{"id":7797,"date":"2019-01-01T10:02:44","date_gmt":"2019-01-01T09:02:44","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.imperial.ac.uk\/videoarchive\/?p=7797"},"modified":"2025-07-24T14:36:07","modified_gmt":"2025-07-24T13:36:07","slug":"olympus-satellite-uplink-silwood-park-1990","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.imperial.ac.uk\/videoarchive\/olympus-satellite-uplink-silwood-park-1990\/","title":{"rendered":"Olympus Satellite Uplink Silwood Park: 1990"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>There are a few previous blogs about Live-Net<\/a>, two in 2013 and one in 2018. But I’ve not really talked about where the system eventually was able to link to. Towards the end of the networks life it had been extended (42Km) all the way down to Royal Holloway in Surrey and eventually a little further (6Km) down the road to the Imperial College field station at Silwood Park<\/a>. You can click on the Live-Net map over on the right to view it bigger.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>The reason for the extension to Silwood Park was primarily to enable the temporary installation of an ESA Satellite uplink station. The Olympus satellite<\/a> was, by this time, (1989 launched) then operational. To cut a very long story short, the Silwood Park uplink enabled any of the connections within Live-Net to get TV pictures across Europe. In October 1990 we did just that, for a very technically complicated programme involving the French Association of Veterinary Surgeons Annual Conference being held in Poitiers, France. The link from France was provided by France Telecom. The feed was sent via normal ground connections to the London BT Post Office Tower. As you can see from the Live-Net map, we also had a feed to and from the BT Tower. That bit was easy…<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Then came the complicated bit. They wanted London participation from various groups including the UK’s chief veterinary officer to allow a discussion on the then major topic of BSE, otherwise known then as Mad Cow Disease. So the concept was that the French feed would arrive at the Imperial College TV Studio mixer and that at the appropriate time our studio guests would take over and contribute. However, this is where it got complicated. They wanted a two-way discussion to happen, so my audio had to feed all the way back to France! It turned into a bit of a ‘Eurovision Song Contest’ in the end. But it still didn’t get any easier, because we had to have two-way simultaneous translation French to English and then English to French. For this a double sound booth with two translators was installed at the rear of the studio. We all wore earphones to hear what was being said. In France they would occasionally insert videos and graphics which was no problem for me. However, London wanted to do this too, so it got even more involved. We were never sure just when the French participants would want to link to us, so we were always poised to switch feeds and start the sound translations. The first video is when we were called upon to come into action.<\/p>\n