Thanks to Scott Tilley over on Twitter The original Satellite Bible from Stephen Birkill is available to download.
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This was a fascinating read! Thanks for sharing.
Interesting to read about what TVE and RTP did for the Canary Islands/Azores, about which I'd seen some stuff before, but not that early.
By the time of this coming out in 1982, it seems TVE-1 was transmitting full time on Intelsat 34.5W to provide full-time live content from Madrid, downlinked on Gran Canaria. TVE-1 must hold the record for the earliest European domestic channel to have been continuously available via satellite (that still exists nowadays)!
I believe TVE-2 became available in the Canaries that same year, so presumably that also appeared, a little later than this was published (they are both shown on 34.5W C-Band in early 90s transponder charts, before Hispasat launched and took over). This must have cost the Spanish a fair amount!
Looks like in contrast, RTP just uplinked the nightly news over Intelsat for the Azores (and Madeira?). I know RTP1 as a full-time version became available later in these islands, and I've seen some evidence of that being via Intelsat 53W by the late 80s/early 90s.
Another surprising thing - that Antenne 2 (nowadays France 2), was on the Orbital Test Satellite to be received in Tunisia. Encrypted to stop Dutch cable networks downlinking it!
The details of the Soviet stuff are also great, a window onto a whole other world!
