Odds and Ends
A page of miscellany with all manner of odds and ends. The weather, a temperature calculator, the national flag, understanding the British Armed Forces, Barnsley's Tuscan hills, Cheese and Dunkers and a potted history of UK TV. This first batch of links are for this website then they are external links:
Stop Them
Other Services
The weather is always a good conversation starter in the UK. This do-it-yourself weather station can be made by anyone with just a small rock and a piece of string. Fasten it to the nearest tree and read the instructions. As an alternative, old people can use joint aches to predict the weather. My nose-end tells me when it is the cold outside.
Temperature Converter
Enter a number in either field, then click outside
the text box for a result. The UK mostly uses the Celsius scale. - 40° is the same temperature on both scales.
The Union Jack
These are the technical specifications for the colours of our national flag. There is some dispute about whether it is called the 'Union Jack' or the 'Union Flag' but the English Parliament has established that either name is acceptable, although 'Union Jack' is used more often. In Canada it is called the Royal Union Flag. An inverted flag can be used as an emergency signal unless it is somebody's T-shirt being worn inside-out. Think of the red diagonals as 'rotating' anti-clockwise, as in the graphic below.
| Scheme | Red | White | Blue |  |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| (Paper) | 186 C | Safe | 280 C | |
| Hexadecimal | #C8102E | #FFFFFF | #012169 | |
| MoD | 8711 | 8711J | 8711D | |
| NATO Stock Number | 8305.99.130.4584 | 8305.99.130.4585 | 8305.99.130.4580 | |
| CMYK | 2.100.85.6 | 0.0.0.0 | 100.85.5.22 | |
| RGB | 200, 16, 46 | 255, 255, 255 | 1, 33, 105 | |
| Example Colours: |
These are the official colours for the flag of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. It was good of the Americans, French and even the Russians for using 'our' colours on their flags, as we used them first. Three cheers for the Red, White and Blue. The aspect ratio of Royal Navy flags is 2:1 (Eg. 6 feet by 3 feet), which is long and narrow and that is the shape used in the Pall Mall and on Royal occasions. The land-based or 'Army' flag is 5:3 ratio, as shown in the diagram above.
Please note that the flying of UK flags in the UK was liberalised in 2012 to allow more people and organisations to fly flags and no permission is necessary. Under the revised Town and Country planning regulations, flags explicitly excluded, although flagpoles are not. There is also an etiquette for flags. Where there is more than one flagpole in use before a building, the Union flag must be the first one on the left as seen with the building entrance behind. If the other flagpoles remain empty, the Union flag must be as central as possible. In a procession the Union flag must again be the first flag.
The Ukrainian Flag
Following the invasion of Ukraine by Russia in 2022, the Ukrainian flag and its blue - yellow colour have been freely displayed throughout the UK in support of Ukraine against the tyranny of the Russian dictatorship. The Ukraine flag dates back to 1848 and is used by them as a symbol of freedom and democracy, after years of flying the Russian red flag. In Penistone, the Royal British Legion flew the Ukranian flag on one of its flagpoles and Clarke's Chemist had windows lit by blue and yellow lights. Penistone church used blue and yellow bunting which had previously been for the Tour de Yorkshire.
The British Armed Forces
To the Civvys That Don't Understand the British Military - The United Kingdom Armed Forces Explained
(This wonderfully funny item was posted on Facebook in March 2022 by an ex-soldier, and in moderate language for a soldier, well done, Ash!).
'The Royal Navy is the oldest. Mum and Dad made all their parenting mistakes with him. The Army is the middle son, they are the explorers who left home and no one cared. The Royal Marines are the youngest and Mum and Dad let them do whatever they want. They have an inferiority complex due to their small size.
'Well, Mum and Dad got a divorce once all the boys had grown up. Mum got re-married to a rich bloke and quickly gave birth to a fourth son, the Royal Air Force. She loves him the most, showers him with the best toys and buys him whatever he wants. When they go on holiday, they fly first class, stay in five star hotels and enjoy the finest meals. The RAF is spoiled rotten and his three older brothers bitterly resent him for this.
'Finally there is the RAF Regiment. The RAF Regiment is the rich stepfather's illegitimate son from a fling with a filthy prostitute during the seven-year itch. None of the other brothers think or act like he's part of the family, and treat him like the unwanted ginger b****rd stepchild that nobody wants.
That's the best way to explain the difference between the UK Armed Forces and their internal dynamics to civilians.'
Cheese
"Cracking toast Gromit, but where's the cheese?" Good cheese is a real treat. English cheeses are excellent. We have: Cheddar, Cheshire, Wensleydale, crumbly Lancashire, Double Gloucester, etc. These are all named after UK place-names. Other countries salute this by trying to make their own versions with varying degrees of success. The US produces Kraft yellow goo slices, specially designed for junk food and the undiscerning. Those Food Channel programmes from the US always refer to cheese in terms of its physical properties, never its flavour. It was a bit unfair of Mr Bush to condemn the French for eating cheese but you've got to agree that French cheese is usually stinky and too solid (unless you include Brie).
Tea and Dunkers
The perfect partner for cheese; biscuits and cakes. I bought the book too. Current favourites are ginger biscuits but Huddersfield Market Hall has an excellent biscuit stall to sample them all. Their bags of broken biscuits are well worth it, just don't let them catch you breaking them. In biscuit etiquette, it is considered polite to take no more than two biscuits. www.nicecupofteaandasitdown.com
Anniversary Gift Guide
Different sources have some variations for the earlier years but they all appear to agree on the major milestones:
Barnsley goes Tuscan
Speaking of cheese, in the noughties, BMBC had spent public money on consultants for them to reshape Barnsley in the style of a Tuscan village. BMBC had the idea of having a halo of light shining up into the sky from the town hall. They also wanted to develop Barnsley's streets into a twee café-style society. Some of that might have been a good idea, as the town of Barnsley has always been something of a dump. However, here are two interesting facts: 1. Barnsley is directly under major north-south and east-west air routes, and, 2. The council has a policy of replacing street lights with more efficient LED lights in order to save lighting costs and to reduce light pollution. Something about brewers and beer-tasters comes to mind.
Here are two views of Tuscany, clearly showing their similarities to the town and climate of Barnsley. We would marvel at Barnsley's Tuscan pavement cafés with their tattooed clientele sipping coffee while reciting poetry in the rain. One's little finger is supposed to poke at a jaunty angle. Since the Leaning Tower of Pisa is in Tuscany, we might metaphorically relate its most notable quality with Barnsley Town Hall.
UK Television
This has turned into a hobby page to some extent! The history and technology of television and radio broadcasting is a subject that has always interested me. I am actually qualified to repair TV sets but not that I ever want to. In fact, my experience started in the analogue days and at first with thermionic valve technology (US = vacuum toobs). Our country had the first broadcast television service in the world.
Test transmissions alternated between JL Baird's mechanically-scanned equipment and electronically-scanned television. It was a no-brainer, although Baird kept on making progress and would later demonstrate a form of colour television. Baird's system was not portable, needed too much light and it had half the definition of the 405-line system. Anyone being televised would need to be in a fixed place and, because of the poor spectral response of Baird's photo-detectors, would need special make-up to look natural on a tv screen. The UK settled on the superior 405-line electronically-scanned pictures, 25 frames per second (50 interlaced fields per second), what we would now call '25i.'
In 1936, the world's first 'High Definition' public television service started from London's Alexandra Palace. It was a good start but broadcast hours were limited to evenings-only and the output might best be described as 'pedestrian.' There had been several thousand homes watching single-channel receivers by the start of WWII in September 1939. Other countries poo-poo this success as insignificant but our country had been the first. A similar rivalry existed regarding the invention of a working light bulb by Joseph Swann, a Scottish inventor. His litigious competitor Thomas Edison was not able to make bulbs that stayed lit for more than a few seconds until months after Swann had demonstrated his working bulbs to a large audience. However, the business-minded Edison battled to secure the patent and, in the end, they had to share the glory between them.
As the London transmitter could have been used for enemy aircraft navigation at the start of the Second World War, the transmitter was closed down in 1939. Those early television receivers had only small screens, perhaps only nine inches wide, although some projection televisions were around but were never a great success. When the service re-started in 1945, many of the old TV sets wouldn't work as electrolytic capacitors had dried out and went 'pop' or their HT rectifiers failed. Ask any old TV repairman about failed selenium or copper-oxide rectifiers and they will pinch their noses.
A post-war trend started as War Surplus shops sprang up to sell army boots, coats, field telephones, gas masks, military radios, valves and radar tubes (Eg. VCR97 or VCR139a). The radar tubes lit up green and had a long persistence (afterglow) but were suitable for home-built television receivers, requiring a few hundred volts to work. The technical magazines of the day (Eg. Wireless World) had construction articles and details of aerials and radio propagation. A new wave of television was born. Our local BBC TV transmitter was on VHF Channel 2, Band I, from Holme Moss and early TVs had only one channel.
When ITV came along in 1956 people bought converter boxes to receive the new channel on their old sets, as we might do now for such as Sky television. Our local ITV station was at Emley Moor, which had a lattice mast at the time. It was on VHF channel 10, Band III and it was originally Granada TV before Yorkshire TV opened in 1968. The ITV channel would be translated down to the same BBC channel that the tv was tuned to. Being stronger, it would (hopefully) overcome any residual BBC signal, although herringbone patterns were common where it did not quite work.
A typical tv set would have either a 'Fireball' or 'biscuit' tuner to select the channels. The Fireball had a disc inside which could be rotated by the Channel knob, to move a set of coils in contact with the contacts, while the biscuit type had a little coil strip clipped into place on a barrel arrangement with side contacts, typically with only two biscuits for the two available channels. Of course, in common talk, the only valve that mattered was the 'Picture Valve' which everybody had heard of. Presumably, the other dozen or so valves served only to warm up the tv's innards. One giant lead forward in the early 1960s was the Silicon Rectifier. A small and cool-running component (Eg. Mullard BY100) could replace a stinking hot rectifier valve and 'dropper' resistances (powering the valve filaments) could be configured to run cooler. Later silicon rectifiers were later encapsulated in plastic!
Transistors started to make an appearance in tvs around the mid-1960s, although at first perhaps only in tuners. Transistors gradually took over the signal processing but valves would continue where higher voltages and powers were required. Televisions with both valves and transistors were called 'Hybrid Sets.'
Colour TV in the UK started around 1966 using the 625/25 PAL system on UHF channels (See Colour Launches in the UK). That was also called 'High Definition' at the time. I spent many years repairing televisions and actually have a City and Guilds certificate to say I am qualified. The early colour tellies were dual-standard and, in my view, a feat of engineering. The Thorn 2000 chassis was a hybrid set and had a solenoid-operated slide switch nearly the length of the chassis to change from 405-line VHF to 625-line UHF operation, with a resounding and satisfying clunk each time it operated. Early colour tvs, such as the Baird 700 series had a few problems with the very high voltages needed for the 'Shadowmask' tv tube, around 24kV as opposed to perhaps 12 to 15 kV for monochrome. They would still be in spec if they suffered an internal flashover no more often than every half hour. In fact, a flashover could be a surprisingly-loud bang and a temporary colour shift on the picture.
The 405 and later 625-line transmissions had a very good innings until the much more efficient digital transmissions came along as DTV. We could have many more stations ('streams') than could be accommodated on the analogue system which needed each station to be on a different frequency.
DTV can group several 'streams' together as 'bouquets' and then transmit them on separate UHF channels. It also does not need as much transmitter power as analogue tv, maybe only 10kW per channel as opposed to perhaps 250kW previously. Analogue television in the UK was phased out in the 'Digital Switchover' which started in the south on 17th October 2007 and gradually swept northwards to finish on 24th October 2012. Our area ended its analogue service in September 2011. The old TV Band III (ex ITV) around 200MHz is now used for DAB digital radio.
Before reading on, have a look at the history of the Emley Moor mast, which reminds us of the time the mast collapsed in May 1969. Also see the excellent 'Aerials and TV' website (Hillsborough, Sheffield) for info on Emley Moor and much more. Take a look at the 'World Analogue TV Standards' website.
Analogue TV Shutdown
The digital terrestrial channels were transmitted in between the old analogue channels (before they closed down), on low power. Now we have many more channels and a bunch of radio stations on our TVs. After the close-down, the digital channels were supposed to go on to higher power. The final analogue changeover in our region was on 21st September 2011. Terrestrial TV now has four HD channels (BBC1, BBC-HD, ITV and Channel4) using the normal aerial but you need a special set-top box as there are only a few (big-screen and expensive) TVs coming out with it built-in.
Digital TV is far more bandwidth-efficient than analogue but it is not quite so 'pure'. Various compression tricks are employed to squeeze it in and sometimes there are visible artifacts on fast picture movements and scene changes, especially on Freeview terrestrial TV. More digital channels can be squeezed into a given bandwidth and at a lower transmitter power than analogue.
Free to Air Satellite
Satellite TV has been around for a long time now, starting with a variety of analogue systems (such as D-Mac, Extended PAL, PAL-Plus, plain analogue and more) then going digital. Freesat has a lot more channels than terrestrial Freeview, without any subscription, several HD channels, lots of radio stations and a few foreign channels but the dish is more of a job to install than an aerial. It's a little beyond most DIY-ers but not impossible if you have a clear view of the sky slightly east of south and a few extras like a £20 satellite meter.
Experimenting with Satellite TV
Good TV viewing can be obtained with even the cheapest of satellite equipment. Maplin Electronics sell complete satellite kits for caravanners and enthusiasts, to receive heaps of English and foreign channels (including every BBC and ITV region) for about £90, without any subscriptions. It works well and the dish can be wall-mounted or fastened to a railing or flat surface. For mobile use, there is a base with rubber suckers. The Humax HD Foxsat Freesat box can also be used for (non-Freesat) channel searching but it is not quite as easy as the caravan kit.
As an experiment, the dish can be G-clamped to a fence or brush handle and it is great fun sweeping the geostationary arc for different 'birds' on a calm day. 'What Satellite' magazine is invaluable for its list of satellites receivable in the UK, with frequencies and other settings. It is not hard to locate different satellites using a satellite meter and then scan for new channels. Under cloudy and rainy conditions, all satellite systems lose some signal and the pictures can break up completely in extreme weather conditions. It is difficult to keep a temporary dish steady if there is any wind. The caravan kit includes a dish, receiver, meter and cables. The trick is to use a receiver which scans easily and with lots of channel memory. From my difficult location I can find around six satellites with a small dish but I have buildings and trees in the way which prevent a full sweep of the geostationary arc.
The 'Hotbird' satellite at 13E carries 700+ channels from all over the world, including BBC World, and some very dour ones from Arabic countries with over-modulated sound and mind-numbing echo. There are also plenty of 'artistic' ladies too, who invite you to call them for a natter about this and that. Mostly that. At 19.2E there is another location with hundreds of channels. Most of them are German and French channels. Most UK dishes are aimed at a cluster of satellites at around 28E, for Sky and non-subscription Freesat. Dishpointer is a handy website to check what is available in each location and 'What Satellite' magazine from Robinson's News is a must for the enthusiast. Also see Lyngsat for info about the satellites.
Franz Kafka: 'Anyone who keeps the ability to see beauty never grows old.'