However, due to the storm disrupting both shipping and flights for a further 24 hours, the first video of the sinking crossed Cook Strait via regular transmissions from WNTV1 and was received on a privately owned television set in Blenheim, at the top of the South Island some 80 km line-of-sight distance from Wellington. A Blenheim-based news reporter's film camera was pointed at the television, then the exposed film was rushed by road to Christchurch, developed and transmitted over CHTV3, concurrently sent further south to DNTV2 for transmission there via a coax cable link. This Blenheim film appears to be the only surviving footage of the first day, and it shows part of the television set that the camera was pointed at. By the time of the Apollo 11 mission in July 1969, the two islands were each network-capable via microwave link, but the link over Cook Strait had not been completed, and there was no link between New Zealand and the outside world. Footage of the moon landing was recorded on video tape at the Australian Broadcasting Commission's ABN-2 in Sydney, then rushed by an RNZAF English Electric Canberra to Wellington and WNTV1. To forward this to the South Island, the NZBC positioned one of its first outside broadcasting vans to beam the footage to a receiving dish across Cook Strait, from which it was forwarded through the recently commissioned South Island network. The link was completed later that year, the first NZBC Network News transmitted on 3 November, read by Dougal Stevenson. The NZBC's microwave network between facilities was very much ad hoc. Due to a shortage of microwave links, the network was completed by "off air" hops, where a 100 kW regional transmitter was received and re-transmitted by another. The network news was made possible by switching inputs to the regional transmitters, so that a signal could be relayed across the country. For instance, the Te Aroha regional transmitter for Hamilton could be switched away from Auckland programming to relay off-air, the Wellington signal coming up the country. Auckland then could see Wellington via Te Aroha. The non-synchronous switching was done manually initially and later with tone switching. During the network news presented from Wellington, if an inject was required from Auckland, Auckland would switch from transmitting Wellington pictures to transmitting, briefly a black screen with a small white "A" in the corner. Then each transmitter down