A Break From the Beeb

Taking a quick break from obscure BBC equipment because, well, it's a lot to write up and I've been 'busy.' I have however been playing around with transistors and the idea of building preamps and/or effects boxes. I recently bought a small cache of germanium transistors to play around with (Toshiba M8640E) and want to use them for something. So far I have gotten into the idea of making a fuzz pedal and have been researching those. I also had a little fun playing around with a 2n5089 that I had kicking around-just experimenting with bias levels and overdrive, using a tube sine wave generator to drive it and looking at the output on an oscilloscope.

It's really been a period of maintenance here. I'm working on getting the sine wave generator re-capped and did a modification to a Mackie mixer I have that has been a bit troublesome. More on this later.

So as to not leave you with nothing about the Beeb's equipment, the next obscure piece of BBC equipment I'll be talking about is the very unique "vision mixer" that the BBC used for an extraordinary amount of time (probably early 1960s into the 90s).

This rather neat photo shows the mixer in its natural habitat (the center thing that kind of looks like a sound console)
Photo from TV Studio History