On Usenet newsgroups and BBS conferences, sellers would post forms that looked exactly like that, except for the ads of course. Buyers would then send in their completed order form via either email/netmail or, preferably, via fax for added security.
I remember always choosing to fax in my orders; even way back then, sharing credit card details via email seemed like a very bad idea.
Fun fact: up until a couple of years ago, whenever you saw a helicopter shot on the Tour de France, a fake chopper noise soundtrack would play faintly in the background. The host broadcaster felt that it added to the ambiance, since the helicopters don’t carry microphones.
Fortunately that practice has been nixed for good. Now the helicopter shots are only mixed with the (real) sounds captured by the motorcycles.
>>Sometimes these images have been filmed during spring.
The helicopter shots are always live.¹ There is however some prerecorded drone footage, filmed earlier in the year, that gets shown alongside landmarks of particular interest.
Whether or not you get to see this prerecorded footage depends on which feed your broadcaster is picking up. Domestic audiences watching on France Télévisions get to see all of it, but international broadcasters are given a feed with fewer prerecorded “heritage shots” (as well as a feed with no prerecorded material at all).
¹ The director can cheat once in a while, opting to time-shift a particularly beautiful landmark shot by a couple of minutes, but only if it would otherwise go unseen due to race action taking precedence.
>> With regards to the camera helo -> relay helo -> fixed wing -> truck workflow, it's likely based on the ability for the camera helos not being able to 'see' the fixed wing aircraft. For instance, since the tour goes into mountainous areas, the camera helos may go down into a valley or be occluded from the fixed wing air craft at various points in time. Using the relay helo allows the fixed wing to fly a less complex flight plan, reducing potential issues with its link to the trucks.
The two camera helicopters do need to remain within range of a relay airplane at all times. This is often tricky in mountainous areas, as you’ve correctly identified. A camera helicopter losing sight of its airplane relay is the most frequent source of signal dropouts.
The relay helicopters are only used to relay the motorcyles’ signals, not the camera helicopters’ signals. The helicopter relays travel freely up and down the route, depending on where the motorcycles are located.
Satellite links are actually used rather sparingly, precisely due to the high latency they introduce. None of the planes, helicopters and motorcycles are equipped with satellite uplinks; they are all using RF links in the HF band.
While there are multiple HF relays, there is only one satellite relay truck per stage, located at a geographically convenient location at roughly mid-point through the route. Its role is to pick up all the HF signals, multiplex them, and uplink them to a satellite for downlink by the Euro Media¹ HF trucks back at the finish line. It also works the other way round, in order to relay signals originating at the finish line, such as the director’s orders, back to the crews covering the race.
This satellite relay stops being used as soon as the riders have passed the midway point; from that point on, the two planes and relay helicopters are linked to the finish line solely via HF and microwave. Shorter routes like the time-trial stages don’t require a satellite relay at all.
Another use of satellite uplinks is the midway sprint location, which is covered by a fixed camera on a crane. It is relayed back to the finish line independently of the HF relays, by a regular SNG truck.
¹ Euro Media is the outfit tasked with coordinating all the HF feeds, for delivery to the (adjacent) France Télévisions production trucks which are, in turn, responsible for producing the international and domestic TV broadcasts.
—only to be quickly overruled by the marketing folks, who’d probably frown upon such a construction.