Heard the pips on News Radio this morning at 4am. Only counted 5 though. They repeat BBC programming in the hour preceding and come back for news on the hour. So maybe the pips were BBC's.

Yes they are from the BBC, I've heard them too.

Photo uploaded to Post 22.

Studio consoles have changed a lot. A typical one from 30 years ago, when a mate of mine worked at 2RRR, followed by 2GB doing panelling work for people like John Tingle, typically consisted of the mixer console, a Revox or Ampex half inch tape recorder, no less than two turntables, a cassette deck and a cartridge machine for playing ads and jingles.

Brad,
Thanks for uploading the pic.

These consoles which are made in WA are vastly superior to the ones they are placing which are an earlier model from the same manufacturer.
But the old desks were a nightmare to work on as the buttons that control the various desk functions are ALL part of a ONE huge double sided PCR so when one had to replace a button which had failed it was a major task taking may hours to extract the board from the desk frame and then unsolder the crook press button and then try and get a new one in there and ensure that the solder went through both sides. Grrrr buggers of things.

The new ones are a much better approach in that each fader assembly has a 64 pin plug on its rear end which mates with a similar socket on a large back plane.
Give the two screws that hold each in a 1/4 turn and the fader unit is then free and lift it out of the desk and remove or repair whatever needed to be done and pop it back in.
IF it was a fader from the Announcers mic feed then whilst the desk is actually on air playing out a track or the news going out you can pop the crook Announcers mic fader out and drop in a replacement in seconds after quickly checking the settings of the failed on and tweaking them on the replacement fader to be the same and he is back On Air.

Only downside is that the cabling terminations are UNDER the desk and to do any work there one has to pop the desk out of the cutout and prop it up safely and then go to work doing whatever is needed on the cable side which is a rare occurrence.

Overall these new ones are much easier to configure and set up doing things like setting the remote start/stop for devices as some require a pulse on one lead to start and a pulse on another lead to Stop and others require a steady ground on one lead to run and stop when that ground is removed.

All that is setup on each fader module according to what each device requires to run.

Most selections are done by removable links on the fader circuit board..no soldering like the older desks were.

The ads and jingles on these babies all comes from the play out from a small computer with the audio into a fader and you simply click on any listing on the screen over the desk and it plays out and tallies how many times each Ad etc is actually played.

Originally they had a bundle of Mini Discs with the ads and jingles on them and they required VERY careful work to insert or remove an audio track to keep the Track Numbering the same.
Used to take me ages to add or remove tracks but now any track can be remotely loaded into the station server and then when on site one simply drags and drops the track where ever it is required.

The Mini Discs are far more versatile than a CD as you can record and erase tracks as many times as you like with no loss of quality and in fact the response of a Mini Disc is better than a CD, much smaller and is in a captive case such that it is almost impossible to leave a finger mark on a Mini Disc unlike a CD where greasy finger marks play havoc with tracks reliably playing.

I can see why they are necessary but I've always hated double-sided PCBs. Somewhere else here (and I can't remember how long ago I posted it) I talked about Mitel DECT phones, which are used in commercial environments like hospitals and supermarkets. They have what one might call micro-electronics inside and the boards are not only double-sided but multilayered. It is very hard for a chap like me with eyesight not as good as it once was to do repairs on this sort of thing. But I've never looked at what should be a simple repair, such as resoldering an electret microphone back in place after the phone has been dropped on the floor that many times that the microphone comes off the board because that either is, or should be, cheaper than what the manufacturer expects - buy a new phone.

The newer models, thankfully have plug-in screens, so if a phone is dropped and the screen cracks, it is a simple matter of replacing it with a screen from a phone I am wrecking for parts. The older model had the familiar orange ribbon cable soldered to the board - almost impossible to shift to another phone with a basic soldering iron and lousy eyes.

With MiniDisc, I am surprised that it never took off in the domestic scene. It was touted to replace the compact cassette as compact disc replaced long playing records but it just never came about. I guess by the time the BlueRay / HD-DVD war was over, consumers had just about had enough of format wars.

With MP3 for sound and MP4 for video being almost universal now, one would hope this is the end of it.

Double sided PCBs? Very much bottom end these days. Mainly for connector boards and power supplies.

The ones I design these days are usually 4, 6 or 8 layers with some parts the size of a grain of sand or a small ant. Forget about trying to assemble these by hand!

I've seen many changes in the last 60 years!

Here is the DECT PCB.

https://vintage-radio.com.au/default.asp?f=2&th=842#8401

Radio National 100 years (although it wasn't called that until much more recently).

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-12-05/history-listen-on-radio-national-s-100-year-anniversary/103176804