My Floating Home

[MtB]

1 hour ago, Alan de Enfield said:

 

Miss, Miss - he said that word that gets people banned !!!

 

Really? I thought the word was twut... 

[Chris Lowe]

I edited it.

[MtB]

5 hours ago, buccaneer66 said:

I edited it.

 

That's curious. Mod edits used to cause an annotation under the post saying it had been edited, and who by.

 

I don't like that mods can now secretly and invisibly edit posts. 

 

 

 

 

 

Edited August 12, 2023 by MtB
Add a bit.

[Chris Lowe]

4 minutes ago, MtB said:

 

That's curious. Mod edits used to cause an annotation under the post saying it had been edited, and who by.

 

I don't like that mods can secretly edit posts. 

 

 

I hadn't noticed that maybe one of the updates changed it, something to bring to @RichM attention.

[Alan de Enfield]

21 minutes ago, buccaneer66 said:

I edited it.

 

 

In the 'old days' when a moderator made an edit they left / attached a note saying so, so that the following posts still made sense.

[LadyG]

22 minutes ago, Alan de Enfield said:

 

 

In the 'old days' when a moderator made an edit they left / attached a note saying so, so that the following posts still made sense.

Ah yes, the Good Old Days. 

[beerbeerbeerbeerbeer]

5 minutes ago, LadyG said:

Ah yes, the Good Old Days. 

 

yes the Good Old Days,

what a load of shyte!

[nbfiresprite]

21 hours ago, HenryFreeman said:

 

I'm actually not sure if I do or don't. It's on channel 4 iplayer or whatever the channel 4 Internet streaming thing is called, do you need a TV licence for streaming channel 4?

 

I don't think I've ever had a TV licence although from age 26 to 6 years ago I was mostly living overseas.

 

This is what I was smugly commenting on to my girlfriend "another boat that'll never see beyond the boundaries of that marina"

 

Only for live streaming of programs that are being broadcasted at the same time over the airwaves,  You don't need a TV Licence if you only ever watch on demand programmes on any TV service apart from BBC iPlayer.

[cuthound]

On 11/08/2023 at 22:18, HenryFreeman said:

 

It sounds like he was lulling you into a false sense of security and you'll have one of those detector vans from the 1950s sat outside in the not to distant future!

 

 

Surely they would need a TV Detector Boat for the canals? 

 

[system 4-50]

48 minutes ago, cuthound said:

 

Surely they would need a TV Detector Boat for the canals? 

 

Wouldn't work.  The TV detector mechanism only works for stationary TVs, and as we all know, canal boats are always on the move...

[IanD]

1 hour ago, system 4-50 said:

Wouldn't work.  The TV detector mechanism only works for stationary TVs, and as we all know, canal boats are always on the move...

Mechanism doesn't work (amd probably never did...) for any TVs, stationary or moving...

[MtB]

6 minutes ago, IanD said:

Mechanism doesn't work (amd probably never did...) for any TVs, stationary or moving...

 

Were there no court cases where evidence from the TV detector van staff was relied upon for convictions? 

 

I'd have thought if not, this would have become common knowledge quite early on. 

Edited August 13, 2023 by MtB

[IanD]

9 hours ago, MtB said:

 

Were there no court cases where evidence from the TV detector van staff was relied upon for convictions? 

 

I'd have thought if not, this would have become common knowledge quite early on. 

IIRC there was admission some time ago from an "insider" that any fines relied on the people with the TV admitting they hadn't got a license, and the vans basically didn't work except in a few test/demonstration cases -- they were a scare tactic. I'll see if I can find the article later...

[BoatinglifeupNorth]

1 hour ago, IanD said:

IIRC there was admission some time ago from an "insider" that any fines relied on the people with the TV admitting they hadn't got a license, and the vans basically didn't work except in a few test/demonstration cases -- they were a scare tactic. I'll see if I can find the article later...

 I’m sure it was also mentioned on some antiques programme, where they visited the Leyland Bedford vehicle museum? who made the vans and they had one on display, the curator said they never worked and were just a scare tactic as you say. They also showed the Pope mobile😂 ✝️

Edited August 14, 2023 by BoatinglifeupNorth

[IanD]

1 hour ago, BoatinglifeupNorth said:

 I’m sure it was also mentioned on some antiques programme, where they visited the Leyland Bedford vehicle museum? who made the vans and they had one on display, the curator said they never worked and were just a scare tactic as you say. They also showed the Pope mobile😂 ✝️

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TV_detector_van

 

A freedom of information act has revealed that TV Detector vans have never to date provided evidence to be used in court against the TV Licence Non-payer, and have therefore never succeeded in enforcing the TV licence.^[2][3]

[jonathanA]

so the detector vans did actually work and could actually detect operating TVs by picking up local oscillators or similar signals and could pinpoint the source to some extent.  This ties in with what the the fellas working the vans always told us (I started my working life working for 'Post Office Telephones' ) 

 

Whether there was ever any prosecutions is a different matter.  My recollection is that the actual door knocking wasn't done by PO technical guys, but i could be mistaken on that.  

 

PO telephones also used to run the 'Radio Interference service' in pre DTI/Ofcom days IIRC.

[IanD]

3 minutes ago, jonathanA said:

so the detector vans did actually work and could actually detect operating TVs by picking up local oscillators or similar signals and could pinpoint the source to some extent.  This ties in with what the the fellas working the vans always told us (I started my working life working for 'Post Office Telephones' ) 

 

Whether there was ever any prosecutions is a different matter.  My recollection is that the actual door knocking wasn't done by PO technical guys, but i could be mistaken on that.  

 

PO telephones also used to run the 'Radio Interference service' in pre DTI/Ofcom days IIRC.

 

If they worked in practice -- as opposed to in theory -- then surely there *would* have been prosecutions resulting form this?

 

The fact that there weren't any -- ever! -- says it all... 😉

[ditchcrawler]

This to bring it back on tack (boats do that on the broads) This floating hotel room is a surprisingly affordable way to stay on the Norfolk Broads (msn.com) They featured on Floating homes as I watched as its only a few miles from mine

[Slim]

5 hours ago, IanD said:

IIRC there was admission some time ago from an "insider" that any fines relied on the people with the TV admitting they hadn't got a license, and the vans basically didn't work except in a few test/demonstration cases -- they were a scare tactic. I'll see if I can find the article later...

That's more or less what I recall. Now, yesterday, that's a different matter.

[Paul C]

1 hour ago, IanD said:

 

If they worked in practice -- as opposed to in theory -- then surely there *would* have been prosecutions resulting form this?

 

The fact that there weren't any -- ever! -- says it all... 😉

 

I think it went something like, the TV detector van would be used to give the enforcers an indication there was a TV being used in that household, then someone went to knock on the door and say "The Van detected it, you're using a TV aren't you?" at which point they'd buckle. In other words, the van was used early on in the process to aid enforcement, not late on in the prosecution of offenders.

 

Remember, back in the days of their use only about half the households actually had a telly (so saying "we don't have a telly" was quite plausible) and the tellys gave off tons of stray radio emissions too.

 

With the change to more efficient TVs, other devices to watch TV and the almost universal ownership/use of tellys, they stopped bothering with the van and just went fishing assuming you DID have a telly.

[IanD]

7 minutes ago, Paul C said:

 

I think it went something like, the TV detector van would be used to give the enforcers an indication there was a TV being used in that household, then someone went to knock on the door and say "The Van detected it, you're using a TV aren't you?" at which point they'd buckle. In other words, the van was used early on in the process to aid enforcement, not late on in the prosecution of offenders.

 

Remember, back in the days of their use only about half the households actually had a telly (so saying "we don't have a telly" was quite plausible) and the tellys gave off tons of stray radio emissions too.

 

With the change to more efficient TVs, other devices to watch TV and the almost universal ownership/use of tellys, they stopped bothering with the van and just went fishing assuming you DID have a telly.

 

Alternatively it's announced that the TV detector vans are "operating in your neighbourhood" and they drive round the streets a bit, then then knockers visit any house without a TV license and say exactly the same thing -- if they're innocent (or brave...) they say no and the knockers (who don't have any right of entry) go away, if not they buckle and admit it and get fined.

 

This is exactly what some insiders have said actually happened, regardless of how the vans were supposed to work in theory -- because of course if it had ever been admitted they were useless, fewer people would have paid up... 😉

Edited August 14, 2023 by IanD

[Paul C]

6 minutes ago, IanD said:

 

Alternatively it's announced that the TV detector vans are "operating in your neighbourhood" and they drive round the streets a bit, then then knockers visit any house without a TV license and say exactly the same thing -- if they're innocent (or brave...) they say no and the knockers (who don't have any right of entry) go away, if not they buckle and admit it and get fined.

 

This is exactly what some insiders have said actually happened, regardless of how the vans were supposed to work in theory -- because of course if it had ever been admitted they were useless, fewer people would have paid up... 😉

Maybe.......

 

Did the vans actually have equipment in them, or were they pure dummy? If they did as above, they'd surely save a lot of money by making them simple dummies. Or perhaps the kit they had in them was just cheap used bits and pieces from the scrap pile of TV studios and mixer desks etc of the day, and they just put a bunch of flashing lights into a panel and made a CRT screen show some confusing waves?

 

Its a lovely British myth/mystery.

[IanD]

Just now, Paul C said:

Maybe.......

 

Did the vans actually have equipment in them, or were they pure dummy? If they did as above, they'd surely save a lot of money by making them simple dummies. Or perhaps the kit they had in them was just cheap used bits and pieces from the scrap pile of TV studios and mixer desks etc of the day, and they just put a bunch of flashing lights into a panel and made a CRT screen show some confusing waves?

 

Its a lovely British myth/mystery.

 

I believe they did have real bits in them and worked *in theory* just as described, because otherwise word would have leaked out and they would have been useless -- even all the technical details of successive generations were published to make the story more convincing.

 

I also expect that the "TV detector van" myth -- if that's what it was -- would have pulled in *far* more in license fees/fines than the relatively small cost of designing/building the vans and driving them round.

 

In other words a very successful and long-lived case of pulling the wool over the public's eyes... 😉

[Sea Dog]

In the 70s my mate's grandad was a TV detector van man. He was quite a bright bloke with a telecoms background, not the sort that I'd have thought would have been content to spend his days idly driving around in a dummy* van, pretending to detect naughty folk's tellys. Maybe he was?

 

* It may have been a Bedford

[IanD]

2 minutes ago, Sea Dog said:

In the 70s my mate's grandad was a TV detector van man. He was quite a bright bloke with a telecoms background, not the sort that I'd have thought would have been content to spend his days idly driving around in a dummy* van, pretending to detect naughty folk's tellys. Maybe he was?

 

* It may have been a Bedford

Think about it -- in those days almost every house had a telly, and the license evasion rate was estimated to be a few percent. So you drive down a suburban street while Coronation Street is on and find most houses seem to have a telly -- loads of signals everywhere, assuming you can pick them up -- and it's not easy to pinpoint to individual houses from the street outside, and do you have a comprehensive up-to-date list of every single house with a license anyway? Lots of false positives and false negatives are likely.

 

The man in the van may well be convinced that he's doing a worthwhile job, regardless of whether he actually is -- and you could say that he is, the worthwhile job of a TV detector van is persuading people to either buy a license or cough up a fine regardless of whether it works or not.

 

Much easier and probably more reliable to just compile a list of which houses *don't* have a license and knock on the door -- and then say "The TV detector van has been round".

 

Now that everyone knows they're obsolete because they don't work with modern digital TVs (no detectable LO radiation) it has been admitted by several "insiders" that the detector vans didn't work in practice *and never did*, they were basically a con job. But they worked... 🙂