Central Facilities is the engineering heart of the station. Every signal entering or leaving the station, or routing between studios goes through this room.
Here engineer Paul Blitz is at work on the main equipment rack. At the top is the interface to the various land lines (in and out). The racks in the middle (with lots of wires) are full of "buffer amps" which distribute the various signals to the studios. Sat on the top of the rack is our 48 MHz OB radio link receiver.

(click on the thumbnail to see a larger picture)

In the room, mainly in a 19" rack unit are the following:

• Mains Power distribution unit
• Burglar alarm and auto-dialler
• Station Output Selector Unit (which controls which studio is on-air)
• Main Output Compressor
• Main Output Line Driver (to feed the signal up the landline to the main hospital)
• Return Feed Receiver (to recover the return feed from the hospital)
• 100V Line Driver Amplifier driven from the return feed from the hospital, drives speakers in all our other rooms so that we can monitor what we sound like "off-air"
• Humax F1-Fox satellite receiver (for IRN)
• Radio 2 tuner (for our sustaining service)
• Telephone Balance Unit and switching unit to allow us to put phone calls on air via either studio
• Ward Land-Line switching equipment
• Lots of buffer amplifiers!