If you watch the UK news on television, then you’ve almost certainly seen a Virtual Studio created by a division of Chertsey, Surrey-based Radamec Group Plc, the broadcast and defence electronics firm. Radamec’s Broadcast Systems subsidiary has now sold its Virtual Scenario system to all of the UK’s news studios, and this has helped the group to report net profits for the six months to June 30 up 14.3% at 527,000 pounds on revenues that fell 13.5% to 6.9m pounds. The higher margin but lower revenue results from the group’s changing portfolio of defence contracts. Last year’s contracts saw a high percentage of goods sourced from outside the group which pushed up revenue, but at the cost of slimmer margins. Meanwhile, the Robotics and Virtual Studios Divisions have grown to contribute 35-40% of group revenues. Many of the UK’s newsrooms use Radamec’s robotic cameras which wizz around the studio floor under remote control, while all of them now use a version of the Virtual Scenario system, allowing almost any background to be artificially projected behind the news reader. The system has been widely sold abroad, and is even used in Televized coverage of the US Senate. Chairman and chief executive L B Whittaker says the system can also be used to do away with expensive conventional sets built for many other types of broadcast TV shows. A few years ago, Whittaker admitted that he had reservations about the limited size of the market for high tech broadcast systems, but now every religious sect in America wants its own TV station, he said, and new studios are springing up all over the world. Radamec’s studio installation have ranged in size from 20,000 pounds to 1m pounds and generally cost what the company estimates to be one sixth of the price of the more powerful rival systems running on Onyx graphics computers. The group’s defense activities have been badly hit by the current turmoil in currency values in South East Asia and the Far East. But despite this, the interim dividend has been increased by 10% to 1.1 pence and the board is predicting a satisfactory trading performance for the full year. Order levels are currently up 15% on the equivalent period last year, the company said