When did the last deflector close ?

There was a deflector outside Ballaghadereen ithat stayed broadcasting for years after the majority of the others closed, I think it was on a hill in Riverstown Co Sligo, It was fed from satellite usually 5 channels broadcast

"When I came back from England we only had RTÉ1 and a very bad RTÉ2"

It just shows how quickly RTÉ had forgotten why they had set up RTÉ2. Within a year of it being set up it was considered a failure.

This setup had 5 channels, the normal 4 and the 5th channel was ch 5, sky news, a movie channel, it tender to rotate from what I recall

When did the "Deflectors" start to Limerick and Kerry?
I've seen the rotting arrays of aerials at Keepers Hill (one set for Wales and one for N.I.), no doubt used by the local cable people before they got the Microwave Link to Cavan.

Certainly some were running in the early 1980s, but were any running as early as the summer of 1979? I moved to Limerick in February 1983. I'm curious for a story I'm writing set June to November 1979 in Limerick and Kerry. I did meet some "operators" around 1983-1984. Their problem was getting enough subscriptions to maintain, never mind a profit. Some were TV dealers.

Also I remembered last night that one Deflector association asked me in (about 1984 or 1985) to contact the BBC about royalties or licence.

1. The BBC /UK didn't and probably still doesn't TV licence payments for viewers outside of UK, IoM and Channel Is.
2. They had no mechanism then to accept any sort of royalties or subscription.

The later legal threats (1997?) by MMDS/Cable operators would not have been allowed in many countries as it's purely up to the rights holder to sue for royalties, not any ordinary commercial 3rd party. But the Deflector operators couldn't afford the lawyers that the Cable & MMDS companies had in any civil dispute. It was only a civil dispute, because though unlicensed transmitters, Comreg rarely took action, except in Band II.

BBC Europe in 1987 might have been the earliest BBC subscription service. But I'm not sure if Wikipedia is reliable on this subject or on BBC Prime.

Ray Burke shut down the deflectors saying they were illegal etc and we all know where he ended up himself !! We had one up in the Galtee Mountains supply BBC1 & 2 Wales, HTV and S4C, it covered Mitchelstown, Fermoy and quite a bit of North Cork.

When did the Galtee one start? Maybe I can work it into my story.

Late 1983/early 1984 I think, I remember my brother, who was doing electronic engineering in college at the time, got an old band 3 vhf aerial and cut the elements on it to turn it into an UHF aerial and my cousin in London ( RIP), sent him the parts required to build a little masthead amplifier for it, all a bit crude, but it worked ( we probably couldn't afford the colour king aerial and proper amplifier at the time ) and my first memories were of Michael Fish doing the weather on BBC 1 Wales. Those were the days, great fun experimenting and the novelty of being able to see UK tv for the first time.

Let's not forget the Donegal single-issue single-term TD Tom Gildea who got deflectors temporarily legalised until DTT was rolled out.

https://irishelectionliterature.com/2011/12/18/leaflet-from-tom-gildea-tv-deflector-candidate-1999-local-elections-glenties/

So single issue that he spoke, I think, three times in the Dáil and each time was on deflectors.

Deflectors made an appearance in West Mayo in 1982 I think. Main mast was on a hill near Balla that took the signal from Brougher Mountain. The Balla mast in turn sent the signal to other locations such as Westport. The system closed down in May 2012. Installers of FTA satellite equipment did a roaring trade for a while after.

As for deflectors making a return when 28.2E eventually ends, I'm not sure if it's a great idea technically. Where we were, the old analogue deflector signal suffered terribly during persistent high pressure conditions (tropospheric lift). With DTT and the digital cliff edge, there would be periods of no picture at all, which would leave the potential viewer pretty unhappy.

I suspected it had to be connected with MMDS rollout otherwise why would they care?

I've moved my story from 1979 (the postal strike and fuel crisis added something) to 1 June 1984, which is definitely a period with Deflectors and also adds Apricot & Sirius from ACT as well as IBM & Clones. No '286 till after my summer time period though it was out since 1982, because it was a really bad design. Serious mistake OS/2 being for it instead of 386 which fixed flaws of 286. The ARM, 68000 and others years before 286 were better. The 286 was rubbish for MS Xenix compared to older 68000 for UNIX, BSD and Cromix.

The story might end at the time of the earthquake in Wales in July 1984

EDIT: Misremembered ARM date. Out of Coffee Error. REDO FROM START

Yes, made a mistake on the ARM. Though there were other real 16 bit CPUs better than the 286, which Acorn didn't like either.

Not so many people realise ARM was first in a desktop workstation (Archimedes), which ran Risc OS and by 1987 ran UNIX. Yet the Nokia Communicator used a 486 in 2000, before the N9210 using the ARM. Apple invested to have the ARM for the Newton. The handwriting conversion was overhyped, but Jobs shouldn't have killed it off. I still have a couple of copies of The Acorn User featuring the Archimedes.

I first encountered the 386 in an office in Dublin in 1987 where they had a test to see if a particular 386 had the multiply bug. I think they were looking at patching a compiler to not use the buggy instruction. Intel would never have been so big if IBM had chosen something more sensible than the 8088 for the PC.

I declined Cable in Dublin in late 1980s and in Limerick in early 1990s. I said I'd rather watch nothing than that quality. But I'd worked in the BBC and in a company supplying video systems in the 1970s.