Rogues Gallery

The block of flats was built in 1975. People settled in, and time went on. The gardens matured. Flats were bought and sold, residents were born and died. The seasons came and went, but one thing was eternal – the terrible TV reception. Then, in 2006, a wild Irish lady moved in. She wasn’t pleased to be in England, she wasn’t pleased to be in Sheffield, and she definitely wasn’t pleased to be in this dilapidated building, where there had been no maintenance by the looks of it since the place was built. She turned the telly on knowing that there would be no RTE, no Angelus and worst of all no Fair City, but at least there should be the British channels.

“Holy Mary Mother of God!” she blasphemed when she saw the horrible snowy reception. Ten seconds later the management agent was getting a fiery earful of scatological Irish idiom, the gist of which was that there was no Channel Five (freely available even in backwoods places like Co Kerry for God’s sake) and the other channels were just tirrible snowy, just tirrible.

These pictures show why reception was so poor. The first one is the amplifier. No, I can’t see it either.

This is an area of high field strength. In 1975 someone made the discovery that he could just about get away without using an amplifier if he installed two aerials and connected each to one of the trunk cables. In 1975 a simple distribution amplifier cost a week’s wages. It was, to this early Rogue, what is now called a ‘no-brainer’. Signal levels at the outlets were 20dB too low, but obviously there was some sort of a picture; good enough anyway for the omission to remain uncorrected.

The second picture shows a ‘repeater amplifier’ where two tap-off lines were fed from a trunk cable.

The lady from Limerick did the other residents, lily-livered English as they were (apart of course from little Dr Umdonga) a great good turn, because thanks to her the whole TV system was brought bang up to date. Everyone lived happily ever after, although there was a brief hiccup in the happiness six months later when the management agent realised that the pot was empty and they all had to pay a special charge for the work amounting to £145 + VAT per flat.

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