bring the current time to the corner of the screen. But Echostar could do it. In addition, he also showed SIGNAL STRENGTH right on top of the picture, which was very convenient for fine tuning the antennas. Also, a very good OSD had a LG VCR - at any time the current time could be displayed on the screen.
Since There were two receivers, and three VCRs, and the VCRs were quite different in recording quality, it was decided to do this:
1) The signal from Nokia was fed first to LG, and then to Blaupunkt. Thus, it was possible to get one record of “pure” ether, another - with the current time, so that it would be easier to navigate later in the records. The signal from Blaupunkt went straight to Casio. This bundle was used to record "specific" channel. Those. switching channels was mostly only on demand, or when nothing interesting was planned, the channels were spinning in parallel with the second bundle.
2) The signal from the Echostar went to the Sony-E780, then went to the Sony-P58EE. From the last, the RF signal went to the Electronics-409D. On this bundle, I recorded za pingyi when I was near the VCR.

Everything was written on VHS video tapes, there were 6 fully recorded E-180 and E-240 tapes. Something was written in the LP, something in the SP. Later the tapes were digitized, sliced ​​and the most interesting was uploaded to my YouTube channel.

Promised photos of installation:


UPD: I found a video recorded on a VHS-C video camera, where I recorded and briefly in broken English told about the installation. Immediately I apologize, I did not have a conversational practice then, and I was preparing a video for an English-language forum. As a result, it has never been published anywhere until now.

Chronology of outages

At one of the satellite reception forums, the outage schedule was found, I focused on it, but something went wrong the Germans were not very punctual in this regard, or I confused somewhere, now it's hard to say that was a long time ago:

So, later in the text, the time is given the summer Belarusian GMT + 3 (mb fix everything then into German).

April 29, 2012, 23:36. Zapping, receiver Nokia SAT 8003 S:

As you can see, on many channels there are infomaps, notifying that the channels will very soon leave the air.
April 30, 2012, 0:04. Also, the usual full capping after half an hour was a little worse in quality - the second plate was slightly knocked down, fixed only the next morning. Echostar SR-90 receiver:

At 0:40, I recorded zapping radio broadcasts:

At the end of the video sound problems - YouTube and copyright, damn ...

Then it was bad ... I sprinkled some ashes on my head - went to take a nap and set the alarm at the wrong time. Leaving one video recorder on TV, the other on the radio, he came back in the morning and saw that the TV was still on, but the radio was gone! Hooray, first off hooked.

On April 30, 2012 at 4:00 AM in Minsk RTL-Radio leaves (the carrier is there, but the sound is chopped off) and the entire transporter with it. I did not fix the transponder number, apparently, at the same time the rest of the trances began to leave.


At audio frequencies, the sound disappeared. And what happened to the image?
Let's take a look at zaping at 5:16:

We see that ARTE has hung a translucent die, on many channels there are screensavers that the channels are disabled. Tele 5 is still on the air.


Next, a pack of video is not from me, switching to info cards or completely turning off transponders:

I also skipped the disconnection of Tele 5, so here’s another video not from me.

After the disconnection of Tele5 on its transponder, some kind of game started to happen ( 5:59 Minsk time ) ...


Disruption of the image is not clear why. I don’t have a spectrum analyzer, but the feeling is that the next carrier has crawled in and caused the receiver’s AFC to malfunction. On both receivers, the behavior was exactly the same. Who is attentive, he noticed the mouse cursor in the middle of the screen :)

Further until the evening, nothing interesting happened.

Bundle of snapping at 5:59 , 6:12 :

At 11:19 , HSE24 continues broadcasting, Arte with die and Eurosport . Looking ahead, I’ll say that Eurosport turned out to be a long-liver - it was turned off last. In some places, there is a sound track in the background, there are teletext signals.

At 12:15, it is already clear that Arte stopped broadcasting, only a die and a still-frame in the background remained.

At 15:44, HSE24 is already disconnected. The moment of disconnection was not recorded.

Further, the situation does not change much until late at night.

During this time I managed to do a lot of other useful things, flicking through all the channels in parallel. I made a list of transponders and scored them all in the receivers in the required sequence, so that later it would be easier to navigate. I didn’t have time to do this right away:


May 1, 2012, 0:40.

Only Eurosport is broadcasting live broadcast ...


Just a couple of minutes after zipping, the transponder, which previously broadcast the rbb channel, will turn off.

1:16 - the transponder that previously broadcast the HSE24 is disabled .

As you can see, only Eurosport is on the air. You can note that English is broadcast on one channel and German audio tracks on the other.

The most delicious thing is turning off Eurosport .
Information from the forum:

Eurosport Utah Midnight Paris Time (uplink) or Midnight UTC (international satellite time) UTC midnight would mean 01.00 UK / Portugal time, 02.00 Central European Time.

In fact, they disconnected at 2:30 in Minsk. Video:

A little comment on the video itself. At the very beginning you can see that some game is going on with the signal. For a few seconds something incomprehensible was happening, something was spinning with a transmitter, but apparently the engineers decided to give snooker to watch people :)
At this point, we see the last identity and - tadam - color bands , and the bands with decent interference. Eurosport has standardly completed its broadcast and on this frequency should start broadcasting a night TV store. But he worked for only a few seconds - the carrier was turned off.
EVERYTHING. The latest analog satellite TV channel has completed broadcasting.


At 3:11, on the sly, the transponder, which was previously broadcasting the QVC channel, was turned off. Here is a video of its shutdown:

May 1, 2011, 4:20 - the last entry I made from the analog.


The picture at that moment was given by 19 transponders , they hung on the air for another month.
Infocard screenshots

On May 11, 2012, transponders broadcasting RTL , RTL2 and SuperRTL went off the air.
On May 15, the Kabel 1 , Phoenix and WDR transponders were disconnected.
May 30, 2012 - all remaining analog transponders are turned off, carriers are removed .
Everything, the era of analog satellite TV is over.
As we see, everyone left the air boring, uninteresting, only Eurosport distinguished itself by its glitches.
The most interesting thing is that after switching off these transponders have been left for a very long time without a signal what is going on at the moment, you can look at Lyngsat or check it yourself. In 2012, there were no plans to launch new channels on these transponders. They were planned to be put into commercial operation only by 2016. And, it is asked, why was it to be disconnected, if there was nothing to score the tanks?
In general, they fulfilled their plan :)

In cable networks in Germany, analog channels were also disabled, an example of dies:


Some materials on the topic:

Page about Atlantic Bird 3
Page about analog Astra
Here is another big table , where the history of broadcasting analog TV channels on the Astra is painted. All by dates, in detail with the numbers of transponders.
The topic on the profile forum dedicated to the disconnection of satellite analog.
Playlist where all videos are collected in chronological order.
And an album with photos on Google Photo.

On this my story can be completed. I hope I managed to convey to you the main chronology of the events of four years ago, and something interesting and, perhaps, useful for you you learned from these articles.
I will be glad to hear your opinion on the whole as regards the statement, maybe there will be some comments and suggestions.
There are plans to write an article about turning off analogue television broadcasting in the Republic of Belarus, about how you can get and decode Teletext from the most standard VHS recordings, as well as an article on how to produce high-quality rollback of BGA chips at minimum cost. And then we'll see how it will be :)

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Thank you for your attention, waiting for your comments!