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Trevor Franklin has spent his life in broadcasting in WA - but you won't have seen him on screen.

The technical officer (electronics) in the School of Chemistry and Biochemistry has been behind the scenes for 45 years, mostly working on and maintaining radio and television transmitters.

He has taken part in some of the more momentous events in those media. The most recent was turning off the analogue transmitter for the ABC's Channel 2.

"I've been at UWA for about six years but I still keep in touch with all my Telstra mates," Trevor said. "Many people don't realise that it used to be Telstra that ensured the television signals made it from the stations' transmitters to your screens at home.  The ABC and other channels just supply the pictures.

"My colleagues at the Bickley ABW 2 transmission site called me the night before the analogue signal was due to be turned off, and asked me to join them for a celebratory barbecue breakfast.

"When I arrived, they asked me to do the honours.  There was a countdown screen connected to a computer, so at exactly 9am on Tuesday 16 April, I pressed two buttons simultaneously, to turn off the two ten kilowatt transmitters, and effectively put an end to analogue ABC television in WA."

Trevor, who has also worked for Channel 9, said his work at UWA was very different.  "But electronics is electronics - you can work on everything."

He credits Telstra, or the PMG as it was when he joined as a 16-year-old, for his wide-ranging abilities.

"The training for a technician in those days included woodwork, metalwork, technical drawing and electronics," he said. "And it took five years to complete - longer than most university degrees."

Trevor was working at Mawson, the television transmission site 30 kilometres out of Quairading, in the wheatbelt, when colour television arrived in WA, and he was again part of an important television moment.

"The transmitters were designed for black and white pictures, and all I had to do was to put filters in that would allow colour to come through.  It was pretty basic at our end. I installed the filters and, the next day, they sent colour pictures down the line."

That was in the mid-1970s. About 20 years later, Trevor was again on hand to push the important button when ABC radio's Triple J came into being. "I tuned it to the right frequency, then I turned it on," he said.

"But I thought something had gone wrong.  I was used to listening to the ABC's other FM station, Classic FM.  And when I heard the dreadful music coming out of the radio, I turned it off and called my boss in Perth.

"'Awful is it?' he asked. ‘Then it's the right station!' "

Several years ago, Trevor said he ‘saw the light' while he was working in the freezing rain in the middle of the night in Busselton to fix a broken transmitter.

"Why the hell am I doing this? I'm getting too old for this caper," he said.

The next day a colleague showed him an advertisement for the job at UWA.  He thought his days of broadcasting were behind him - until he was called up for that one last job on 16 April.