Which led to some head-scratching when one of the big bosses asked "Why don't all the Heart stations sound the same?" The majority of the station sound comes out of a box called a Processor that lives at the transmitter, and can be adjusted to meet different needs, depending on whether the radio station is predominantly speech-based, or music-based and, in the case of music-based stations, what sort of music they're playing.
Because of the variety of equipment, some of these processors are anything up to 15 years old. Not surprisingly, technology has moved on in that time, and newer processors are capable of greater variety than older ones. So, to get all of them sounding the same is quite a challenge! Given that a new processor costs some £11,000 these days, the other alternative - of replacing every processor across a fleet of some 50 or more transmitters - is not exactly cheap, and it's one that has been resisted so far!
To this end, I commissioned Ian Oakland, who has had a long history of selling and adjusting these processors, to visit a couple of our sites - Churchdown Hill, between Gloucester and Cheltenham, and Stroud (actually at a village called Randwick high above the Stroud valleys) to tweak the processors there to try to get them to match some other transmitters. We picked one of the worst days of the year to do this, with snow making the ascents of the hills rather tricky, but we made it to both sites and back safely.
This is the mast and transmitter halls at Churchdown Hill. Looking back down the lane, you can see how wintry it was on our visit:
And here's Ian hard at work tweaking that processor:
